Season 5 Episode 13: The Phantom

"April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain."

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The season finale was both dense and satisfying. It did what great fiction is suppose to do: create mirrors of our humanity and inhumanity; layer meanings for depth; excite our senses to want more.

We learn from Marie, Megan's mother, that the setting is in April, when she has come to visit her daughter during Easter, a holiday her husband doesn't celebrate because he's an atheist. Easter, the holy day celebrating the raising of the dead, shows Don in the embryonic stage of becoming reborn, and perhaps not in a good way. We see him helping Megan get a job as an actress in a commercial, playing Beauty in a theme of Beauty and the Beast. Will Don become her Beast? By helping her succeed he may have knowingly helped her to leave to pursue her career, just as he helped Peggy and she left him. We are left with uncertainty when a young woman expresses her interest in him at a bar. He doesn't say he's married. He doesn't say anything. We are left to find out next season.

Phantoms are illusions, transparancies of ideas and ideals but also of the living and the dead. In this episode, Don's waking spirit is not the only apparation we see. Adam, Don's younger brother who also committed suicide by hanging, is seen at SCDP and at the dental office. Adam tells him that his tooth is not the only thing rotten to the core. But this is not Adam speaking: it's Don's conscience.

We also see the specter of Peggy by her absence. When the Topaz client complains about using the word "cheap" in a commercial with a young woman, he mentions that "you should get a girl's opinion. I used to take that as a given here." When Don does see Peggy, it is in a movie theater, home of the shadow world where illusions of human existence are projected in an empty room.

Megan is also shown in this other world light when Don watches her audition reel alone in an ethereal black and white silence: it's as though she is already dead.

Lane's spirit hovers at the company when Harry doesn't want to move into Lane's office and at the partnership meeting when his death benefit to the company makes SCDP profitable for the quarter. Joan also feels guilt over Lane's death, as she thinks that if she had slept with him perhaps he wouldn't have committed suicide. When Don visits Rebecca to offer her $50,000 as reimbursement for Lane's capital investment in the partnership, she accuses him of having "no right to fill that man with ambition." She thinks Don had a corrupting influence on Lane, when she finds the picture of the young woman in his wallet and also the visit to the brothel with the Jaguar client. She believes that ambition was the cause of his suicide, the pursuit of personal achievement which Don embodies.

Pete becomes a ghost before our eyes after Beth's electro-shock treatment erases her memory of him. She further describes his (their) affair as "a temporary bandage on a permanent wound." His physical fight on the train again reminds us of his false pride and self importance. But most importantly, that he is just like Howard but does not have the self awareness to realize it. When the episode ends, Pete is listening to headphones cut off from the world and his family. We don't know what he is listening to as he is no longer there. We can not follow him.

Roger also becomes spirit through his use of LSD again, but this time alone, standing naked, arms open to the world from the heights of a hotel room.

Don's guilt is from his manufactured persona, Lane's and Adam's deaths, his damaged familial relationships. His hard scrabble early life and his own accumulation of bad decisions has been glossed over by a successful career and wrapped in a handsome guy package. His guilt manifests itself in a painful tooth which is infected and needs to be removed. The tooth is a molar. Was it his wisdom tooth that was removed?

Season 5 Episode 9 Dark Shadows

"Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends" Alexander Pope

Fidelity is the skin that holds relationships together, both social and personal. Fidelity is looked at and tested in this episode; illustrated with short vignettes but not really explored in detail with some characters appearing selfish and petty while others react to being slighted and disrespected.

Early on, when Sally is creating the family tree, we are reminded of Don's disloyalty to his country when he assumed the identity of another in order to escape duty as a soldier. Don is the hollow man, the empty suit with a persona cut whole out of cloth (a draper is a dealer in fabrics or cloth). 

Don looks through Ginsberg's work late at night and decides to compete in a "creative" environment with him. When Don and Ginsberg's ideas are chosen to show to the client, Don intentionally leaves Ginsberg's panels behind in a cab. When the team lands the account, Don takes credit, but he wins the competition by default of omission. Don's use of power and authority is galling to Ginsberg when he finds out. He calls Don on it and says childishly, "I feel bad for you" and which Don replies "I don't think of you at all". This dismissal of Ginsberg, that he is so beneath him as an individual and employee, and not worth consideration, is based on Don's growing hubris and the fact that the younger Ginsberg and Megan are better at creative ideas than he is.

Roger chooses Ginsberg over Peggy for work on the potential Manischewitz account. When Peggy finds out, she is upset because she thinks that Roger feels she is not as good. Roger explains that he choose Ginsberg because Ginsberg is Jewish. Peggy says it is disloyal. Roger's reply, "it's every man for himself" slighting her more by not recognizing her as a woman.

