Lolita’s had a long lock on the top spot of my favorite books this year. Of course, competition’s sparse, since I’ve barely read anything in 2009, but a challenger has finally emerged. Fittingly it comes from the very same author, Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire does not resemble Lolita very much. Lolita is a classic first-person novel; Pale Fire is a metafictional mindfuck. Settings are similar, as are narrators (verbose sexual deviants of Euro extraction), but the greatest commonality is their excellence. Pale Fire is an altogether different kind of book — some might say it’s too clever, others might say its difficult to get into — but it’s still Nabokov’s, which means it draws from that deep well of spirit and has that same crystalline prose.

The conceit is this: in 1963, famous poet John Shade composes a 999 line poem in four cantos called Pale Fire. This occupies 40 of 300 pages. The remainder is commentary on the poem, presented by his not-quite-right admirer Charles Kinbote, who exercises a brand of criticism not many would call scholarly. Kinbote regularly takes snatches of poetry and uses it to digress on his own preoccupations, of which he has many. The book’s real heart is hidden in this commentary, and watching Nabokov operate on all these levels — as Shade the poet, Kinbote the commentor, as himself, as “himself” — is impressive. Metafiction is always in danger of becoming too glib, too self-satisfied, but Nabokov circumvents with dependable earnesty. He still wants to engender an authentic emotional response, he’s just going about it another way.

For all the dangers of metafiction, it does present opportunities. No other style better addresses the ritual of reading, the act of writing, the wonderfully intimate relationship between author-audience. This book was assigned in class, and some of my classmates weren’t sure exactly how to read the thing. Should you read the poem in one go, then turn to the commentary? Or flip back and forth as the commentary refers to the poem? Nabokov’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion is to buy two copies and read them side by side.

Usually the reader just has to turn the pages, but Pale Fire demands a little more effort. You’ll be reading the poem, checking the commentary, perhaps glancing at the index, realize a connection in another part of the book — it’s a fragmented way to go about reading, and you’re always aware that you are reading. Nabokov planned for this, since — more than the delightfully batshit story of exiled king Charles the Beloved, from the distant land of Zembla — this book is about reading. Here’s an excerpt which speaks to that and also contains that irresistible and ecstatic emotion I referenced earlier.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of it being readable… Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse — I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do — pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

Pale Fire, at times, offers these butterflies of revelation. No, it’s not always so emotionally engaging as Lolita, but when it is, it devastates. It is a constant reminder of just how stimulating and delightful reading a book can be, the marvellous “special reality” that an author can create and we can inhabit, the only password required a common language and a love of it (easy to do with Nabokov).

Simmons is a writer of ephemera. His Page 2 on ESPN is a reliably entertaining time-killer, and his weekly picks keep me abreast of the NFL season. But the thing you most want to see when you visit is an NBA column. Bill Simmons knows basketball, and is the rare observer that sees things even a relatively hardcore fan (me) will miss. When he announced his candicacy for Minnesota Timberwolves GM, all his readers went, “Hahaha… hmm…” Frankly, it didn’t seem that ridiculous. Simmons, besides being a trade machine guru, seems to have a good handle on what a team needs to succeed.

With that in mind, I was excited by the recent release of his definitively named tome, The Book of Basketball. (A deep discount at Amazon didn’t hurt.) But after reading it, the title seems a rather ridiculous claim to authority. My suggestion: A Book of Basketball. Like Simmons’ web articles, it will keep your attention, but sometimes only barely. This is dispensable stuff, which is fine when you’re writing ephemera, but not when you’re writing a big book like this.

The translation from weekly column to a book is clearly on his mind, as Simmons needed to figure out a way to adapt his style posterity. His solution is mildly ingenious: footnotes addressed to the readers of 2075 (pretty cocky to think this book will be ready 54 years from now, since Breaks of the Game vanished from print for years), explaining the people he’s talking about. Of course, I didn’t even get some of the references, so it also serves as a crib sheet for the less culturally literate. One of these footnotes, about Sports Illustrated:

An excerpt: “Calling on Magic [in the clutch] is like asking Busby Berkeley to step in and direct the climactic scene in an Ingmar Bergman movie.” I was just thinking that! Nobody slammed out awkward pop culture references like SI in the seventies and eighties.

Which is funny, because Simmons has taken that throne. For instance:

LeBron coasted through Saturday’s Skills Challenge and played Sunday’s All-Star Game with the intensity of a female porn star trying to break one of those “most male partners in one afternoon” records.

Totally. Or, in reference to Pretty Woman:

Julia Robert’s performance was the movie version of Doc Gooden’s ‘85 season…

The reference problem dogs the book throughout, and not just for the sometimes esoteric choices. It’s a second-hand book, full of other people’s ideas and words. Constant quotations and references to other books/films lets other creators do the heavy lifting for him. Simmons is that reputedly funny guy whose only comedic gift is an ability to pick a Simpsons or Family Guy quote appropriate for any situation. (I make the comparison to describe his writing, but it works on a literal level, too: Simmons is really unfunny.) By himself, he’s an average writer. So when he needs to get a point across, he, for instance, references The Shawshank Redemption. Or The Godfather. (That’s a favorite of his, so much that I had to skip footnotes where I saw the title, because I haven’t seen the trilogy yet and didn’t want to get spoiled).

Of course, similes are a crutch for a lazy writer: you can’t describe the thing on its own terms, so you rely on another thing and let the reader make the connections. What if I haven’t seen Shawshank? More troubling are the quotations from other basketball books. Simmons will reference these, make a self-deprecating crack about “they said it better in one sentence than I could in 5 pages!” and move on. But why am I reading this book if other people are making these points better? Sometimes Basketball feels like a giant book report; Simmons includes his extensive bibliography in the back, and that’s cool, but sometimes he goes no further than regurgitating a point I already learned from David Halberstam. It’s like doing research exclusively from second-hand sources: if you don’t engage with the primary material, all you’re doing is distorting the work of people who came before you.

But Simmons does have primary sources to work with. We learn in the first chapter that he essentially grew up in the Boston Garden during the Celtics glory days. He was there for Larry Legend’s heroics, and saw first-hand some of the great players of the era. Footnote after footnote emphasizes just how important basketball was to him, and you begin to get a glimpse into the youth of Bill Simmons through the lens of basketball. These are the best parts of the book, when Simmons passion and experience come to the fore. Yes, he’s a homer (the Kareem potshots are plentiful¹), but it’s possible to correct for his bias, and what results is some really useful basketball writing.

The book’s premise, aside from some introductory chapters tackling Russell v. Wilt², The Secret, and a whirlwind tour of the NBA’s development, is a reimagining of the NBA Hall of Fame. Simmons doesn’t like the current model, and proposes a five-tiered Pyramid which would establish a definitive hierarchy of NBA greats. At this point it’s impossible to read the book without consulting YouTube every five pages to check out a Chris Mullin mix tape, for instance, or to watch Hakeem decimate David Robinson in the playoffs. The players Simmons knows best get the best profiles, like McHale, Bird, and the other ’80s/’90s greats, while the old-school guys get completely shafted. Some of these ’50s guys get entries that essentially say, “Well, I YouTubed this guy and didn’t find anything good, but I did read one paragraph about him, and his stats look pretty good… #53 all time!”

