MAD MEN on AMC - Seasons 7(a) & & 7(b)

I'm with the New Yorker on one point: I want most everyone to end up happy. Even Pete, I guess.

pete's journey to self-knowledge is almost the (Shakespearean) comedic double to don's.

pete seemed almost likable when chatting with ken, albeit maybe only on a well-established pete scale.

5 minutes in and i'm all "woah Weiner must have been reading ILX threads, i've been predicting Don walking off into the sunset
with Rachel for 3 years.." 5 minutes later and.. jesus. what a kick in the nuts. rest of the episode was a blur.

pete's journey to self-knowledge is almost the (Paulie Walnuts) comedic double to don's.

Molly Lambert: http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/mad-men-week-1-recap/

that new yorker recap is odd. like, why choose now as the time to finally get tired of mad men's standing invitation to reflect on mad men?

i like how everyone is moving forward & changing while Draper is idk, chasing waterfalls or some shit just totally locked in the fog of the past. Like he still has the same flight attendant on speed dial etc. his apartment used to seem so rad & now it looks like a sad midcentury furniture showroom

yeah otm

I dunno, Joan and Don seemed set up as going in opposite directions here, in terms of dealing with their past, with Don moving forward (by accepting his) and Joan kind of regressing by hiding hers. Don for the first time being visibly comfortable, open, accepting about how he used to be poor, in the convo with the girls and Roger at the diner. Joan gleefully embracing the chance to discard her past, at the department store.

Wealth/status aside, Don's hallucination of Rachel and his visit to her shiva both seemed like him attempting to reconcile rather than store her memory away in another compartment. Obviously he's not liberated from all he's been done/been through, but that line he tells the waitress at the end, about just needing somewhere to sit so he can like hold it all together, was pretty key i think. He's allowing himself to feel the pain at least now rather than pretending its not there, and that process seems static on the surface but is progress underneath? Meanwhile he's staying sane by checking both back alley w/ waitress and bedroom floor w/ stewardess off his list.

Obviously feel for Joan for the boardroom meeting but she did not come off too sympathetic this ep IMO. Enjoyed Stan telling Peggy to loosen up a little and just go with things. Peggy's path to self-knowledge seems most glacial of all, don't think she's reaching it by series end.

http://goodmenproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Screen-Shot-2013-06-24-at-10.19.02-PM.png

Speaking of Weiner & Co. checking out stuff on the web:

http://41.media.tumblr.com/b462d8781d530f52d701f57ab8c0e427/tumblr_n5we3cbScY1qdbluio1_1280.jpg

I was going to say, this is the first time I remember Draper discussing his past in a casual setting with more than one person.

and he was bragging about it almost - if you go by roger's response.

really loved "do you have anything by john dos passos?"

Meredith is one of the most underrated characters on this show imo

That was such a glorious victory for Kenny just now. So glad to have this show back.

Not sure he has enough malice in him to live up to it though

The actress in the fur coat who opened the show is Andie MacDowell's daughter (middle--on the right is another daughter who's on an HBO show I don't know).

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2810886/thumbs/o-ANDIE-MACDOWELL-MARGARET-QUALLEY-RAINEY-QUALLEY-570.jpg?2

That's neat. When I was watching that scene, I wasn't thinking "She looks like Andie MacDowell" but I was thinking "Wow, she looks very 1970!"

That's one healthy gene pool there.

I just had some sleepy/drunk-thought tweets from 2 nights ago. about ted chaough replied to by a ted chaough parody account. the internet is just fantastic sometimes

Yay Peggy!

And loved the pop tarts Twin Peaks moment.

The Lynchian bits are so predictable now, of course the point is that Draper is still circling the drain, maybe he's even a ghost, making its rounds? Na, just a creature of habit: abject fun, like in Dylan's dirge, "Going To Acapulco." Meanwhike life outside goes on all around him. Same as it ever was, or since he first bottomed out, rolling and puking in front of Peggy's new pals. "God, he's pathetic." What was that, Season 3? Of course Weiner is Making a Point, incl. about the nature of alcoholism, which he's hinted will have much to do with the end of this show (oh, can't it be a heart attack, Anna Draper greets him with a book and a bong, they walk into the Pacific sky, get it over with). Really hoping for a spin-off tho.