(This sets up a possible future partnership with Peggy and Ginsberg, who now have a shared gripe against the principal partners, for them to leave and start their own agency).

Betty, finds a love letter from Don to Megan and becomes jealous. Her revenge is to try and break the bond between Sally and Don and at the same time, between Sally and Megan, by bringing up Don's first, now deceased wife ("go ask Megan about it"). When Sally returns and fains innocence to her meddling, Betty is upset and knocks things off the kitchen table. But Betty, instead of causing problems at the Drapers, has caused problems between she and Sally without realizing it. When Megan asked Sally "where did you hear that?" (about the wife) Sally's response was "from someone who doesn't lie." Sally learns the truth about her mother's true intentions which is to poison the relations between all parties. Betty is teaching Sally how to be an adult, but the inadvertent lesson is not to trust the words of her parents.

Other characters express a lack of fidelity in their relationships: Henry Francis says that he "choose the wrong horse to back" creating doubt about his commitment to Governor Rockefeller. Betty herself wonders if she made a mistake by divorcing Don to marry Henry. Pete is unfaithful to his wife by day dreaming about a sexual encounter with Beth Dawes. Pete also becomes angry when his new "friend" at the New York Times turns on him by not writing about the firm after an extensive interview. Megan tells Sally that she won't tell Don about their conversation, but tells him anyway. Roger obtains Jane's participation for a business dinner meeting by buying her an apartment, which he ruins for her by using his dominant and economic power over her for sexual gratification.

On Madison Avenue, everything is for sale, save faith, fidelity and loyalty.

Season 5 Episode 8 Lady Lazarus

A disappointing episode with too many rapid cuts between characters which did not allow the viewer to immerse with the development of the story lines. While I enjoyed the contrast between Megan's quitting the business and pursuing her acting career with Pete's personal family crisis of wanting to be single, neither story really mattered to me, which I attribute more to the editing / directing than the story telling. What I did enjoy is Peggy's growing self assurance (yelling at Ginsberg and Stan to let them know that Megan is talking, and the two of them responding like two cocker spaniels by snapping to attention; getting into an argument with Don (like a married couple) after the failed Cool Whip repartee goes south in the test kitchen). Peggy can hold her own. She enjoys her work and career and she thinks Megan is brave because she is pursuing her acting dream. What is touching is that Peggy is by far the braver woman with her personal work achievements and independence but is not aware of it. Megan, moves from the support of one father figure to another with her marriage to Don and is one of the least brave and the most girlish of all the women represented on the show. As for the men, I'm enjoying the metamorphosis of Roger who is leaving behind the pettiness and competitiveness of the firm and becoming an ethereal and spiritual guru like Bertham Cooper. This is in contrast to Don, who is becoming more staid, conservative and fossilized.

Howard, the life insurance salesman from the commuter train (and the reminder of Death), has started a hidden and double life with an apartment and young girlfriend in the city, leaving his wife alone at home (with an off screen child). When Howard's wife Beth (played by the doll eyed Alexis Bledel) locks her keys in the car, Pete gives her a ride home. She mentioned that she doesn't like the city as it is dirty and there are homeless people. Pete's response is that "you are not suppose to see them".  When Howard's wife and Pete have sex, they share a post coital tristesse and in their sad conversation she compares his eyes to pictures of the earth "blue and round and surrounded by darkness" and the earth as "tiny and unprotected". Her melancholy echos later when Pete talks to Stan and says the same thing. But his melancholy is not the same as hers. Hers is based on rejection by her spouse, the resulting loneliness and the meaning (or lack of it) of life. Pete's is lonely too, but his loneliness is because he is not honest. His life is composed of social maneuvering, mis-truths, false advertising, pitches to men for sales and for women for sex. Pete's isolation is self inflicted where Beth's is not. While Pete wants to have an honest relationship, he looks everywhere but home, to his wife who has been the most supportive and instrumental in the development of his career.

Megan wakes Don up at night and tells him she is not interested in advertising. She rejects Don's world forcefully. He is visibly hurt and later as he escorts her to the elevator, he forgets to get in with her as he says goodbye. As he waits for another elevator, the doors open and he looks down an empty shaft into the void. Is he looking at the emptiness of his life? His work? That Megan has left?

Don is also getting out of touch with the times and with youth "when did music get so important anyway?" he asks. Later, Megan gives him the album Revolver by the Beatles to listen to. And the episode starts to close with Don listening to the Beatles song, Tomorrow Never Knows. In closing, Don turns off the song before finishing, learning nothing from the experience.

1: The song lyrics to Tomorrow Never Knows, was based on the book, The Psychedelic Experience, by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Their book, in turn, was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

2: Maybe it was the skis that Roger gave Pete, but all of a sudden I got the impression that Megan's character was based (ever so slightly) on Claudine Longet.