Loaded Couch Potatoes

Still playing catch-up here.

“Tonight’s” episode is titled “The Fog,” and thankfully, not only is it better than the crappy horror remake with the same name from a few years back, it’s also better than the original John Carpenter movie of the same name.

Why do I mention that, you ask?  Well, I thought it, so I typed it.  Not much more to it than that.

Moving along…

No, there are no ghostly pirates lurking in the night waiting to give you the gift of throat avulsion as an act of retribution from beyond the veil of life, but that’s not to say there’s nothing creepy going on in this episode.  Quite the opposite.

As has been the case with much of this season, there’s ooginess aplenty lurking around every other corner.  Maybe it’s just Halloween season creeping up on me, but here’s a list of some of the more cringe-inducing moments from Mad Men‘s “The Fog” (all of them the best kind of cringe-inducing):

*     During a parent/teacher conference with Sally’s teacher, there is an intercut shot of Sally — who has gotten in trouble for being in a fight with another student — smearing what looks like blood across her cheek.  This is a distrubing little snippet of film that maybe can’t quite compete with similar cutaways in The Exorcist and The Shining, but coming in the midst of a mostly no-nonsense drama like Mad Men, it is deeply unsettling … all the more so because we don’t really know what it is or what it represents.  We have just enough information to make wild guesses, which of course, is the quickest way to existential terror.

*     Speaking of Sally’s teacher — you remember her from the Maypole dance and Don’s fingers-in-the-grass moment, right? — she calls the Draper house and begins the process of flirting with Don, only to be interrupted by Betty announcing that it’s time to go to the hospital.  The teacher is obviously well on the way to being drunk, and seems to be partially coming out of her clothes.  Never what you want from your daughter’s teacher; in this instance, she seems even more fucked up than Sally, who is pretty fucked up to begin with.

Will future episodes find Don Darper puttin’ the Polish to Ms. Farrell?  Surely not; he’s a new father!

*     Betty’s stay at the hospital seems about as unpleasant as you’d ever want to see.  Everything feels sick and green, and at one point when a nurse tells Betty it’s time for a shave and an enema, I knew this was not a place I wanted to be in.

*     Then again, I don’t much want to be out in the solarium with Don, either.  He’s stuck out there with a creepily intense prison guard whose wife has apparently been in in the process of a breach birth for quite a few hours.  This fellow is just normal enough to pass a ’63-style decency inspection, but also just drunk and violent enough that it inspires a bit of a shudder at the thought of him being a prison guard, a husband, or a father.

Later, when Don is visiting Betty, he passes the guard and his wife; he’s rolling her in a wheelchair down the corridor, and while both of them have strange expressions, neither of them has a baby.  I’d be hesistant to say for sure what that means, but I don’t think it’s a good thing.

*     Drifting away on a cloud — nay, a fog — of drugs and pain and exhaustion, Betty goes into a reverie in which she imagines herself back at her home.  She walks inside, and finds her father mopping the floor, apparently using blood instead of water.  She also finds her dead mother, standing over Medger Evers, who has recently been murdered in the timeline of this episode, and who now sits at the Draper kitchen table, a bloody rag held to the back of his skull.

In another reverie sequence earlier in the episode, Betty — looking impossibly gorgeous in the way she must see herself in her dreams — walks calmly down a street, and cups a caterpillar in her hand, presumably so it can become a butterfly. 

In the Gene/mother/Evers reverie (and indeed during some of the real events in the hospital), Betty acts almost like a child, and this spectre of her father reinforces the idea: “You’re a housecat,” he says; “you’re very important, and you have little to do.”

People have on occasion accused Betty of being an uninteresting character, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact is that she just never quite managed to grow up, and despite giving birth to her third child, she still hasn’t managed it.  I’m fascinated to see where this all leads.

*     Pete corners Hollis the elevator operator to get him to spill the beans to Pete about why Negros buy certain types of televisions.  This is, oddly, not as off-putting as it seems like it might be; nowhere near as bad as, say, Roger Sterling singing “My Old Kentucky Home” in blackface.  The things is, even though I know Pete is a racist, I also know he’s racist out of ignorance moreso than out of hatred or outright bigotry.  He honestly wants to know why Hollis behaves as he behaves regarding the purchase of television sets, and while Pete is certainly guilty of assuming that this one person can act as a stand-in for a multitude of other people … well, isn’t that what advertising is all about? 

Pete, at least, wants to let the Negros have their own place, and then determine how to make money off of it; Roger, and Bert Cooper as well, would rather pretend that such a place doesn’t exist at all.  With that in mind, I don’t think Pete comes off looking too bad here.

*     Peggy goes to Don, emboldened by the idea that Duck Phillips wants her to come work for him, and asks for a raise.  She is shut down entirely, and it’s impossible not to root for her.  She’s right to point out that women deserve equal pay; she’s also right that she frequently does a better job than Kinsey.  Don’s rejection — which was possibly brought on more by exhaustion than by workplace chauvinism — will doubtless have consequences.

*     Finally, we see Betty getting up in the middle of the night, woken by baby Gene crying from papa Gene’s old room.  In the hallway, Betty pauses, almost as if she has to summon the strength to make herself go into the room.  It would be easy to say that this is due to sad feelings over the room having briefly belonged to her now-dead father, but we know better: this woman wishes she was anything other than a mother.  She is usually strong enough to put up a good facade, but here, in the middle of the night, in the dark where nobody else can see, the true Betty appears.

And the episode is over.

Another great hour of television come and gone.