After a few of these, I learned a valuable lesson about reading this book: you don’t have to read all of it. Skip any players you don’t recognize, skim when he starts talking about the ’50s and ’60s, and don’t worry about missing too much, since this is a book that’s too big by half. People talk about Stephen King needing a solid editor to keep him in line, and the same goes for Simmons. His repetitions, digressions, and careless language could all be significantly improved with a more careful editor. The editor emerges as a character in the footnotes (“Grumpy Old Editor”), but he must have spent more time chatting with Simmons about hoops than correcting proofs.

Really, Simmons gives us a simple rubric for judging his own book. In that extensive bibliography I already mentioned, he breaks the books down in the following categories:

• Influential Must-Reads [ ]
• Very Helpful and Highly Enjoyable [ ]
• Extremely Useful [ ]
• Enjoyable Books that Helped a Little [ ]
• Helpful, Not a Total Waste of Time [X]
• Not Particularly Helpful [ ]

¹ It should also be noted that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has recently been diagnosed with a particularly rare form of leukemia. This has to be a little awkward for Simmons.

² Simmons maintains a really troubling sneer when it comes to Wilt Chamberlain, even going so far as to jokingly insinuate he might have been gay, on the evidence that Wilt owned cats. Okay… This is particularly odd, since he glowingly describes James Posey’s pre-game bear hugs, during which Posey whispered sweet nothings/pep talks into his teammate’s ear. Simmons says in a foot note: “THE NBA, where questioning your sexuality happens.” Pair this with an ecstatic description of championship teams, where 12 men become one, blah blah, and you’ve got a slightly uncomfortable read. Same problem with race — always a dicey issue in NBA books — since Simmons operates under that presumption that black men are better at basketball than white men. Not the most controversial take in the world, but still slightly uncomfortable.

HEADSHOT. AGAIN.

Mad Men turned in another solid episode on Sunday, but it’s clear the show is struggling with Season Three Syndrome. Season one is easy: it’s a brand new show with new characters, stories, tone. In Mad Men’s case, you’ve got a classic look, sumptuous production values, crisp writing, and Don Draper, one of the best male leads in recent history. The only pitfall of the first season is some early missteps before the cast and grew really gel — The Office struggled here. Season Two is just feeding out the line. If you’ve done your job right, there are plots to be resolved with an ensemble the audience has come to love. Plus there’s enough of that new car smell that sheer style can carry you. Mad Men killed it in the second season, deepening Pete Campbell and Betty Draper, bringing in the inestimable Duck Phillips, and showing us a new side of Draper. Breaking Bad, also on AMC, did similarly well in its second season, expanding on the first and further showcasing Cranston’s chops while the ensemble around him only got more comfortable.

But season 3 is the killer. In Mad Men’s case, by the time you get to season three, there’s 26 episodes in the books. That’s twenty hours of television, an awful lot of time to spend with one show. Obviously movies only run 1.5-3 hours, and considering some of them (Transformers 2), those can be some long hours. Books are perhaps a better comparison, especially in a show like Mad Men, since its episodes feel like chapters. If you’ve ever spent twenty hours reading a book, you know how much of a slog that can be. A 20hr book is probably 400 to 500 pages long. Well, here we are at page 500 and the secret set up on page one (Don’s double life) is just now being paid off.

Examples of Season Three Syndrome:

• Arrested Development — One of the best comedies around, but its wackiness started to seem (at times — again, I love that show) more desperate than inspired.
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — Started to run out of ideas by season three, evidenced by its hit (Mac’s a Serial Killer) or miss (Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire) slate of episodes.
• The Office — Played around with the Pam & Jim tension for a season too long. Michael’s implausibility as a character really started to show.
• Entourage — Coasted on Jeremy Piven’s scenery chewing once they realized the show had no legs and no conflict.
• Dexter — Central conceit couldn’t sustain itself, collapsed under its own weight.

Now shows certainly have beaten this season three slump. The Simpsons, for instance, was just hitting its stride by season three. Same with Seinfeld. The Wire’s third season was great. Deadwood (R.I.P.) continued its excellence. These are divergent shows, but it’s pretty clear how each managed to avoid this let down. First off, a sitcom without an overarching plot like The Simpsons or Seinfeld can always go long. It’s really easy to come up with 180 stories about living in New York City, for instance. And since The Simpsons frequently parodies pop culture, it has the luxury of focusing on whatever’s current at that moment.

The Wire treated each season like a novel, so that the viewer was guaranteed a self-contained body of episodes. David Simon was careful to plot its arcs in such a way that no threads stretched from season to season.

And Deadwood just had so many stories to tell.

Mad Men has mitigated the slump a bit. As I’ve mentioned in earlier recaps, it has shown a willingness to try on new genres and tones. And the core formula still works. And the actors are better than ever. But the show’s focus and drive is beginning to diffuse. That’s because as Weiner advances the plot — Joan and Sal’s firings, Don’s exposure — Sterling Cooper is losing its centrality.

Mad Men is most effective as a work place drama: watching Kinsey beat his head against the wall trying to come up with an idea is exactly why I watch. But now the ensemble is being split up, which means not only do we lose interactions between characters, but we simply can’t see enough of them since they’re outside the walls of SC. Fun as it is to watch Joan bust Greg in the head with a vase, that relationship isn’t interesting because Greg is a bit character. When Joan and Sterling talk, we know both, care about both. When Joan’s with Greg, we just wait for him to stop talking.

While we’re getting too much of peripheral characters (Greg, Farrell), we’re also getting too much of the leads. Draper and Betty have been all over the last few episodes, for instance, and it has come at the expense of the rest of the ensemble. Campbell has been nowhere to be found, Ken! Cosgrove! is barely showing up in meetings, and Kinsey got one scene with a janitor named Achilles. Peggy hasn’t really gotten a story since her conquest at the bar with the college boy. It was great to see Roger get a substantial plotline (Slattery is such an asset to this show), but there aren’t enough minutes to go around. Paradoxically, Mad Men is both too long and not long enough to accommodate all its characters.

Draper is certainly stealing most of the screen time, which makes sense, considering his Big Secret has been uncovered. But, as I expressed last week, I’m kind of unimpressed with it as a dramatic moment. After Betty’s discovery — which was a thrill, I realized that it won’t have many consequences. Betty’s pity this week was totally in character, but a little too by-the-numbers. The anticlimax here was a little disappointing, but it makes sense: secrets have a shelf life. Look at other TV shows that hinge on a mystery or an ongoing plot — Lost or The Office, respectively — and you can see that the show can only maintain interest in that particular line for so long. Lost, which should have been two to three seasons max, had to radically revise what the show cared about in order to maintain its forward momentum. And The Office, whose Pam & Jim storyline was a really great romance for 2 seasons and just okay afterwards, had to send Jim to Stanford to keep things fresh. So for the viewer, Don’s secret has become completely passe, and our only interest in that secret is how it will affect things now that it’s out. Weiner must make this matter, and I trust he will… but this is the third season, after all.

