Recap: Tempted by
the idea of making themselves and the other partners rich and expanding the
company, Pete, Bert, and Joan meet with a banker to discuss the possibility of
SCDP going public. They wonder about how to get Don and Roger onboard when the
deal is certain, agree that it won’t be a problem, and make plans to announce
their news to the office the following day. Before that happens, the company
loses two major clients and their hopes are crushed.
Roger is having an affair with Daisy, a flight attendant who
works in the first-class airport lounge. Not only do they have fun in bed, but Roger
has convinced her to tip him off to prospective clients at the airport and do
other airline-related favors for him, which she seems to equally enjoy. Through
Daisy, Roger manages to land a new account with “Mikey” and get an opportunity
to present an ad campaign in Detroit for a new model of Chevrolet. Roger
returns to SCDP and announces his new business just as things are falling apart
due to lost accounts, and Don calls in his creative team with great excitement
to develop the Chevy ad campaign. Roger feels he’s redeemed himself through his
new account successes, and Don later gives him a nod for his accomplishments.
At CGC, the three principals meet for a creative discussion
and Frank Gleason informs Ted that he has cancer, which in those days was a
death sentence. Frank explains that Ted and Jim Cutler will have to buy him
out, and that the company may go under now that they’ve dropped Alpha Romeo as
a client, unless they can get the Chevy account. Later we see Ted in his
office, trying to get his television to work so he can watch the sit-com Hazel when Peggy walks in to see what’s
going on. Ted tells Peggy about Frank’s cancer, and Peggy responds to Ted’s
worries about losing Frank’s “paint brush and his negativity” by telling him
he’s strong. Ted kisses her, but then apologizes: “I’m sorry, I’m just
grateful. Goodnight, Peggy.” Peggy seems to like Ted’s attention and his kiss,
and later fantasizes about it when kissing Abe.
Peggy and Abe are now living in a home they bought in a
changing neighborhood. While Abe tries to fix something electrical and shocks
himself in the process, Peggy complains of a neighbor who’s a junkie and has
pooped on the stairs. She later has a scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth
and complains about paint fumes, noisy neighbors, and loud music. Abe explains
that these inconveniences are all part of being in a changing neighborhood, but
Peggy says she doesn’t like change. Abe replies: “I don’t think you understand,
babe. Everything’s changing.” They then kiss, and that’s when Peggy fantasizes about
kissing Ted.
Now at home with Trudy on a trial basis, Pete receives
credit from Trudy for his good behavior but she isn’t yet ready to consummate
their love again. Pete gets angry about the sexual rejection, threatens
divorce, and hints that he’s going to be much more successful soon. She notes
his statements but is resolute. Later, Pete and Bob Bensen visit a whorehouse and,
standing in the hallway together, Bob offers to pay for Pete’s session.
Suddenly Pete sees his father-in-law, Tom, exiting a bedroom with an African
American prostitute, and they’re both stunned. Tom and Pete say hello to each
other awkwardly. At the office, Pete asks Ken for advice on how to handle a
hypothetical situation such as he had. Ken says it would be mutually
destructive for either he or Tom to mention it, so he thinks Pete is safe.
Just then, Ken receives an urgent call from Jaguar, and Pete
wonders why Ken is getting the call. They learn that Jaguar has been lost following
a meeting between Don and Herb that Pete was excluded from. Pete storms out of
Ken’s office and confronts Don with blame and bitterness. He says, “Do you know
we had a public offering on the way?” Of course Don doesn’t know, since he was
excluded from that interaction. Joan resents Don for not putting up with Herb,
since she had to sleep with him just to get the account, and she tells him off
(even though Don was the one executive who had advised her not to sleep with
Herb). Everyone else appears angry with Don, but just then Roger steps in and
announces that he has good news and bad news. The others cut him off and inform
him that Jaguar is lost. Roger replies that, in that case, he has only good
news: a new account and a shot at representing Chevrolet.
Later Pete goes to Tom’s office and tries to make amends,
but Tom condemns Pete, saying: “My daughter is a princess,” and announces that
Vicks will drop SCDP. To retaliate against Tom, Pete goes home to see Trudy and
tells her bluntly that he saw her father at a mid-town whorehouse with “a
200-lb. negro prostitute,” which to Trudy’s ears sounds not just immoral but
also freakish, given American society’s racial segregation and pervasive jokes
about fat people in that era. Trudy tells Pete to get his things and go, but
she’s unnerved by learning about this side of her father, whom she idealizes as
much as he idealizes her.
