Mad Men on AMC • Fifth Season Thread

i know no one is talking abt this now but i thought the soap opera thing was more about 'lets just admit a huge part of our enjoyment in this is about getting caught up in the dramatic emotional lives of people portrayed, and isn't really about some high-minded subversion of anything'

Ugh this was the worst. I mean a fine episode but eurgh.

I had a hard time watching it. Except the Peggy stuff was great.

really wanted a conversation this week between Joan and Peggy where they said "I'm so MAD at these MEN!"

Peggy interviewing and resigning was so good

I was thinking two things during Peggy's physical exit:

"Is Joan going to slip out and actually say goodbye? Nope, guess not."
"OH NOES THAT ELEVATOR DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK. DON'T DIE! Okay, whew."

what did lane call pete earlier this season? a "grimy little pimp"? and now he really is, and lane's no better. you could argue that lane is worse, since he essentially needed the jaguar deal to go through to cover his embezzlement and he talked joan into a deal that only benefits her if the company is solvent, which might still be questionable even though they got jaguar.

ha ha i was worried about peggy plummeting to her death too! every time someone uses the elevator now it's very stressful

With two episodes left, I'm wondering a) will Lane get caught? and b) will Don cheat?

Lane might get caught, but I think this will be the only season that Don doesn't cheat (look for that to begin happening next season).

Lane is on suicide watch imo

lane and pete can jump off the roof holding hands afaic

Poor Ken Cosgrove doesn't have anyone to be in a pact with now.

joan's "meeting" while don pitched jaguar was one of the saddest things i've ever seen on television. horrible, depressing episode, but great, too. loved peggy smiling at the elevator as the kinks kick in.

Sometimes I wonder how Vincent Kartheiser even sleeps at night.

by not owning a toilet iirc

I felt nauseous throughout, and at the beginning I thought it was so ham-fisted and silly that this would genuinely be the worst episode in the show's history, but even as the cross-cutting between the pitch and Joan's night with that creep featured a speech that was so bloody on-the-nose (DRINK!) it still worked and kind of devastated me. Even that reveal that the conversation with Don in her apartment had already happened should have irked me a lot more than it did. The ending was great though, and I can't stress how awesome the Peggy stuff was, even though I loved having her in that office.

figure she'll be back before too long. there's always next season...

i'm not looking forward to where this thread is going to go, but i probably won't be able to look away either. sigh.

I don't know if she'll come back to SCDP, but I'd love to see this develop into a "student becomes the master" thing a couple times.

yeah, i suppose competing houses is a logical step

I just hope they can divide the time better than they have with Betty. Though I know the oddness of the storyline was also partly to write in Jones' pregnancy.

Wow. Everybody loves the corny Krishna episode, but when cathartic events actually occur to central characters, folks here are ambivalent. Dang.

peggy leaving was so low-key that it seemed like she was ambivalent about it until the very last moment when the music came on.

the speech at the end to the jaguar guys was tremendously depressing. and yet it's kind of impressive that draper even managed to work the unreliability of the car into the sales pitch

I don't know if weare ambivalent. Just kind of shell-shocked by Joan being prostituted by Pete and manipulated by Lane.

I'm not ambivalent. I thought this was amazing.

daria otm. Peggy's smile at the elevator was some kind of brilliant.

welp, Lane's days are numbered afaict. with Joan a partner the company has no use for him, and she is bound to discover his embezzlement = dude is doomed.

but yeah omg this episode was depressing

i don't know if Lane will ever get found out, this is a company full of creatives and secretaries after all!

Yeah, the only person who's in a position to discover his act would be Joan and I think Lane burned that bridge last night. Should she find out about it, I don't think she'll be at all amenable to helping him cover his tracks.