I guess the lesson here is that Ricky Gervais knows how to run a show. Both The UK Office and Extras wrapped up after 2 seasons, and that’s fine. Both were great shows, and in The Office’s case, beautifully concluded. There’s this mentality that television shows have to run for 5+ seasons to be a success; perhaps this has something to do with the fact that shows need 100 episodes before they can be syndicated. The question is what kind of success you’re going for. If you want financial success, a long-running, popular show is great. But that can oftentimes directly conflict with artistic success, which has its own demands. Unfortunately, television is a medium where the bottom line has the final say on a show’s viability: any number of great, cancelled shows can attest to this fact. Weiner seems to want Mad Men to run all the way into the 70s. I guarantee you that nobody is going to stick around to see Don Draper grow sideburns.

You Weren’t

Though most of the runtime was devoted Draper’s secret, for me this was John Slattery’s episode. As comic relief, he’s brilliant. But when he gets to do more with Roger than crack wise, that’s when he kills it. In “Six Month Leave” (the one where Roger and Don take Freddy out for one last time), Slattery mixed wry comic timing (“Is it Milwaukee? Son of a bitch.”) and some simply great dramatic acting. That scene at the bar between him and Don remains one of my favorites. The same Roger Sterling is on display here, thanks to the appearance of an old girlfriend, Annabelle Mathis. Apparently they spent some time in Paris before the war, where Roger played at being a character in a Hemingway novel. Slattery shows us, maybe for the first time, Roger’s heart. His delivery of “You want to know if it was a great time? Yes. You want to know if you broke my heart? Obviously,” was fantastic. I assume that Roger’s daughter’s wedding will feature in an upcoming episode, and I hope Sterling — who has been perhaps best served by season 3’s reevaluation of priorities* — continues to develop in such interesting ways; with Slattery playing him, it’s a great reason to weather the slump.

*I wonder if this is all a lead up to Sterling being ousted from his own firm.

Whenever you’re a writer outlining a long piece of fiction, you have certain moments you keep in your hip pocket, beats you know will occur in the storyline and propel it forward. It’s a relief to have those at your disposal, especially if the tempo is beginning to stagnate and you need to jolt it back to speed. Betty’s opening Don’s drawer was one of those moments, the kind Weiner laid groundwork for in Season 1. Remember that Mad Men in its first season was very much about Don’s double life. It still is, to an extent, but now it’s mostly the stress that puts on Don. In Season 1, it was the actual mechanics of a secret life — how to get rid of a brother (drive him to suicide), how to take another man’s identity, how to disappear into a gray suit. So honestly, I kind of forgot that it was even possible for Betty to discover Don’s secret. It’s been on the backburner for so long that it’s just faded into the texture of the show. But these are the first moves towards setting up the season finale, which was until tonight looking like another “Damnit, Don, I know you’re having an affair” affair. Betty looking into that drawer certainly had that frisson these late episodes have been missing.

Too Close To Home

Visual storytelling: while Don's with Farrell, Betty's in a bath, reading. Check the ring on her finger.

We understand some characters because they let us; they give off sparks, in a way, offering up a view of an internal life. Others are more inert, and we only really learn about them when they bump into other characters. Peggy and Pete belong to the first camp, and Don belongs to the second. When you think about it, Don spends most of his day brooding or delivering snappy comebacks (viz. his putdown of Cosgrove in the early going). That’s why Don’s pitches are so fundamental to the show, cheesy as they are — they’re one of the few instances when we’re permitted a look into Don’s psychology. Last week’s “you people” was a great example of this, but through the show’s run the second most dependable window into Draper’s head is seeing how he interacts with the women he’s fucking. Start with Midge, the worldly beatnik: Don tells her he doesn’t want to go to school tomorrow. Go to Rachel: Don asks her to run away with him. Go to Bobbie Barret: fingerblast. Go to Joy: Don at his most passionate. Go to Betty: Don becomes emotionally cruel. All these women show us aspects of Draper, and Miss Farrell gives us another. His affair with her is perhaps the most intimate we’ve seen, and that’s communicated with the earnestly romantic exchange the two share in bed, about the color blue:

Soft lighting, a tremendous sense of proximity, quiet pillow talk — it’s romantic but not sappy because Mad Men so rarely permits its characters this kind of sentiment.

What seems odd to me is that Don ended up with Betty at all. Clearly he’s capable of healthy, loving relationships — can he not sustain them in the long term? Is he bound to stray, no matter who he’s with, simply for the thrill of it? I don’t think so. Don is a philanderer, but a serial one at that; he moves from one tryst to the next. These affairs are about more than sex, as the Farrell interlude has proven.

Get some Aquanet

Please… Please… Please

The episode ends at the 40th anniversary gala. Roger has delivered a generous (possibly earnest?) speech extolling Don’s many virtues, and introduces the man himself. The crowd bursts into applaud, and a bashful Don goes to the podium. The last shot is Betty’s POV, Betty who just discovered her husband is a fraud, something she’s suspected a long time. Yet the applause goes on, everybody in the SC cosmos is celebrating him like he built the cosmos, and Draper seems on top of the world.

This can only mean he’s about to take a hard fall. The moment is loaded, and not just for Betty. Don’s “Pleases” come off as pleas, as if he’s begging for these people to clapping. Normally the object of the ovation is being mock-modest while secretly basking in the adulation, but Draper is legitimately uncomfortable.  After he says “I’m very honored,” look at his expression:

Don knows he's a phony

And so does Betty

Betty’s careful observation is what makes this scene. Notice she isn’t fuming; it looks like she pities Don. Now that she knows (or partly knows) his secret, maybe she’ll understand just how out of place Draper feels in this sphere. In any event, by simply learning opening that drawer, Betty has been drawn into a conspiracy of sorts. She has a secret now, too, and this is intoxicating. Notice how Betty gives up on her vigil, finally falling into bed without confronting Don. Why would she? She wants to hold onto this secret for awhile, perhaps save it for when it can inflict the most damage. Also worth noting is that Betty’s secret has doubled her the same way it has Don: Don always has a performance going, and sometimes Dick Whitman shines through. Well now there’s two Betties, and one’s the housewife and one knows.

What’s interesting about Don’s secret is that it’s not the kind of thing which would destroy a marriage. Don’s infidelities and cruelty is what’s hurt Betty in this marriage, not the fact that Don is actually Dick. In a way, Don’s secret has nothing to do with Betty. But of course it has everything to do with her, since it proves to Betty their marriage was built on Don’s greatest pitch of all.

Look at that screencap again. Whatever that look is, it’s not anger. It’s pity, or sadness, or maybe coolness. And that makes me think maybe this revelation is the only thing that can save the marriage. Don’s secret validates and perpetuates itself — I need to keep this secret because it’s a secret and that’s what you do with secrets — but is it really necessary? Would its publication be so shocking? Pete Campbell thought he was going to torpedo Don by snitching to Bert, and so did Don, and so did we. But Bert just shrugged, and why wouldn’t he? Who cares if it’s Don or Dick, he’s still good at his job. It’s not like anyone knows who the real Don Draper was, so what’s the difference? And yet now Bert coerced Don into signing that contract by dangling that knowledge over his head… what’s the danger? Will the cops take Don in for desertion? Isn’t there a statute of limitations on that kind of thing? That’s one thing Mad Men has failed to do: make explicit why it’s so important to Don to maintain this charade.

Best known for his visionary Viriconium stories, as well as quantum sci-fi Light and Nova Swing, Climbers is M. John Harrison’s 1984 foray into the mundane. Considering his genre leanings, even his rendition of our world comes off as slightly skewed, strange in subtle but telling ways. For better or worse, Climbers is vintage Harrison, a style guide for his brilliant but sometimes mechanical prose.

