Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

After Mrs. Blankenship's death, any other death on the show would be a letdown.

No one has to die but it's tv, they do. And the show's pretty death obsessed at the moment.

age-wise, aren't Cooper and his sister probably oldest?

Does anyone foresee, what with the ominous turning of hippie tides and ambient violence, Megan dying under mysterious circumstances and Don, as the primary suspect, breaking under scrutiny and being fully exposed? Just a feeling... I also think that Pete's gun is a total MacGuffin.

I hope this show never goes in this direction. The trip out to the HoJo and then her disappearing gave me horrible reminders of that Six Feet Under storyline.

they should just kill off bobby draper so they won't have to keep re-casting him.

otm

i couldn't even remember bobby's name there for a minute, that's how inessential a character he is.

Love the idea of offing Bobby. Always wished they'd done so to Baby Grace on Friday Night Lights.

only if Landry did it

Mad Men: SOMEBODY'S GOT TO DIE

No-Botty Got Ta Know That I Killed Yo Ass in the Ho...Jo

i think don violently chasing megan down in the summary encapsulates how he feels and how he chooses to act on those feelings. he's deeply invested in megan and desperately wants to make their relationship work -- compare his turning around the car and spending all day worrying about her to how he treated betty, who he'd remorselessly blow off at the drop of an emotional hat -- but he's emotionally immature and has no tact.

oops. scratch "in the summary."

This show is the best it's ever been imho

Holy shit @ so much of that episode but Ginsburg in particular, goddamn that was good. "Are there others like you?"

Also can I just say it find it weird how much of this thread is dedicated to these super moralizing posts about how awful character [x] is

solitary posts etc

eh my loathing of Megan is more an aesthetic judgment than a moral one fwiw. those teeth! ugh

i totally fell for Megan when she made the comment about her teeth last season

looks-wise, mind. I've liked her character this season though.

I'm not even

anyone know if the two-part premiere counted as two of the 13 episodes, btw?

yes

Lolled at the line that was like "it's always smooth sailing with LSD!

cool. cheers.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-how-to-make-those-next-on-mad-men-preview-clips-less-useless

you guys are savages

interesting jewish-theme triptych w/ peggy's boyfriend making the 'bracha' crack, jane sterling speaking yiddish while under influence of LSD and ginsburg telling peggy about the holocaust. weiner kinda much much better writing at more secular jewish figures than ppl like ginsburg and his father.

This show is the best it's ever been imho

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Tuesday, April 24, 2012 3:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sometimes i think so, other times i wish it would be more about, you know, advertising. am i wrong in imagining that the first season devoted more "A" plotlines to actual stuff related to the business?

Isn't it a foregone conclusion that Joan's husband is going to die in Vietnam? (obv not a major character, but still)
--Waterloo? Oh, we've sunsetted that. (Tarfumes The Escape Goat)

Why would anyone care if he did?

obv not anymore

interesting jewish-theme triptych w/ peggy's boyfriend making the 'bracha' crack, jane sterling speaking yiddish while under influence of LSD and ginsburg telling peggy about the holocaust. weiner kinda much much better writing at more secular jewish figures than ppl like ginsburg and his father.

― Mordy, Tuesday, April 24, 2012 8:50 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on that note, i saw three movies from three different countries/decades this weekend in which a character using the word "meshuggah" was the tip-off that they were jewish.

xp ya, he can die in vietnam all he wants, no one on the show is going to mention it.

xp part of it makes me wonder if the writers are trying to indicate that being jewish in NY was becoming easier. unlike first season where you have to be a wealthy department store heiress to be overtly jewish. a kind of 'they've been here all along' type of reveal. i haven't been following it so closely but friends who close-read the show for jewishness tell me that they've suspected that jane was assimilated for a long time (i guess her maiden name was a giveaway) but only got confirmation tnite. i do agree that the 'bracha' line was basically as superficial as such a thing could be. speaking yiddish under LSD was interesting to me bc jane is part of whole generation of american jews whose parents spoke yiddish but who only got bits and pieces of it. i don't know if she speaks fluent yiddish and has just totally repressed it in her new community, but i suspect she only knows idiomatic yiddish and maybe has some dormant unconscious memories of hearing her father speak. ginsburg thing is - like shakey mentioned - possibly true (being born in concentration camps possible but exceedingly rare - by contrast i know at least ppl who were born in DP camps). kinda hamfisted and weirdly overly dramatic, just like when his father blessed him. the whole character feels so tone deaf in some ways and then really great in others (like when he's working).

line breaks dude!

also i don't think there was any major shift in terms of "how easy is it to be jewish in NYC" in the mid 1960s.

ginsburg seems like a particularly jew-y jew.

Maybe it's less about NYC and more that very specific Madison Ave world. In the first season they mentioned that they have "one of them" or were bringing in Jewish sandwich boys or whatever into meetings. Which seems pretty strange because of the whole Edward Bernays thing, but whatdoiknow.

but ginsburg isn't anything like a jew-y jew! he's kinda like how you might make up a jew-y jew if you didn't have any exposure to one

?

he has a strong NYC jew accent, his dad even more so and uses lots of yiddish, etc.

they should have hired a consultant who had met a jew i guess

um, the show runner is jewish y'all

my nutty theory: that the 3 characters represent 3 different ways that jewish community is interacting with upper crust wasp community. jane has totally assimilated into wasp community. her jewishness only comes out under influence of LSD. you could barely know she was jewish. peggy's boyfriend lies entirely outside this community. peggy kinda goes out to him. he comes to parties but makes no efforts to belong. and then ginsburg, despite in some ways being the jewy jew, is kinda this meeting place where he is trying to fit the two together.

re ginsburg, i just wish there was more insight into his character i guess? he has a lot of noise going on - yiddish idiom, accents, blessings, holocaust - but doesn't really seem to be a very fleshed out character. esp compared to jane who summons an entire world + history for me.

we're only just now kind of learning about Ginsberg, and it feels like he's gonna have a larger role to play.

yeah, i'm curious to see what they do. what a totally weird thing tho to have him born in a camp.

you could barely know she was jewish.

i didn't know this at all before this ep. (but like i said above my recall is shit)

i think that was intentional. you'd have to be paying really close attention. (which indicates how assimilated she is.) i'm told there was something re her cousin that was kind of a hint but idr it.

to be fair we barely see anything of jane

Didn't Weiner basically say explicitly that she and her cousin were jewish and meant to be read as very assimilated?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/matthew-weiner-closes-the-books-on-season-4-of-mad-men/

Maybe it's less about NYC and more that very specific Madison Ave world. In the first season they mentioned that they have "one of them" or were bringing in Jewish sandwich boys or whatever into meetings. Which seems pretty strange because of the whole Edward Bernays thing, but whatdoiknow.

Pretty weird that they've never mentioned Bill Bernbach.