Poor Ken Cosgrove doesn't have anyone to be in a pact with now.

if Peggy doesn't at least offer to build him a bridge out then she gets to be a shit like everyone else on the show, damn you Peggy

this was so great and everyone was so horrible, poor Joanie. Hendricks and Kartheiser can have their Emmys now imo.

ya, i don't get Peggy treating Cosgrove like crap. seemed to come out of nowhere.
but good on her for moving on. very happy for that fake tv person.

I was proud of Good Guy Ken, telling Pete off, saying 'Absolutely not!' to the client's suggestion they order a second round (have to get home and write, after all!)

It was shitty to see PEggy leave without saying goodbye to people(!) and especially for breaking her pact with Ken. But she's Don now, and that's a very Don way to do it all (except he never left Sterling Cooper, except for SCDP.)

I applauded Joan's "you're mixing two different stories." She may have chosen to sleep with him to secure her future (literally sleeping her way to the top - ugh - but if I were in her position in that era, I might've as well) but she's subtly indicating that she's beautiful AND intelligent, and he is neither in particular.

We might get to see Kurt & Smitty at Peggy's new job! And I still pine for Sal. Was nice to see Freddy Rumsen - the one who had *actually* made the first positive change in PEggy's life!

saying 'Absolutely not!' to the client's suggestion they order a second round

Nah, that "absolutely not" was to the client saying "it's on me".

everything in this episode "came out of nowhere"; out of character bullshit from a to z

yeah, a second round on him (they'd had the first round with him..) - that's what I meant but I can see how it may have been unclear.

(xp)

maybe this whole episode was one of Pete Campbell's scuzzy dreams

and when he wakes up next episode Joan is throwing airplanes at his head

ya, i don't get Peggy treating Cosgrove like crap. seemed to come out of nowhere.

she was in a foul mood, didn't see any more in it than that

jesus the plotline with joan. this really tips the show over into...something. i don't know how we're going to relate to the characters from now on knowing they are capable of this. interesting that don's transition from antihero to hero seems complete with him being the only one to beg off on this.

how is joan going to be treated by the partners now that they know what she'll do? even if she has money now, what are her workplace interactions going to be? do we trust campbell (or hell, even sterling) not to let on about this?

jesus.

they really saved up a ton of plot for this one, huh?

I think this comment on the Basket of Kisses website sums up better than I ever could how this isn't exactly a character change for Joan. It's a bit more obvious, more direct, but she has been dealing with being treated as a body her whole life (this is a woman who chose to marry her rapist to obtain her goal of being married to a man who could support her and who would give her a family - and is smart enough that you know she recognized it as rape):

While it definitely makes me sick to my stomach, yes, I find it believable — because I’ve seen it happen. This is 1967, not 2012. You can’t/won’t understand the mindset of women then if you didn’t live it then. Watching TV shows, documentaries, movies and reading books is not going to really help anyone understand it. This was so much more of a man’s world than it is now, and women had so little power that it really isn’t comprehensible from the mindset of 2012. It just isn’t.

This is coming from someone who adores the character Joan; she’s one of my top three favorites on this show. I really do adore her. And I feel like I see her clearly.

Joan’s been exchanging herself for things she’s wanted since season one, and if you remember, she suggested to Peggy in S1E1 that she do this also. Throughout five seasons, she’s given herself away, in exchange for dinners, for nights out, for jewels, furs, for birds, and for nothing. We’ve seen so many, many examples of this.

This was what she was taught, by her mother and by the culture she grew up and lived in still in 1967. Her “value,” her “skill set,” her thing to offer in the marketplace was/is her extraordinary beauty, her body and her sexuality. This was what men — the power players and the power brokers — always responded to and what they gave value to. Joan knows her value in the marketplace.

No judgment here from me. It was the way it was. Joan is in her mid-30′s, she has a new baby, she’s unexpectedly a single mother, she lives and works at the whims of men. We may not be seeing it on screen, but you can bet that Joan has seen her first lines, gray hairs and the beginning of sagging of certain body parts. She knows her value is going to start to diminish. Now before anyone blows a gasket — I’m NOT referring to what I see as her value, or we as viewers see as her value, but what Joan HERSELF sees as her value, and what she sees and has confirmed each and every day.