The historical M. John Harrison (M. for Michael) is passionate about rock climbing. I don’t think he climbs anymore due to age, but he still references the sport on his blog. With that in mind, Climbers occupies that ambiguous pseudo-autobiography of the kind Coetzee’s latest belongs to. Our protagonist is Mike, a man of indeterminate age who has become obsessed with climbing. He writes on the side, too, but we do not learn much more; if this is an autobiography, Harrison doesn’t seem much impressed with his own biography. But the title tells the tale, and Climbers is much more a paean to the sport than any kind of confession. The act of climbing, its challenges and rewards, are the book’s true subjects, and it focuses so intensely on that slab of rock that the niceties of literary fiction — plot, character development — appear only sporadically, or in relation to that slab of rock. Climbers is an ambivalent work: it is too focused on boulders to satisfy lit. fiction readers, but too lyrical, too oblique in its treatment of climbing to satisfy practitioners. This myopia leads to a book that is often aloof, and sometimes utterly fascinating. Whichever side it lands on, it is definitely its own thing, a reliable trait in Harrison’s work.

Considering my own awareness of climbing is limited to The Wall from American Gladiators, I wasn’t hoping for much in that direction. I was more interested to see Harrison write a straight up novel. He came closest to the mundane with The Course of the Heart, but even that had a magician named Yaxley as a principle. Climbers has its share of madmen, but none of them are magical. With names like Gaz, Sankey, Bob Almanac, and Normal, it’s the usual oddball assortment, and Harrison renders them with amazing economy, relying on a few details to fill in the portrait. With the protagonist, Mike, he gives us nothing, and he is one of those cipher lead characters, useful only as a lens to watch the rest of the cast and devoid of much personality. Again, this book is seriously committed to climbing, so much so that Mike doesn’t really exist unless he’s scuttling up a cliff face. As a result, huge swathes of his personal life, the kind of stuff other writers would delight in writing, goes unmentioned.

The story’s narrated in first person, but the narrator has little interest in making sure we know who’s who — you’ll have a hard time distinguishing Gaz, Sankey, and Normal, for instance — and so when he mentions getting married, its in a completely off-hand way, as if he were telling this story to himself and so had access to all the backstory. Mike is married and then divorced, for instance. Major characters can die in the subordinate clause of a long sentence; plot twists are revealed in a careless line of dialogue. I found it exciting stuff, but it could just as easily be seen as trickery and withholding on Harrison’s part.

The main problem is Mike, the cipher, gives the reader nothing to invest in. In climbing terms, he’s a sheer cliff, utterly impassive, without handholds. Harrison recycles old material in Climbers, lifting small scenes from other works. Its jarring to see these again in a new context, but especially troubling because it doesn’t make a difference. Mike is so absent, so generic, so much a type for Harrison, that he can give him any scenes because he’s just like all his previous protagonists.

Without a compelling lead and a fitful at best plot, Harrison relies on his prose to do the heavy lifting. And it hardly falters under the load — as always, his descriptions of nature are spot on, his attention to gesture keen, and ability to light a scene unrivaled. His metaphors, something I’ve always praised, have become hit or miss for me. They are never cliche, but sometimes are way too cute, or try too hard.

He also has an irritating habit of recounting nonsensical snatches of overheard conversation. It’s as if he sat in a cafe (seemingly the only establishment Harrison’s characters will enter) and jotted down these scraps of conversation and uses them to fill the page. There is an effect he’s attempting, here, some kind of alienation triggered by this unintelligible dialogue, but it comes off as artsy.

But of course, so many problems just go away when you write well. Harrison’s got that covered, plus a weary, intermittently brilliant aesthetic that flat out works.

“You people,” says Don. It is “Wee Small Hours” best moment, a reminder from Weiner that Don Draper is not somebody to like, and that he’s also one of the most interesting characters on TV. It is a surprising line, not for its cruelty — Don has excoriated underlings before — but its implied accusation. You had it coming, Don is saying. Within the context of Don’s mounting pressure and powerlessness at work,  it’s obvious he’s taking every opportunity to lash out at those weaker than he and try to salvage the superiority he values so highly. But to blame Sal for being gay is an abrupt 180 from the sensitivity and discretion Don showed on the flight back from Baltimore. And then you have the fact that Don has so frequently been Lee Garner, the sexual aggressor willing to bully his way into bed. Later in the episode Don does just that with Sally’s teacher. So where does this “You had it coming?” mentality come from?

A partial answer to that is Don’s contract. After Sal very correctly points out that Garner is a bully, and all he did was turn him down, Don tells him, “Lucky Strike can shut off our lights.” Now that he’s chained to S-C for the next 3 years, suddenly Don has a serious investment in this company’s well-being, so much so that he’s willing to turn his back on Sal. Normally when other characters are in extremity, Don displays compassion, like he did with Peggy after she had her baby. But now he’s sticking the knife in characters at their most vulnerable. This is awful dramatic karma, the kind of thing tragic heroes do before fate strikes them down.

... AND IT'S TEARING ME APART

I Expect The Moon

It’s been awhile since we had our last Draper pitch. While this wasn’t the most mind-blowing of sells, the campaign is very good — but there’s no mention of the moon. This is a deal-breaker for Connie who, during their midnight moonshine chat, grandiosely declared he wanted Hilton on the moon. Except he actually meant it. So he breaks Don’s heart by telling him he’s disappointed. As Don pleads his case, Connie says: “You want me to just say yes to everything you do?” This is obviously flawed thinking, since he expects Don to do exactly that. A few episodes back, he told Don he could tell him “no”. But that’s not an option. Hilton believes he should be obeyed, no matter how wrong he is. It’s a childish power-play, to value compliance over quality, but that’s just what Hilton wants. Like I said last week:

Hilton’s character may become something like George Hearst in Deadwood: the powerful man who domineers everyone he comes into contact with… [there's] tension between a powerful man and the kind of man who hates being coerced.

The question becomes: who will speak truth to power? How long can Don stand being browbeaten? He went off-grid in California over much less than this — how will Don escape this time?

Sal

Awkward...

For three seasons Sal’s worst fear has been public exposure. In this season’s premiere, Draper could have outed him. He didn’t. It turns out Sal was wrong to be afraid of S-C finding out he’s gay: after all, Kurt’s gay, and he still has a job. Sal, on the other hand, refused Lee Garner Jr. and paid the price for it. What’s especially difficult is just how unfair the entire scenario is. Garner’s sexual harassment, Don’s callous indifference, Roger’s snap-second firing… and all Sal did was say No. In a season full of people wielding power irresponsibly to get what they want, Sal is one more casualty.

That makes two S-C regulars we’ve lost, Sal and Joan. My concern is that the show’s focus can only be divided so much. We’ve got Sterling-Cooper business, Don’s home life, and a smattering of Peggy and Pete’s. Mad Men can’t sustain more plotlines that aren’t happening at the workplace, and so it seems like once you’re gone from S-C, you’re gone. At least that’s been the case so far for Joan, barring her cameo appearance during Pete’s dress problem. And that shot of Sal flipping through his portfolio, lingering over the “Relax” ad he produced during the show’s very first episode… that felt like a goodbye.