Marie is at Don and Megan’s for a Mother’s Day visit. As the
three of them chat around the kitchen bar, Arnold drops by and mentions that
their son, Mitchell, is visiting them for Mother’s Day. Marie gets Arnold in
her gaze and behaves seductively, and Arnold takes notice. Don asks: “How long
is she staying?” but doesn’t get a firm response. Later, Megan and Marie enter
an elevator where two young women recognize Megan and ask for her autograph,
which irritates Marie. At work, Don hears from Pete that the dinner meeting
with Herb is cancelled, but shortly thereafter Roger tells him that the meeting
is on, without Pete – but with wives, to “limit the explosion.” Back at home,
Megan confesses to Marie that she’s worried about Don because he’s so distant,
and Marie advises that it’s very hard to stand next to someone giving an
autograph. “He thinks you belong more to the public than to him.” She also
advises Megan to dress hot so that Don will want to have sex, and Megan does
exactly that.
Don, Megan, and Marie attend the dinner that Roger arranged with
Herb and his wife, a ditzy blonde who chats about mundane experiences as if
they were fascinating. Bored silly, the others want to leave, but they wait for
Roger (who was to be paired with Marie). Roger never shows up, and eventually,
the ladies all go to the ladies’ room and leave Herb and Don to talk business.
Herb tells Don that he has a “kid” whom he wants to supervise Don’s creative
process, and Don hands Herb the business card of another SCDP person who, he
says, will be in charge of the Jaguar account from now on. This leads to a huge
stand-off, and Don dumps Jaguar. When the ladies return to their table, the
Draper party files out of the restaurant, leaving Herb and wife to dine alone
together.
Back at home, Marie sits in the living room while Don and
Megan have sex in the bedroom. The phone rings, Marie picks it up, and it’s
Roger. Marie is offended that Roger didn’t show up for the dinner, and despite
his attempts to salvage the relationship, she tells him to forget her name.
Later, Don meets Arnold in the elevator of their building,
and Arnold, looking wasted, asks Don to come out and celebrate with him because
he just quit his job. Arnold says he lost a heart patient and the opportunity
to perform the first heart transplant was granted to another hospital. Filled
with self-pity, Arnold says, “Fate hasn’t chosen me.” Replying: “I don’t
believe in fate. You make your own opportunities,” Don refuses the pity-party invitation,
saying he has too much work to do. When Don gets home, Megan approaches him
seductively, calls him “fearless” in a way that Don feels awkward about, and performs
unrequested sexual favors.
The next day, Don and Roger are at the airport lounge where
Daisy works. Sitting nearby are a number of people from a competing agency, all
traveling to Detroit on the same flight, and they needle Roger and Don for
losing Vicks, which is a surprise to them. They immediately call the office to
find out what happened to the Vicks account, and Daisy promises to “lose” the
other agency’s luggage. Once Don and Roger arrive in Detroit, Don finds himself
unable to sleep in his hotel room and goes to the bar, where Ted Chaough shows
up and says: “Damn it” to him. Although Don feels harassed, he eventually listens
to Ted’s insights and realizes that CGC and SCDP are in the same position: two
small agencies with great creative ideas that will be stolen by the big
agencies, one of which will get the business. Don gets the idea of combining
their agencies to become one big agency, and the two of them spend the night
working on a joint campaign that wins the business. When they return home, Ted
calls Peggy into his office. Anticipating an possible encounter with Ted, she’s
surprised to walk in and see Don sitting there. She learns that the two
agencies are merging, although the other partners may not know it yet, and
she’s poised to become the copy chief of one of the 25 largest ad agencies in
the country. They then tell her to write a press release announcing this
merger, and to invent a suitable name for their new agency, “the agency you
want to work for.”
A primary theme of
this episode is Abe’s statement that everything’s
changing. Specifically, SCDP is changing for the better by building strong new
relationships or alliances and dropping weak ones, often explosively. Although
much of the episode involves building the business via new alliances, the same
process takes place in some personal relationships. Some of the strongest
alliances and biggest explosions involve relationships that combine the personal
and the professional realms.
·
Pete, Bert, and Joan form a temporary alliance
to try to expand the business by taking it public. Their idea proves to be
built on a weak assumption that all their current business is secure, and their
plan explodes when they learn that Jaguar is lost.
·
Roger forms a relationship/business alliance
with Daisy that proves strong in enabling him to secure new business contacts
that yield big results. Meanwhile, Roger drops his interest in Marie, since he
had previously asked Marie for a more meaningful relationship than just sex (he
wanted to do LSD with her) and she rejected the notion. In this episode Roger
tries to salvage his relationship with Marie, but she hangs up on him with
explosive anger when she realizes her sexual wiles don’t really fascinate him
as much as she imagined. With Daisy, he has good sex and a deeper relationship,
one where they both mix business with pleasure and where Roger feels he’s in
charge and getting what he asks for from her.