Joan made a good deal, when offered the chance, by her life experiences. Would I have made it in 1967? I didn’t make that particular decision but I made many that were based on similar cultural mindsets and beliefs of the times I lived in, in those years. Would you? Maybe, maybe not. It’s 2012, and we’re not walking in her shoes living her life.

Was she sick before, during and afterward? I’ll bet you everything I own that she was. Was she diminished by this decision? Yes. Undoubtedly. Would she make it again, given the chance? Probably. Joan is doing the best she knows to do, living in the world that existed in 1967, given what she knew, what she was taught about her value, and in a world dominated and driven by men.

None of us here, now, have the right to judge her. The fact that I’m still sick to my stomach at 3:35 am and not sleeping is more to do with the powerful reminders that MW gave us in tonight’s show about the world that existed then for women, that was even worse in the years before that, and that still exists today. Matt did a superb job. And it’s good that it’s so disturbing for so many of us tonight.
http://www.lippsisters.com/2012/05/28/recap-the-other-woman/

I liked how in the middle of all the Pete rottenness, they threw in him reading Goodnight Moon to his kid.

Also: am I mistaken, or does he have copies of the Earth pictures Rory (and others) talked about pinned to the wall of his office?

I didn't notice the moon pictures - but I did go to a friend's apartment and SHE had them framed on her wall, one week after I'd seen the Mad Men (they were on the wall before the episode; she's a science journalist.)

Who knows if Greg can take 2.5% of SDCP from Joan, seeing as they are mid-divorce?

from tom and lorenzo

Which brings us to our next point: The partners will never forget that Joan literally slept her way to a partnership. This part of the story has us confused quite a bit. It doesn’t make much sense to us. Joan, as we know her, wouldn’t agree to such a thing, no matter how much money was offered, simply because she would know that from this point on, the most important people in her career will always think of her as a prostitute. After all the hard work she’d done to establish herself as a highly competent manager, we’re having a near-impossible time believing that she would do this. In other words, we believe that Joan could sleep with a man she’s not attracted to in order to get something out of it. In fact, we believe that Joan has done some version of that before in her life, and we believe there’s a cynical, practical part of her that would just shut herself off and get through the act, knowing that the benefits could be life-changing. What we don’t believe at all is that she’d expose herself to the level of judgment and possible ridicule she would be receiving from people like Roger and Don.

i basically agree w/ this.

Pete framed it in such a way that it seemed like he'd been urged by Don and Roger to do this - she told him off for discussing it with the other partners. As far as she knew, they'd all "decided" she would/should do it and so she was already a whore in their eyes. The context of finding out that Don had vetoed it but told her AFTER she'd already done it was so heartbreaking, watching that tiny amount of sadness on her face, under her mask. But I figure if people are going to think that way about her without even waiting for her decision, it's reasonable that she'd decide she might as well go ahead and do it. My husband said after her contract discussion with Pete "at least she's doing this for HER company now, not the company she works for."

Hey wait a second - the client is gone to bed and Joan, her Mother and Don are still roaming around? It's not even so late that Don decided to wait until the next day to drop by and discourage her? Damn, Grandpa, stay up til it gets dark at least..

yeah i raised an eyebrow @ the timing of all that

What we don’t believe at all is that she’d expose herself to the level of judgment and possible ridicule she would be receiving from people like Roger and Don.

finefinemusic otm in responding to this. she did it because she felt that all the partners, including don, wanted her to. that suggestion must have come as a huge, dispiriting blow, and i'm not surprised she acquiesced under the circumstances, if not happily. "if that's all you see me as, then fine. but it's going to cost you."

regardless of her workplace situation, how the other partners view her and whatever rumors as may float around, she knows that she and her child will now more than likely be financially secure for life.