Now I think Joan’s going to be brought back at some point, just because she’s an indispensable character — after all, who do people talk about when they talk about Mad Men? Don, Roger, and Joan. I’m not so sure Sal’s going to be showing up again, and if that’s the case, it will be disappointing. I hope Weiner won’t let the show lose these characters just because they lost their jobs. Sal and Joan can provide perspectives on this society that we can’t get from the average S-C employee.

This Close

More awkward...

The B(etty) plots just don’t do it for me anymore. Jones is a great actress, but when Don’s at the office and she’s at the house, there just aren’t any interesting characters for Betty to interact with. Henry Clay looks good in a suit and has great hair — that’s all. Carla gets three lines per episode, two of them usually “Hello, Mr. Draper”; Francine is amusing and not much else; and the kids are just there to highlight how bad a mother Betty is.

Betty’s refusal to go through with the affair was in character, but also disappointing, drama-wise. Aside from the guy she fucked at that bar, Betty’s character arc has been a sine wave, with the Y-axis her desire to cheat on Don. So far, nothing’s come of it, and it’s getting old.

Where’s Everybody Else?

Mad Men’s ensemble has always been one of the show’s great strengths; no matter who we were following at the moment, there was a great character to watch and a great actor playing that character. Problem is that leads to audience attachment, and with 13 hours a season, there’s only so much time to go around. Usually Weiner does a good job divvying it up, but lately we’ve not been getting enough of a lot of characters. Joan’s an obvious one, but where’s Ken? After the Campbell v. Cosgrove deathmatch was set up, we haven’t had another word about it. How about Kinsey? Peggy? Roger? And we could always use more Duck.

While the ladies squee up front, Henry Clay basks in glory.

Mad Men’s third season has been all about stretching its legs. New characters, new stories, and new ways of telling those stories. In episode 8, “Souvenir,” the show breaks out of the S-C secretarial pool and goes to Rome. The Drapers visit at the request (read: edict) of Connie Hilton, and what’s ostensibly a business trip very quickly becomes a referendum on the Draper marriage. “Souvenir” deals with Betty’s dissatisfaction, and the impossibility of escaping such a deep-seated discontent with something like a vacation. It also shows what kind of bad behavior Pete Campbell gets up to while everyone else is on vacation.

La Dolce Vita

Fellini’s classic came out in 1960, three years before Mad Men’s present, and here we see Weiner’s homage. Dolce is an important show to Mad Men: that movie’s main character, Marcello, is a handsome man working in a not-quite-respectable industry (tabloids), and bears a strong resemblance to Draper. The actor who plays Marcello Rubini is Marcello Mastroianni, and Mastroianni plays his leading man with a kind of passivity, almost diffidence, that Sheila O’Malley references in regards to Cary Grant:

Grant was a leading man. But he was not a Clark Gable kind of leading man, who pounced on the girls he wanted. Instead, Grant held back. He felt that he should stand still in romantic scenes, and let the girls come to him. It made him more powerful.

This idea of withholding yourself to increase your power should be nothing new — think back to Don’s tryst with Shelley the stewardess, where he sits on the bed and tells her to undress.

Aside from that, you can bet Don’s seen Dolce. Roger certainly has: his saddling up that model in Season 2 is cribbed straight from the film. Weiner gives a glimpse at Rome’s night life which looks familiar if you’ve seen Fellini’s movie, but his interest is not in the city itself, but what the city represents for Don and Betty.

Rome

The Eternal City has been referenced a few times this season, actually.

• When the execs from PPL show up, they compliment Pryce on his work cutting the fat: “Yes, well, Pax Romana and all that,” he says.
• Sally reading to Gene from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• The MSG suits angrily declaring that the Garden “is the Colosseum!”

La Dolce Vita is a film fascinated with the moral decline of a decadent people, which is a theme all over late Roman history. I think it’s worthwhile to consider Mad Men, teetering on the brink of the 60s tumult, as being consciously paralleled with Rome. Camelot is about to fall, after all, and Grandpa Gene could have been reading any book at all. This is an era of successful people in New York City, the center of the universe the same way Rome was the center of its own.

But within the episode, Rome is quite simply an escape. Betty and Don get to drop everything, including the 2-month old baby (figuratively of course) and do a little jet-setting. They’re there on Connie’s dime, and he seems less the magnamious benefactor and more the “client from hell,” as Weiner puts it, and as Betty hints at. Betty — and especially the cosmopolitan knock-out we see in Rome — is cagey about this kind of stuff. Hilton’s character may become something like George Hearst in Deadwood: the powerful man who domineers everyone he comes into contact with. In Deadwood, Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen were the two adherents of the Don’t You Fucking Tell Me What To Do school of thought that Draper belongs to, and much of season 3’s drama was drawn from that tension between a powerful man and the kind of man who hates being coerced. We’ll see if the same path is taken here.

But back to Rome. While there, Don and Betty have a second honeymoon of sorts, and share a very sweet scene where they pretend to be strangers meeting by chance. Considering the damage they’ve inflicted on each other over the last few seasons, it is nice to see both characters get a fresh start, as it were, and seduce each other all over again. What I like about this scene is how willing Don is to play the part: after all, his whole life is an act already, so why not? Betty’s a bit less enthused. Her would-be Italian paramours say Don’s ugly, and she relays that to Don with a kind of pleasure. She can say it because they’re in Rome and playing a flirtatious game, and they’re not her words, but don’t the feel like they could be? Jones delivers the line with a challenge, signalling that Betty has not forgotten everything else that’s happened in this marriage. Don’s committed to the scene, though, and asks, “What brings you to Rome?” Betty’s quiet. “See anything of interest?” Don follows, meaning himself. Betty looks him over, and says: “I could take it or leave it.” Yes, a provocation, but also a statement of her dissatisfaction. Weiner says he wanted to examine the Draper marriage, and clearly it can still be a charged relationship at times. This time, it manifests itself in a positive way, as the couple goes upstairs.

Their sex scene is one of the most passionate and romantic the show’s yet had. During the commercials, I was flipping over to Entourage, and that highlighted for me just how smart Mad Men is about sex. Weiner & co. fully acknowledge its many complications and gray areas (which we’ll get to in a minute with Pete), and while the season 3 promo push marketed the show as the “sexiest on TV,” it’s really one of the most adult, mature shows when it comes to sex. Compare that to Entourage, where the extras are all silicone-augmented 10s and the sex is joyless, gratuitous.

Pete Campbell Reads Ebony

Pete’s conquest this episode certainly qualifies as joyless, though not gratuitous. After doing a good deed for the au pair down the hall, Gudrun, Campbell stays true to himself and follows that good deed with something nasty.

Pete's second appearance at a young lady's door, looking for sex.

It’s difficult to watch, even though the scene is cut quickly. While nowhere as explicit (or physical) as Joan’s rape, Pete’s definitely in the same territory; instead of force, he decides to extort Gudrun. This still makes it clear how unwelcome Pete’s advances are:

It’s slimy, unlikeable, and icky: vintage Campbell. What’s amazes me is how adroitly the show keeps us invested in Pete. There is a point where an antihero transitions into a villain, and the audience won’t engage anymore. Pete toes that line constantly, but still, somehow, we care.

