- Listen for the drop of Sally’s teacher’s panties in next week’s episode.
- With the whole Betty birthing/grandpa dying/naming the baby after dead grandpa/Lion King-style circle of life thing, I wasn’t sure if I was watching Mad Men, or an updated version of the music video for Live’s 1994 smash hit Lightning Crashes.
- Don’s camaraderie with the expectant prison guard in the hospital waiting room seems an extension of the scene a couple weeks ago when he befriended an escapee of both the working class and Sterling’s abhorrent party (remember Sterling singing in blackface?)
In both cases the friendships were incited by shared illicit alcohol. What are we to make of these friendships? Are we simply seeing Don’s true self — a man most comfortable with other “Real Men”, not weak-chinned ad execs like Pete Campbell? Or is something more complicated happening — an emotional longing that hearkens back to Don’s abandonment at birth and other childhood traumas?
- There’s a moment between Don and the prison guard that could be straight from a Hemingway story i.e. spare dialogue that is almost cliché, but saved by rhythmic elegance, simple as the blues and spotted with well-placed pauses, and deeply sad and true subtext.
PG: “The other one a boy?”
Don: “Yes.”
PG: “Toss the ball around?”
Don: “Not enough.”
- Remember when you could smoke in hospital waiting rooms? Me neither. Remember when hospital waiting room’s weren’t crowded or overlit, and had burnt auburn walls, which, as was pointed out in Slate’s TV Club, aren’t so dissimilar to wall as the offices of Sterling Cooper?
- Has the doctor of anyone who’s ever given birth in a TV show or film been available to deliver the baby?
- I like Don’s attempt to comfort the prison guard, and the dose-of-reality-rebuke he receives in return:
“Our worst fears lie in anticipation.”
“Are you so sure about that?”
- Is Duck Phillips the WASPiest man to ever use the word “nosh”?
- What most people don’t know, is that Kanye West had a second outburst at last night’s VMAs. He jumped onstage and yelled, “Pete Campbell doesn’t care about black people.”
- Nice detail of Don looking at the egg for a chick, though, one might argue, meditation on eggs directly post-childbirth is not particularly subtle.
- I know Mad Men is a fictional show, and that the Rothko painting in Cooper’s office is actually a replica. But it still makes me cringe to see it hanging unnoticed as slick-haired men discuss sales.
- And the Emmy for least revealing yet no less enticing “Next week on…” previews goes to…MAD MEN!
.jpg)