·
The alliance of Cutler, Gleason and Chaough
seems to be in jeopardy due to Frank’s cancer diagnosis. Amazingly, Ted manages
to reverse this fate by forging a new alliance with Don Draper and, presumably,
expand the business dramatically, although we will have to wait and see whether
this comes to pass.
·
Ted forms a personal relationship with Peggy on
very shaky grounds by kissing her at work. This does nothing for the company’s
business, and we’ll have to wait and see if this intimacy goes further. Generally
though, Ted has contributed significantly to Peggy’s career growth, and in this
episode we see Peggy try to boost his morale (professionally) by telling him
he’s strong. Their mutual growth orientation at work creates a solid foundation
for their professional relationship, which helps each of their careers as well
as CGC.
·
Peggy and Abe’s relationship hits a rough patch,
and it remains to be seen whether it will survive. Abe has always been the
leader in driving Peggy’s personal growth (while encouraging her professional
growth too), but Peggy has to want to continue stretching and growing on a
personal level for the relationship to endure.
·
Early in the episode, Pete and Trudy try to
strengthen their marriage, and Trudy has allowed him to return home on a
probationary status. Later, the marriage explodes because it was built on a
foundation of Pete’s lies that are exposed during this episode, and a
foundation of inequality – with Trudy having enormous personal power (strong
self-knowledge, strong boundaries, strong principles) and Pete unable to match
her.
·
Pete and Bob Bensen now have a new alliance that
spans business and personal life. No longer on the outside socially, Bob has
managed to position himself as more of a friend to Pete, and is currently
trying to position himself as a benefactor by offering to pay for Pete’s
prostitution session. Regardless of whether this will serve SCDP in expanding
their business, Bob is clearly focused on using this alliance for his own
advancement in the company.
·
Pete’s relationship with Tom has always been
based on their mutual love of Trudy. Now that Tom realizes Pete has cheated on
Trudy, Tom “explodes” his relationship with Pete by telling him he will have
his company drop SCDP, and he should get out of his office or be physically pushed
out. It’s fitting that the SCDP-Vicks alliance should be dropped, though, as it
was built on the arguably weak foundation of personal favors owed between
in-laws. Since Pete is losing Trudy, he wants Tom to lose her, too, so he tells
Trudy about seeing Tom at the whorehouse – despite the fact that this encounter destroys
his chances of reconciling his marriage. This revelation not only causes Trudy
to explode with anger at Pete, but it causes her whole belief system about her
father to begin to fall apart, undermining her core beliefs about men and
marriage.
·
Pete and Joan both explode with anger at Don
when they learn that he has jettisoned the Jaguar account. Others are equally
angry until Roger pops in and brings his good news of new business around the
corner. Since Pete’s anger towards Don is almost comical (considering that Pete
lost the Vicks account), and since Joan’s anger towards Don is misplaced (considering
that Don was against the idea of asking her to sleep with Herb), their anger is
based on confusion at best.
·
Don and Herb end their business relationship with
an explosive meeting. Although Don doesn’t know it at the time, this helps to
move the company forward, since Don would have to drop Jaguar anyway in order
to be able to compete for the Chevy business.
·
Arnold ends his career as a heart surgeon, at
least at his current hospital, by quitting his job after he loses a patient and
the opportunity to perform the first-ever heart transplant. This is devastating
to Arnold, whose ego seems to have exploded when he says “Fate hasn’t chosen
me.” Don also feels the blow, as he now has to face the prospect of not knowing
if or when Sylvia will be available to him again or whether the Rosens might
even move out of NYC.
·
Megan tries to be a knock-out sexually, and she
manages to get Don’s attention and create some sexual explosions. However,
their relationship, which originally started out with Megan offering Don “no
strings attached” sex, has reached a deeper level and then devolved back to
being based more on hot sex than mutual growth. By the time they got married,
Megan was driving Don’s growth both personally and professionally, while Don
was driving Megan’s professional growth at SCDP. This made the relationship
outstandingly passionate for Don, but a little less so for Megan because she
felt no career fulfillment at SCDP. The marriage lost quite a bit of its
excitement for Don when Megan left the company and went into acting, because
she was no longer part of his business life and therefore no longer inspiring his
career growth, although she continues to challenge him to grow personally.
Unfortunately for Megan, her insights into Don cannot match the insights that
Sylvia offers, as Sylvia sees more deeply into Don and is now driving his most
critical points of growth (by identifying his need for inner peace), which he finds
deeply exciting.
Another theme is the emotional
rollercoaster of contradictory events, including several plot twists and
personal reversals.