Souvenir

I was talking last week about symbols. Here we have a little trinket Don gets Betty as a souvenir, and you know it’s important because that’s the episode’s title. As much as Betty enjoyed the Roman holiday (thankew), their return to Ossening is a return to reality. After Francine — and one imagines Betty thinks of her as ‘vulgar’ — talks about her own version of that magical getaway, with her boor husband Carlton to nearby Lake George, the illusion is shattered for Betty. If someone as abrasive as Francine has experienced exactly what she has, was it special? Evidently not, as Betty tells Don: “I hate our friends.” Don transitions much more smoothly back to the States, since he has no reality to return to. So he tries to carry that romance back home, but Betty isn’t having it.

She wants her life to be like it was in Rome all the time. The holiday only proved to her just how miserable her day-to-day is: remember that scene early on where we see Betty rushing around on her daily routine, doing dry-cleaning, etc.? She wants to be wearing a black dress and a beehive, she wants attention, she wants glamour. Don getting her this souvenir — which is actually pretty sweet — emphasizes for Betty how hollow it all was.

HEADSHOT.

In a show with such lavish sets and meticulous period details, it makes sense that objects often become much more than set dressing. Mad Men employs symbols frequently, ranging from the obvious to the obscure. There have been golden violins, Don’s Caddy, and an ant farm. In this season Dream of the Fisherman’s wife stands out, as Don asks, “Wait, who am I?” Weiner’s symbols invite that question, but don’t always provide an answer. A lot of the show’s depth comes from these moments when the viewer can construct some meaning for themselves, so that’s the game we’re playing today.

An eclipse looms over the episode’s proceedings. Over at Sepinwall’s, he airs the ideas that the eclipse represents characters being blocked, as the moon blocks the sun, as seen in Don’s manipulation at the hands of Connie/Bert. Or, Sepinwall suggests, the sun is something desired, and some characters try to look right at it, while others look indirectly.

My feeling is that the eclipse is not a personal event. We see many characters witnessing it, and Sally’s whole class gather to watch. The eclipse is a communal event, one with wide-spread implications. And the eclipse’s significance is a much older one, one perhaps foreign to the show’s context: an eclipse is a deeply unnatural phenomenon that inspires dread. The sun is swallowed, an eerie occurrence which reminds us of the workings of planetary bodies, bearing their usual connotations of destiny and unimaginable determinism. Again, this season is all about change, and I see the eclipse as one more harbinger of exactly that. Don struggles with the idea of signing a three year contract at SC. Betty sarcastically asks Don, “What’s the matter, you don’t know where you’re going to be in three years?” It’s not a ridiculous question. Elsewhere in the episode we meet a young man eager to avoid military service. By 1966, America’s going to be knee-deep in the rice paddies. Don signs his contract on 7/23/1963 — not a crucial date, so far as I can tell, but MLK’s “I have a dream” speech is approaching, as is JFK’s assassination. The society these people have thrived in is due for a sea change.

Where’s Your Bible?

Jon Hamm's trademark "scalp acting". Versatile technique which signals surprise, attention, or arousal.

Connie Hilton shows up again –  in Don’s chair — dangling the promise of his New York hotels. Rarely does a client’s story do more than punctuate the episode’s themes, but the Hilton arc has been developing over multiple episodes. Clearly Hilton represents Don’s shot at the big leagues. But an account of this caliber demands certain protocol be followed, such as all major assets being “secured”. This runs counter to Don’s no-contract way of business, which he used to crush Duck. More than that, the idea of a contract conflicts with Don’s way of life. This is a man uneasily inhabiting his own marriage, with an almost pathological aversion to commitment and stability. For Don, a three year contract, even a generous one offered by the loveable Bert, is a deal with the devil. As he explains to Betty, ostensibly schooling her on how business works but really revealing Don’s own idea of what power is:

No contract means I have all the power. They want me, but they can’t have me.

Last week Connie chastised Don for not thinking big enough, and this line reinforces Don’s limited imagination. He thinks that being powerful is being wanted. But in this conception of himself, Don turns himself into a commodity. A rare one, yes, but a commodity nonetheless, and commodities are bought, sold, and utilized by men like Bert Cooper and Connie Hilton. You don’t want to be the guy who can’t be had. You want to be the guy who can have whatever he wants. Don speculates that Hilton will “enjoy something he can’t have.” Really? Forbidden fruit’s interesting for Adam and Eve. God doesn’t give a shit — he says what’s forbidden and what isn’t.

A more antagonistic set-up than Don's meeting with Connie. Don is wearing a darker suit than usual, and must enter Bert's frame, as it were, establishing him as the supplicant.

My favorite scene in the episode showcases why Bert Cooper has his name on the building. Don, worse for wear after his run-in with the hitchhikers, enters his office to find yet another superior sitting in his chair. Bert efficiently goes about disillusioning Don about his own position within the company.

Sacajawea carried a baby on her back all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And somewhere, that baby thinks he discovered America. You, Don, have been standing on someone’s shoulders. We brought you in, we nurtured you like family. And now’s the time to pay us back. You can’t go any further on your own, Don.

That emphasized line is key. It gets back to what I was saying about the big leagues. If you want to operate in their sphere, you have to play their game, and that’s a tough pill for Don to swallow. (Much tougher than that phenobarbital.)

Bert then asks him, “When it really comes down to it, who’s signing this contract anyway?” I found this line ambiguous — perhaps he’s subtly reminding Don that he’s well aware of Dick Whitman. But he also might be suggesting that it’s Sterling Cooper making the commitment to Don, a notoriously unstable employee. Bert can’t do it himself anymore, hence the talk of family. He’s put Don through college, as it were, and now it’s time for him to pay back his dues. Hitching your wagon to Don Draper might be a great idea… or you might be left with nothing when he bolts to California, or London, or anyplace.

Fuckin’ Duck

Mixing business with pleasure.

I want to take you in that bedroom, lock the door, take your clothes off with my teeth, throw you on the bed, and give you a go-round like you’ve never had.

SO SAYS DUCK. While Don chafes at his opportunity’s prerequisites, Peggy gets to take a look at opportunity for the first time, and enjoy some of the extracurriculars Don’s so fond of. As always, Peggy’s sexual experiences are a little sad, and a little misguided, and she can’t seem to avoid fucking guys she’s worked with, but it’s definitely a power move on her part, or at least what she imagines one to be. In actuality, this probably hurts Peggy, because if she takes that job at Gray’s, she’ll be beholden to Duck. Peggy’s problem is she can’t separate work from her personal life, because work is her personal life. And that, of course, is risky. This is a show of workaholics, though considering all the non-work, perhaps that’s not the right term. This is a show of people who define themselves through their jobs. Remember Freddie Rumsen, asking, “If I don’t come into that office on Monday morning, who am I?” Don has a moment of doubt in this episode when his peasant father mocks his soft hands, tells him he grows bullshit. Peggy wants to advance because she can’t seem to think of anything else to do. I try to think of someone on the show who isn’t defined by their work status, and I keep coming back to Ken. Cosgrove doesn’t take work too seriously, and has cultivated some kind of inner life. And he seems to be rewarded for it.

Another Symbol

I think it really ties the room together.