He's in the habit of crisis. I've been there, already tired again of watching him.

Mr. Jo-HOnes

Draper's secretary's turning out to be a character I look forward to seeing. I can see the gears turning behind the pipsqueak voice. I loved the brief look she and Draper exchanged when he handed him the file.

He'll put the moves on and she'll stab him. Or she'll put the moves on him and he'll see her as his blond little brother (who discovered he was still alive, wanted to re-bond, so Dick-Don sent him away with a ton of money, then felt bad, went to the kid's SRO hotel, but he'd already hung himself)

She put the moves on him last season, remember?

http://40.media.tumblr.com/0d152bf5f91ab295b7b22eb5636223a8/tumblr_n67dimbgaO1qdbluio1_500.jpg

http://41.media.tumblr.com/b1b86011835aa10a5e838d9c0afd6264/tumblr_n67dimbgaO1qdbluio2_500.jpg

^^^^^^^^ best fucking tumblr ever

One easily missed detail I really liked from the new ep: The gunshots followed by police siren in the background while Peggy and her dude were looking for the passport.

XP Oh yeah, I wish they'd hurry up and get on the new season.

I mentioned how much Meredith reminded me of Lucy from Twin Peaks somewhere in here--I'd bet the actress (or Weiner) conceived the character as an homage.

Yes otm! I bet that was on purpose cos I had the same thought during one of her scenes and it cuts right away to Ray on the couch receiving a set of golf clubs from a cyclops.

The actress in the fur coat who opened the show is Andie MacDowell's daughter (middle--on the right is another daughter who's on an HBO show I don't know).
― clemenza, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 11:43 PM (Yesterday

Yup, that's her.

you think Don and Betty could get back together? after the Rachel thing i'm clutching at straws for the guy.

He's gonna re-connect with Midge in detox.

Who was the waitress btw? Have we seen her before at all?

this is the same 'wait.. who's she? are we meant to know?' thing that happened a few episodes back when a random blonde showed up as he was getting an offer from a rival ad firm. and we never found out who the hell she was!

isn't it just that she reminds him of rachel?

The random blonde was a prostitute hired by the firm trying to get him to sign, right?

Who was the waitress btw? Have we seen her before at all?

I seem to recall somewhere in Don's post-(first)divorce bottoming-out spiral that he had a fling with some waitress as part of an epic binge, but I can't recall if this was her or not. Kinda seemed like not.

Nah that one was older and less attractive.

The actress has never been on Mad Men before. But there has prob been quite a lot of women in Don's life we haven't seen.

Wealth/status aside, Don's hallucination of Rachel and his visit to her shiva both seemed like him attempting to reconcile rather than store her memory away in another compartment. Obviously he's not liberated from all he's been done/been through, but that line he tells the waitress at the end, about just needing somewhere to sit so he can like hold it all together, was pretty key i think. He's allowing himself to feel the pain at least now rather than pretending its not there, and that process seems static on the surface but is progress underneath? Meanwhile he's staying sane by checking both back alley w/ waitress and bedroom floor w/ stewardess off his list.

this description pretty much explains why i have found don to be a boring character for so long. too much internalized angst, which requires you to project onto him whatever your theories about his state of mind might be... like an antonioni character or something. zzzz.

i mean, i suppose what i'm getting at is that the interpretation i quoted is just as good--but not necessarily much better--as a dozen others. and all of the interpretations are pretty much equally gaseous at this point. this can be defended as a kind of psychological realism but it's not very interesting dramatically. IMO.

Don as a ghost works for me, he's a shell/shade at this point

said it lots, but don is at his best as a character when the characters in the show are put in the position of figuring him out. i also have high tolerance for antionioniisms.

also i often feel like the writers of mad men are kind of too engaged in shadowboxing with expectations, and thus the show increasingly feels like it's being written as a series of knight's moves. a conscious resisting of expectation, but in an equally consciously unpredictable way. i think that was refreshing for a long time but--and maybe this is just the burden i'm bringing to it as a particular viewer, who knows--leaves the show feeling like its run out of narrative gas and is coasting on its (typically impressive) feel for surface texture, dialogue, etc.