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 7: At the Codfish Ball

This episode opens and closes like a flower, with Sally, on the verge of becoming a young woman, talking to her young male friend, Glen, who is away at private school. The episode begins and ends with this artifice, and while as a whole did not gel for me, I have come to realize how much of this show is about the complex nature of women: their interactions with men and with each other. It is this depth of character that makes the show so enjoyable, even if the overall assembly is slightly flawed. This particular episode seemed choppy when put together, especially with the final scene of Sally commenting on the city (life in particular) as being "dirty", which sounded like an echo of her mother. But when looked back upon the intricate range of situations, emotions and reactions, it is indeed a flowering and living organism.

Sally, talking on the telephone, causes the grandmother to fall and hurt her ankle when she trips over the telephone cord. Later, we find out that Sally has blamed her brother's toy for the accident and has taken credit for calling the police (which she didn't). Sally's deception to her father (and extended family) to make herself more important (and blameless), takes credit for something that is not earned. This is mirrored in Don receiving the award from the Cancer Society for the newspaper advertisement that he wrote when they lost the Lucky Strike account. Don receives credit where credit is not due, and furthermore realizes that it is all a sham when he finds out that his betrayal to a client is considered dishonorable, as he broke the concept of trust. This is also the accusation by Megan's father, that she married a man with a beautiful apartment ("exquisite decadence") and wealth, but she did not earn it on her own; that she has sacrificed her personal goals to achieve social advancement by marriage. Sadly, even when Megan does deserve credit (for saving the Heinz account), she does not accept it. Megan walks in a twilight world of wife, co-worker and daughter, and is uncomfortable transiting through the roles.

In this episode, Megan's character is developed with more background about her French father, a left leaning author (and teacher?) who has a current relationship with a young graduate student; her alcoholic mother, who flirts with men in order to make her husband jealous and has an sexual encounter with Roger which Sally observes (but does not inform). Megan's mother is also a youthful competitor with Megan for the affection for Don's attention, which she notices, but he doesn't ("she touched you six times").

The role of the daughter is shown in varying conditions with Megan / Emile, Sally / Don, Peggy / Kathy. Megan disappoints her father; Don doesn't want Sally to grow up ("remove the makeup and boots"); Kathy doesn't want her daughter to be used by the boyfriend and is against her moving in with him. Emile's comment that "they spread their legs and fly away" is the summation. The rancorous relationship between child and parent is offset by the truthful and honest bond of sisterhood that runs through the episode: between Joan and Peggy, when Peggy goes to Joan for advice ("it's a proposal; go shopping"); between Megan and the wife of the Heinz executive ("I like you like a friend") and tips her off that the account is not going to be signing up with the firm; between Megan and Peggy, when Peggy tries to make Megan take credit for her work, but Megan declines ("this is the best it gets"). Even when Kathy, Peggy's mother is about to leave the apartment. While she disapproves of the living arrangement, she still gives advice (re: loneliness) "get a cat. Twelve years later when it dies, get another one". Sally is the only one who does not have a female confidante. Her role is still that of a child and has to rely on talking to another child, Glen, who as a male, can not be told everything she knows. Sally, who at the beginning of the episode wants to be an adult (Rogers' "date" at the ceremony) is deflated, disappointed and depressed by Rodger's and Marie's sex act. It is knowledge itself that is dispiriting. It is knowledge that makes this show so much fun to watch.