This week, Betty once again flirts with the extramarital. The lucky man is one Henry Francis, a cagey political strategist for Rockefeller. He clearly knows his stuff — after all, he put in the leg work with Betty while she was pregnant. Now she’s dropped the weight, and is ready to go. Nice.  After a fraught encounter at a bakery, Henry doesn’t pull the trigger. He does, however, point out that sweet fainting couch. Betty buys it on an impulse, in much the same way Sal keeps Ken’s lighter: they can’t have the person, so at least they can possess this object.

Betty’s approach to the eclipse bears mentioning. She went to college, as we’re reminded, but still stares straight at the sun. I mean, really? Gene dropped the ball on that one. But I think Betty’s looking straight at the sun speaks to her natural tendency towards a willed blindness, as well as her childish streak. Don, in contrast, dons (yeah I did it) a pair of shades to look at the sun. Betty experiences things directly, since she’s been protected her whole life, so she has no shields. Don has plenty of those.

Back to the fainting couch. Henry’s explanation — Victorian ladies, corsets and stuff — doesn’t seem to cohere with Betty’s very modern remodeling. But beyond the obvious sexual component of the purchase, it makes sense. Betty is by temperament much closer to a Victorian lady than, say, Joan, who’s a modern woman. Betty’s a beautiful creature who stays in the home and has little to do. Even her leisure activity, horseback riding, smacks of the British aristocracy. By buying this couch, I think Betty’s learned nothing from her near divorce with Don. Yes, she can fire right back at him, but she has put directly before her hearth (the center of the home, as the interior designer reminders her) a fainting couch, an old-fashioned symbol of women easily overwhelmed, incapable of facing the rigors of existence.

Like I said up top, Mad Men’s props are often much more than that.

His Foot! His Goddamn Foot!

Mad Men has had some shocking moments over its 2.5 seasons. There’s the dramatic surprise (Roger’s affair with Jane), the character outburst (Betty slapping Glen’s mom), the bizarre (Polly the dog going Jaws on that bird). But John-Deereing-the-New-Boss has stolen the crown, unseating even Don’s fingerblast. Yes, Don’s digital assault was about the last thing you’d expect, but at least it was screened by Bobbie Barret’s skirt. This tractorblast, if you will, made me think I’d stumbled onto an altogether different show. Guy MacKendrick’s mangled wingtip was as gruesome as the Korean war flashbacks — as Roger says, “It’s like Iwo Jima out there.” I talked last week about how the show is beginning to stretch itself, and experiment with new modes of storytelling. Last week we got a taste of the surreal, this week we got a taste of B-Movie slasher flick. In honor of the tractor which ended LimeyDon’s all-too-brief reign, a replay:

Click to play.

I don’t think you can say enough about this scene. Not only did they play it absolutely straight with the gore, but the timing was sensational. Rule says if you show a gun in Act 1, it better go off by Act 3. This also holds true for tractors, apparently. The British wunderkind, Guy MacKendrick, has just waltzed into Sterling Cooper and laid down his new vision for the company, with a flowchart which doesn’t even include an increasingly restive Roger Sterling. Don’s short-lived visions of a new existence in London — and what could be more intoxicating for Don Draper — are dashed. The sword dangling over Pete’s head descends another inch. And then, with one fell pass of the tractor, Guy MacKenzie is short a foot, and Sterling Cooper has lost its head man.

The scene in the aftermath is just as good. The stunned junior execs are standing in an office. Harry and Paul are in their undershirts. A cheerful Roger, whose flowchart slight was answered with an amputation, comes in and cracks a few jokes for the shellshocked troops. And all the while, we see the silhouette of a janitor as he squeegees the blood off the frosted glass. Again, this feels like it can’t possibly belong to the glossy reality of Sterling Cooper, where everyone’s hair is in place and the clothes are great. Yet it still manages to feel of a piece, at least with this episode, which plays around with some horror tropes.

Take Lane’s snake charmer gift, for instance. In any mob movie (or Se7en), there’s a severed head in that box. Or in any Bond movie, there’s a real live snake which lunges for his throat, the sinister villain’s twisted reward for his loyal underling. Jared Harris plays the scene with as much trepidation, and for a moment, didn’t you think something awful was going to come out of that box?

Or how about Sally’s fear of her baby brother? Another well-worn horror movie convention, a fear of small children (see: Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Ring, etc. etc.) does not lead to anything more disturbing than a shrieking fit. But Sally’s distress, the barking dog, and Don’s genuine alarm all feel, again, like another show. Yet Mad Men manages to shoehorn it in.

I think this kind of range bodes well for the show moving forward — if Weiner wants a shot at the three-peat for best Drama, he needs the latitude to tinker with the formula and throw in episodes like these to keep things fresh. Many shows run into trouble their third year because their formulas can only support so many hours of watchable television — The Office and It’s Always Sunny are two that spring to mind.

Particular American Genius

Connie, the affable stranger from the bar, reappears, this time as Conrad Hilton (great-grandpappy to Paris Hilton). Don, whose hopes for a new life in London have just evaporated, quickly turns around and gets back to pitching. Don’s perspicacity, though it doesn’t always work with his wife, is in full effect. Connie questions his lack of imagination — that being the only limit for men as powerful as he — Don replies:

Connie, there are snakes that go months without eating, and they finally catch something… but they’re so hungry, that they suffocate while they’re eating. One opportunity at a time.

Don, to this point, has been one of the less ambitious characters on the show. Unlike grasping Pete or driven Peggy, he’s already master of his domain, and sees no real need to expand that domain. Here we see Don getting a little ambitious. This makes sense, considering his frustrations with Lane — shutting him down on the Garden, badgering him over paper clips. Don has been very comfortable starring at Sterling Cooper, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that the place’s entire structure is subject to the vicissitudes of the day… and tractors. The simple existence of guys like Guy are a sobering reminder to Don that he is not, in fact, unique. His American Genius (and what a bitterly ironic term for a man so tormented) is not singular. Especially with a third kid to consider, Don’s got to be thinking ahead. For now, he’s been thwarted. We’ll see where he is by the end of the season.

Brainless Fingers

Other characters were more than thwarted. Greg, Joan’s husband, gets the news about the promotion… and it’s bad. Joan’s status quo shifted most radically this episode, as her farewell party was interrupted by a dismemberment, her husband didn’t get his job, and she has to find a new one. Hendricks finally gets a substantial scene all to herself, which is good, because she steals everyone else’s. I’m not sure where she goes from here — considering her performance in the Deere Incident, Joan’s value is clearer than ever, as Don points out in the emergency room.

Joan’s fate in the show is the one to watch. Peggy’s trajectory seems reasonably well-charted — she’s on the way up, be it with S-C or Duck, Inc. Joan’s vector is more uncertain. A consummate woman of the times, positioned between the domestic Betty and corporate Peggy, Joan might get swallowed up by her mediocre husband, or bounce back. I can’t imagine the show without her, though, and I have faith Weiner knows that. Hendricks impresses me more with every episode.

Another word on Greg, though. As seen in that still above, there’s a real spark between Don and Joan. (In better circumstances maybe they’d end up together.) But Joan got Greg instead, who might easily be mistaken for Don. The crucial difference between the two is simple: one’s got it, the other doesn’t. Don, even with the enormous chip on his shoulder, has a gift, and Greg just doesn’t. His superior tells him he has no brains in his fingers, and that’s about it for him. Weiner uses this show to comment on artistry, and this seems aimed at the aspirers out there. This is the real fear — that someday, after all your toiling and training, somebody’s going to tell you just don’t have it (the spark, in Roger’s phrasing), and you’ll have to face that. Greg can’t address that reality yet. We’ll see if he can.

