Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

he's just so hopeless. so fantastically hopeless.

Yes, he seems too pathetic to hate.

Who's the guy in the Palm Beach golf-type outfits in the office?

stan rizzo (jay r. ferguson), new art director brought in last year iirc. gets away with it due his role, i suppose.

Yeah, I've supposed that as well.

he's a coward, a lech, an idiot, and with no skills/attractive traits into the woodchipper with him

― the sir edmund hillary of sitting through pauly shore films (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 27 March 2012 18:45 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When he gets into his sixties he runs for to become 2012 Republican nominee for Presidency

Crane's passive aggressive cowardice and SELF IMPORTANT attitude is SO annoying. He's always crowing about how he's THE HEAD OF HIS DEPT, ETC but I have yet to see him to do anything worthwhile. He definitely slimmed down (not sure if that was purposeful) AND I thought for a moment when he arrived at Don's party, that he was now single. But it seems no. He's just a philandering creep (who's not hot enough to do as much philandering as he'd like).

Also I am really starting to love Layne.
He was REAL CHUFFED as being seen as a gentleman.

The wallet incident made me uncomfortable -- was he taking it because he didn't trust the cabdriver or because he was thinking about stealing the money/perving over pictures? Him being racist would seem worse to me than just being sort of desperate.

it could be racism. i was wondering that too. also, most cabbies aren't exactly rolling in the dough - that might be more to do with it? (or not)

or just I am Britisher Executive, I am much more well placed to do this good deed than any lowly cab driver

maybe

I don't know honestly. Felt like racism at first but who tf knows

it was sort of an underlying theme of the ep, so who knows?!

I took it ambiguously at first, just as the cabbie did - it was just a sense of being uncomfortable with there being this wallet, that Lane had kind of found, that was in his hands and he didn't want to pass it off and trust someone else with it. It could be a racial thing, a class thing, a distrust of taxi driver thing, who knows? I thought that the driver kind of paused and then brushed it off after getting Lane's card.

To be fair, the driver also said something about dropping it off in the lost and found, implying it'd be changing hands again and neither of them would have responsibility anymore. I can see where Lane would rather take care of it as an honorable thing to do.

whole thing seems like a preamble to something else, hard to tell what

Lane using mafia connections to set up some sort of future money and/or advertising deal, imo

i think it was just Lane being proper englishman to be compared later with his lechery over the photo and then contrasted with his meeting with the wallet owner and the whole, "this is how we do things here," spiel

def racist. I think they're setting up lane to have major issues with the eventual black hire?

what about his black girlfriend?

"I can't be a racist, some of my favorite mistresses are black"?

The irony of being called a gentlemen by a guy whose personal photo he has just stolen.

xposts

people are complicated. and i'm sure there are class issues too.
i wish this show was as serious and thought out as it wanted to be. There's pretensions of DEEP MEANINGFUL SOCIAL EXPLORATION but it's all gloss

yeah, i dunno about the lane = racist read. think the struggle with the cabdriver was there more to raise questions than to make any clear point.

dudes it not like people are like "i am going to do this particular thing for a RACIST reason and this other thing for a CLASSIST reason"

could be that it was a throwaway scene added to explain how he ends up with the photo and no-one really thought through WHY he would want to keep the stupid wallet in the first place.

i wish this show was as serious and thought out as it wanted to be. There's pretensions of DEEP MEANINGFUL SOCIAL EXPLORATION but it's all gloss

― Lil T the Bowed Jet (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, March 27, 2012 4:16 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are you joking, what would you have liked to have happened in this situation, a deep meaningful exploration of layne's racism?

$100 in 1966 money is over $600 in 2010 money, and he sort of changed his mind after he noticed how much money was in there.

perhaps it'd have been more clear if Lane had yelled "hands off, negro lackey! I will make sure this wallet returns to the place from whence it came!"

He gives the cabby his card and tips him.

he sure does.

"here's a tip, cabby. don't wade into the ilx mad men thread."

i wish this show was as serious and thought out as it wanted to be. There's pretensions of DEEP MEANINGFUL SOCIAL EXPLORATION but it's all gloss

sort of agree, cuz i do wish it were willing do dig a little deeper, cut a little sharper, but my bigger problem is that it's starting to really feel like a traditional soap opera, in that, despite all the ups and downs, it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. first few seasons gave me the sense that it's structure was novelistic, that these various pieces were being put in place to some meaningful narrative purpose.

fucking "it's"

If you found a wallet in the back of a cab and was about to hand it to the cab driver and noticed it had $600 in it, and you were having money problems, what would you do?

demon struggle

ilx mad men threads always make me glad the writers do their own kinda weird, sometimes inscrutable things and not the super obvious TV things everyone seems to always want them to do

ilx mad men threads are fun because so much of nothing happens in the show and yet we always have so much to talk about

I am throwing my buddha trinket at this thread.

Yeah nothing happened, except the birthday party, the office-switching stuff, Joan bringing the baby into work, a steamy phone conversation, French pop musical number, commentary on the civil rights and occupy struggles, etc.

Don't forget the rough sex!

i think it was a mix of things but obviously a slight distrust of the cab driver had something to do w/ it. i liked this moment for the same reasons as s1ocki.

i liked the quiet irony of when layne dismissed 1/2 of the "negroes" by saying they were only hiring secretaries. even though the context was "civil rights" there are these narrowly defined gender roles (discrimination) that nobody in the room cared to question at that moment.

also do you think that all the black folks showing up to apply for a job was just a spontaneous reaction to their "equal employment" ad or if it was a concerted action to test the sincerity of that ad?

Yeah, that whole "secretaries are female" thing, and that all of the black men (and women!) didn't really question it was a decent commentary on the mixed state of racial/gender/workplace politics

despite all the ups and downs, it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere.

Well, the show is going *somewhere*: to the end of the 1960s.

I'm not saying that to be snarky, either. I think a lot of the show's momentum comes from the anticipation of how the characters will react to and interact with the changing times.

What do all of you think of the way with which the receptionist was canned? She was kind of iffy, but it was kind of a quick turnaround from "we don't need to hire anyone" to "weakest link on the chain just carried a racist statue through the entryway past the group that would be offended, dump her"

wait was she canned? i must have missed that.

first few seasons gave me the sense that it's structure was novelistic, that these various pieces were being put in place to some meaningful narrative purpose

I think, like the Sopranos, they weren't sure where it was all going for the first couple seasons (might get cancelled! or in the Sopranos case have a major player die lol) and now that the show's place is secure and Wiener's given it an end-date, we are going to see some very methodical, multi-season plotting with a definite "narrative purpose".

also s1ocki OTM w this: glad the writers do their own kinda weird, sometimes inscrutable things and not the super obvious TV things everyone seems to always want them to do

I don't think that's a thing that happened, was it? xps

"weakest link on the chain just carried a racist statue through the entryway past the group that would be offended, dump her"

this was totally grounds for firing. she did a really stupid thing, which was immediately identified and she knew she should have known better.

i couldn't get a bead on how we are supposed to understand megan. was the presence of her arty/homosexual friends meant to underline the generational divide between her and her husband? that struck me as a bit over the top, her coquettish song-and-dance routine included.

i did like how almost everyone in the office had a different assumption of how don must have been reacting to that.

Well, they had no open positions, then they asked her if she'd just carried it through the entryway past all the waiting people, and then the scene cut to them announcing an open receptionist position.

oh i see.