Loaded Couch Potatoes

How, oh how, did I ever get five episodes behind on a show this great?

Well, prompt payment of the cable bill helps prevent it there’s no way to say for sure, but here’s something for sure: this week’s for gettin’ caught up.

Staring with 3×2, “Love Among the Ruins.”

The episode begins with some of the creative crew screening a scene of Ann-Margret singing “Bye Bye Birdie,” which a prospective new client — Patio diet soda — wants them to recreate for an ad campaign.  Depending on what you think about this Ann-Margret number, you may come away from this scene feeling any one of several things: that it is awesome and sexy, or that it is campy and pathetic, or that it is just plain bad and therefore a fine example of how misguided parts of the ’60s were.

Here are some other key events from the episode: Roger argues with his ex-wife and daughter over his daughter’s impending nuptials (the date is set for November 23); Paul’s leftist ways cause a meeting with the Madison Square Garden execs (who want to build where Penn Station currently resides) to go awry; Don saves the Madison Square Garden business, only to be told by Lane Pryce that the London branch is turning down the account; Don, to placate Betty, determines that her father should live with them so that his deteriorating mental condition can be dealt with; Peggy, upset by her perceived inability to measure up to Ann-Margret (and to Joan?), hits the bars on the prowl and goes home with a stranger for the night; and at Sally’s school, Don watches the children dancing around the Maypole in a celebration of renewal (more specifically, Don seems to be closely watching Sally’s teacher … and as she dances, he lets his hand drift down to the green grass and begin stroking it).

In some ways, this episode feels more like a collection of scenes than it feels like a singular episode with a strong throughline.  This isn’t really the case, however: all of the episode’s disparate story strands are related to the idea of “love among the ruins,” the ruins in this case being New York City specifically, and perhaps America in general.  The overwhelming feeling I got from the episode was of things getting ready to start going very, very wrong; and while some people might be able to survive it, nobody is going to be unaffected.

During his meeting with the vp from the Madison Square Garden project, Don mentions having recently been to California, where the people are bright and optimistic; in comparison, he says, “New York City is in decay.”  His idea for the Madison Square people is that they should pitch their project as a “city on the hill” sort of thing, and offer the citizens of New York City — who are angry over the idea of Penn Station being demolished – a beacon of hope and optimism.

The characters on whom this episode focuses are all in the process of doing some version of that for themselves, and mostly failing: Roger, for example, whose new marriage has caused his daughter to hate him to the extent that she doesn’t want her new, sisterly mother-in-law to attend her wedding at all.  Obviously, none of this is headed anywhere good for anybody involved, and as if the characters’ interactions weren’t enough to tell us that, think back to the date of the upcoming wedding: November 23, 1963.  That’s a day after President Kennedy’s assassination.

Roger’s relationship with Don also appears to be more strained than has been the case in the past.  There are any number of psychological reasons this could be the case, and I don’t want to get into them here; I’d rather let the rest of the season play out, and look at it only in retrospect.  For now, I think pointing out the strain is probably sufficient.

Betty is similarly failing in her attempts to reconcile herself with her father.  Their relationship has apparently always been strained, but Betty insists on trying.  She, too, is a daughter dealing with a remarried father, and in this episode we discover that Gene’s new wife has left him.  Betty’s brother wants to put their father in a nursing home, and move into his father’s house; Betty resists, and it’s not clear whether she’s more upset over the idea of her father being abandoned to strangers or over the idea of her brother getting that house.  Either way, she’s plainly fumbling for a solution to a nasty emotional problem, and Don gives her the solution in the form of having Gene move in with them.

Finally, Peggy deals with things in her customarily odd and mysterious way.  She takes offense at the Ann-Margret footage, and is plainly upset by such blatant sexualization for the Patio ad, arguing that the campaign they produce ought to be more related to female fantasies, not male fantasies, since it is women who are the target consumer base for diet sodas.

Later, we see Peggy performing a bit of Ann-Margret’s “Bye Bye Birdie” for herself in front of a mirror; this is a creepy scene in some vague way, and yet it is also endearing, and a little sad, as many of Peggy’s scenes tend to be.

And yet, later in the episode, spurred on by seeing how confidently Joan interacts with some men in the office (and by Don’s cavalier dismissal of her concerns over the Patio campaign), Peggy is prompted to go out to a bar, where she picks up the first guy who will talk to her, and goes home with him.  He doesn’t have a Trojan, but, she tells him, “there are other things we can do.”  Naughty, naughty!  Naughty, but also admirable: Peggy goes after the things she wants, and in that sense is somebody we have to respect.

Excepting Don, Peggy is consistently the most interesting character on Mad Men, and in some ways, they have a lot in common.  She is mysterious at her core, and capable of doing whatever she needs to do in any particular moment to get out of that moment exactly what she needs.  I interpet her taking the schmo in the bar home and conquering him as an act of symbolic renewal of her own feelings of sexual self-worth; in other words, this is her own sort of dance around the Maypole.  (That might sound crude; not so much if you know anything about what the maypole represented in the pagan ceremonies from which it originated.)

Don also attends a renewal ceremony, of course, and therefore it may not be at all an accident that the episode ends with Don and Peggy sitting in a room, having a moment of silence before they begin talking about a new campaign.  Their acts of renewal seem to have been successful, for the time being; for other characters — Roger and Gene certainly, and perhaps Betty as well — the luck hasn’t been as good.

One last thing I’d like to mention: the scene of Don sitting in the dark, watching Ann-Margret sing “Bye Bye Birdie,” strikes me as being particularly haunting.

Especially if you recall that Betty’s nickname is Birdie.