Lane Pryce also finds himself on uncertain ground. The Brits have rewarded his ostensibly successful stewardship with a reassignment to Bombay, though of course reassignment is a euphemism for exile. And Lane, just like that, wins our empathy. Early in the season I doubted the value of this character, calling him the…

…so far colorless Lane Pryce. Now I’m ready for Weiner to prove me wrong. Maybe Pryce will be a crucial component to the most successful season of Mad Men yet, a well-drawn and multi-faceted character that sheds light on the culture of the day, while providing an entertaining foil to Don Draper. Or maybe he’ll drink tea and eventually roll over when Don kicks the Brits out.

Engendering pity is the surest way to humanize a character. It’s something we saw with Duck, dozens of times with Pete, this episode with Greg, and now with Lane. He emerges as the good soldier, a man who keeps a stiff upper lip and, most importantly of all, obeys. “One of your greatest qualities is you always do as you’re told,” one of the bigwigs say, an absolutely heartbreaking “compliment”. At a loss, Pryce and Draper have a little moment, when Lane says, “I feel like I just went to my own funeral. I didn’t like the eulogy.”

Great shot here. The camera pushes in as Lane turns around and takes out his pipe -- small thing, but makes for a dynamic shot.

So the appearance of PPL looked to be a sea change, but turned out only to be a tremor, a harbinger of things to come. Everyone’s positions are beginning to clarify, and nobody’s very happy with where they are. The next few weeks should be good.

Yes.

Season 3 feels like it finally hit its stride with “The Fog,” but not all of that can be attributed to the man above (though Duck’s return doesn’t hurt). Weiner’s change motif finally gelled, and the pieces are starting to rumble into place. Pete’s getting reamed by Roger, pressured by clients, and is suddenly presented an opportunity with Duck; Peggy needs cash and is starting to bump against the glass ceiling at SC; Betty had a kid with very little fanfare; and Don spent the episode talking to a prison guard.

Peggy gave this turtleneck the OK.

During my despair of late August, when Duck seemed written out of the show, I wrote this.

Now why, if you’re Matthew Weiner, would you throw away a character like that to bring in Lane Pryce, who so far as stock a Brit as you’ll get? So much characterization has been done with Duck, you’ve established a rivalry with him and Don… and that’s it?

Luckily Weiner brought back Phillips, and in exactly the capacity I wanted him: as a member of a competing agency looking to poach talent from Sterling and Cooper. I’m not sure you can actually have Duck succeed, since this cast is big enough as is without introducing a whole new workplace, but somehow, some way, I feel like this plotline ends with Don and Peggy having a Mindblowing Pitch Duel, with Roger and Duck serving as their cornermen.

Until this thread develops a little more, there’s not much to be discussed, but I think that screenshot atop the post is worth mentioning. This is our first glimpse of Duck, and his wooden mallards are flying high behind him. What was embarrassing kitsch when Don was in the office now feels like an affirmation of identity, as those ducks certainly enjoy pride of place. Clearly Duck can’t disgrace himself enough, and seems ready to offer a new challenge for the Draper Youth.

Speaking of…

Don has yet another encounter with a stranger, and as always, it’s full of on-the-button dialogue which can be applied to Don. Hamm doesn’t get to act too much in his scenes with Dennis the prison guard. For the sake of completeness, let’s mention the obvious: DON’S IMPRISONED BY HIS OWN LIFE. While Dennis natters about things, Don does say “she’s on the boat, you’re on the shore.”

Betty’s labor, featuring the titular fog, is one of the more interesting sequences in the show’s run. Never in the first two seasons did the show abandon its high realism. Don’s flashbacks sporadically changed the pace, but it’s season three where the showrunners are starting to take chances with the show’s mode. In the first episode we had the more involved flashback (which I talk about here), and in The Fog this bending of reality is heightened. While tripping, Betty has some scenes with her dead father, as well as a walk down a suburban road that’s half Bye-Bye Birdie (she’s on a green screen and perhaps on a treadmill) and half Alice in Wonderland. It’s surreal, and a great choice by Weiner. Television shows can make it two seasons by mining the same material, but after 20+ hours, new areas must be explored. The whole ordeal presents an opportunity to watch Betty outside of her domestic context; on the table she accuses the nurse of having slept with Don, proving that she has by no means forgotten her previous discontents, and that this baby might not be more than a finger in the dyke.

This shot exemplifies Betty’s ambivalence about the baby. Upon his return to the office, Don joked he didn’t get any sleep the night before and didn’t plan on getting any for the next sixth months — of course Don sleeps soundly while Betty has to see about the baby. On her way to the nursery, she pauses. The railing’s balusters throw prison bar shadows across her back, continuing that theme. Her head sags. The baby is wailing. We can’t see her face, a reliable clue that the character is experiencing some uncertainty. For all of Don’s misgivings about his existence, Betty is more trapped than ever. With Carla leaving, she now has three kids to look after, and it’s obvious she’s hardly equipped to mother two. And with her father dead, plus Don about an episode away from nailing Sally’s teacher, Betty is approaching a breaking point.

But Gene’s not gone yet. Besides his appearances in Betty’s hallucinations (Cutrona snags the line of the episode with the “You’re a housecat. You’re very important and you have little to do”), Gene is in a sense resurrected with the new baby, named Eugene Scott Draper. Considering her sometimes difficult relationship with her father, Betty’s choice of name seems less an honoring of her father than an effort to recast him into something she can deal with. Gene, even demented, didn’t think much of Betty, and he frequently upset her. Perhaps Betty wants a more manageable Gene in this baby.

To Peggy, this new baby seems like yet another jewel in the glorious crown that is Don Draper’s charmed existence.

Peggy: I look at you and I think, “I want what he has.”

Don: Really?

Peggy: You have everything. And so much of it.

Don: I suppose that’s probably true.

The viewer is invited to scoff at Don’s lack of conviction — he does have everything. Right? Well, that depends on who you are. In a show about advertising, one that’s full of ambitious characters, desire is a primary emotion. And Peggy wants Don’s life. Ironically, Don probably wants Peggy. Whatever else you want to say about Draper, one can at least appreciate his conflict about conventional life. While he is, by every usual metric, a huge success, Draper’s not the kind of person to be contented with a paycheck and a hot wife. (Ken Cosgrove, on the other hand…) Obviously he can’t conceive of another way to live — see his snide banter with the beatnik in season 2 — but Don’s still missing something.

Of course, Don never engenders sympathy without an equal measure of disdain, and in this case it was his disingenuous deferral of Peggy’s request for a reason. “I’m fighting for paperclips,” he tells her, when of course he was earlier telling Pryce to go easy on the expense accounts, and to think of the men’s morale. Peggy’s searching, “What if it’s my time?” at the door seemed to clinch it. I don’t think she’s long for Sterling Cooper.

Other Stuff

Hollis pops up, and we get a sampling of some black issues which might appear later. Most mysterious was the bloodied black gentleman that was sitting with Betty’s mother. Pete social ineptitude gets magnified a thousand in the presence of non-WASPS, as seen by his … tense… conversation with Hollis.