WARNING: This blog is for people watching Mad Men Season 6 on Wednesdays on Sky Atlantic. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen it yet – may contain spoilers!
So, no great surprises. Though what were we after? That existential question, echoing on from Season Five’s conclusion to this new opener – “are you alone?” – hasn’t been answered. It’s rhetorical, after all: identity and death are Mad Men’s central themes, and in that regard the first Season Six (double) episode was standard – or classic.
It’s hard to imagine any more allusions to death could be crammed in here. More interesting, perhaps, are the varied responses to all this dying. Sandy’s backseat of the car declaration – “my mom’s dead!” – elicits laughter; Don vomits during the eulogy to Mrs Sterling, and even Roger finally weeps only when holding a brush from his deceased shoeshiner’s kit. Less explicitly there’s a “cool” coffin-like violin case, the porter’s seeing-of-the-light and Don’s lame, drunken hounding about “hot tropical sunshine” at the end of the tunnel. Later on, his pitch for Hawaii as the “Jumping Off Point” fails to excite the client – unsurprising given the argument that “Heaven’s morbid! Something terrible had to happen for you to get there!”
Oh, plus Inferno. Dante gets to heaven in the end but not until he’s rejected sin. If Season Five had a cliffhanger it was over Don’s future fidelity, and our shock at finding him in bed with the doc’s wife is relatively mild. Still, the episode’s arc is clever: there’s an inversion here of the series’ pilot, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, where we meet Draper first alone in a bar, then at the apartment of his bohemian girlfriend Midge, and onto the office – before, quite startlingly, he returns home to suburbia, a wife and kids. In another moment reminiscent of countless others we find Dick Whitman staring and troubled in thought, the wrong soldier’s lighter in hand, as the photographer tells him: “I want you to be yourself”.
In comparison Betty’s behaviour of old – her feistiness – is uncomfortably exciting. Rape jokes in bed to her straight-laced husband, making goulash in a flophouse, deriding the threats by a sinister squatter. Becoming a brunette is the tamest of Elizabeth’s exploits.
But as often in Mad Men, the greatest joys lie in the smaller details and developments. There’s Peggy and Stan’s continued friendship, her repeated expletives and funky white knee-high socks. Sally’s ever-more sophisticated teen angst. An intriguing reference to iciness between Roger and Joan (Joanie, we long to hear how you are!) The eager, new (and handsome?) account man, Bob Benson, is already suggestively grating. And in her new soap opera role, Megan has to “radiate evil, be a lying cheating whore”. Not to forget 1968’s hairstyles of note: in a marvellous re-introduction we find Pete posing on the stairs, his head dashingly turned to show off some quite extraordinary new sideburns. Abe’s grown a fine mop and Ginsberg a wicked ‘stache, while Stan’s gone suitably grizzly and poor Harry… I fear Austin Powers comes to mind.
A final word on the episode’s rather dull title, “The Doorway”; a reference to Roger’s lament in the shrink’s office. Life, he waxes, is a series of doors/windows/bridges and gates that all “open the same way and close behind you”. Likewise, Mad Men‘s penultimate season seems to be off on the same-same track of pace, content and tone. It’s slick, slow and brooding as ever. Question is – are you glad of that?
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