·
Bert, Joan, and Pete have great excitement and
high hopes about plans to take SCDP public. These hopes are crushed early in
the episode, bringing anger and disappointment.
·
Ted and his partners at CGC are brought down
emotionally when Ted learns about Frank’s cancer diagnosis, although he tries
to lift Frank’s dark mood. The executives also discuss the possible folding of their
company, which brings feelings of worry and concern. After Ted shares this
information with Peggy and his concern about losing Frank, she tells him he’s
strong, which causes him to feel excited enough to kiss her, giving them both a
temporary thrill. Next, Ted feels bad and apologizes to her.
·
Peggy rides an emotional roller coaster on a
personal level, between her relationship with Abe that provides too many
annoyances, her feelings of disgust about the social environment surrounding
her home, and her relationship with Ted that secretly sparks her sense of
feeling appreciated and loved. Not knowing what will happen next with Ted spurs
her fantasies and imagination, which at the end of the episode are suddenly
interrupted and brought down to earth when she sees Don in Ted’s office and
realizes Ted is not going to seduce her at the moment. However, she is then asked
to imagine being the copy chief at the company of her dreams, bringing her
emotional roller coaster back up to the top of the next hill.
·
Arnold rides an emotional roller coaster by imagining
himself to be the first heart surgeon in the world to perform a heart
transplant, then losing his patient, and then quitting his job because he
realizes his dream will never come true. He thus rides from the heights of
egotism to the depths of tremendous self-pity.
·
Megan’s emotional rollercoaster has to do with
worrying about Don being so distant (which she knows is a threat to the
foundation of their marriage), and then trying hard to please and excite him
sexually, but still knowing that she hasn’t really reached him. She also experiences the usual emotional ups
and downs around her mother.
·
The dinner with Don, Megan, Marie, and Herb and
his wife involve pleasantries, excitement on the part of Herb’s wife who was
excited about every little thing, boredom on the part of the others, worry
about why Roger wasn’t there yet, explosiveness between Don and Herb, and then
confusion among the women who were led by Don to leave before dinner started.
·
When several people at SCDP learn about losing
Jaguar, emotions of anger and fear sweep the office, only to be reversed to a new
wave of high hopes when Roger announces his new account through Mikey and a
meeting with the “big guys” – Chevy. Don rides the wave of excitement while
developing a great ad campaign, only to have his hopes dashed by Ted when Ted
explains to him that the small size of their agencies will exclude them from
winning the business. Ted and Don’s anger and depression then give birth to new
high hopes when they realize they have a chance at the business through merging
their companies, and this strategy brings success and emotional elation for
everyone concerned within their two agencies, spreading to Peggy at the end of
the episode.
·
Trudy’s emotional rollercoaster begins with
hopes that her marriage may succeed after all, if Pete continues his good
behavior, and ends with her explosive anger at Pete as well as her feelings of shock,
disgust, and disorientation when she learns about her father’s whorehouse
activity.
·
Pete’s emotional rollercoaster involves hopefulness,
anger, shock, and retaliation with Trudy; sexual desire towards his hooker; friendship
towards Bob; shock, worry, anger, hope of reconciliation, and revenge in his
relationship with Tom; self-righteous anger and feelings of betraying towards
Don; hopes of getting rich and crushing anger at having those plans undermined;
an uneasy alliance with Ken; and great bitterness overall.
·
Don’s emotional rollercoaster begins on a down
note when he hears that Arnold and Sylvia’s son is visiting, which to him means
she won’t be available to him for an undetermined length of time. This problem
is later exacerbated when Don learns that Arnold has quit his job, which to Don
means that Arnold may be at home too, making Sylvia even less available to him.
At work Don is faced with a meeting with Herb, a man he dislikes, but the
meeting enables him to tell Herb off and dump his business, which Don ultimately
finds refreshing and helps him feel better. However, the office turns against
Don, which must not have felt good, until Roger walks in and brings Don’s mood
up again with his news of the Chevy meeting to come. At the airport, Don and
Roger face harassment by a competing agency, and in Detroit Don feels restless
and goes to the bar where he is met by Ted, who he feels is harassing him.
Through their conversation, Don begins to realize that Ted is not his enemy and
in fact could become an ally. This sends Don into a new cycle of excitement
that is sustained when Don and Ted win the business and decide to merge
agencies. Don also experiences up and down emotions around Megan, including
probably guilt, sexual interest, and awkwardness when Megan comes on to him at
a time when he isn’t really in the mood.
Finally, a couple of fun hypocrisies are Pete blaming Don
for losing Jaguar, when he loses Vicks, and Tom condemning Pete for cheating on
his wife with a whore while he’s cheating on his own wife at the same
whorehouse. All in all, another great episode.
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