Loaded Couch Potatoes

Here’s the episode title: “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency.”

If you have not seen this episode, and ever intend to, DO NOT read the rest of this review.

Seriously.

Stop.

Stop, Dave.

Won’t you stop, Dave?

Alright, jackanapes, you’ve been warned.

This episode — which is almost certainly one of the better episodes of the series to date — is an instant classic, and what people are mostly going to remember is one very specific moment in which … well, we’ll get to that later, but suffice it to say that it was one of the most shocking moments I’ve ever seen on a television show.  Another review I read — I believe it was HitFix’s, but I could be wrong about that — compared the moment to something one would expect to see in a Tarantino or Coen film.

They weren’t wrong to make that comparison.  More on that later.

The setup here is that Sterling-Cooper is getting a visit from the overseas owners, who are coming in to evaluate the lay of the land and, as it turns out, to reorganize things a bit.

With them comes Guy MacKendrick (Guy walks into an advertising agency, indeed), a smooth-talking, handsome fellow who will be taking Lane Pryce’s position.  Poor Lane is being shipped off to Bombay, where, it is hoped, he will do as fine as a job as he’s done in New York.

As Roger notes, this Guy is a born account man, and it’s clear that a major shakeup to the status quo is in the offing.  Heck, they even left Roger off of the flowchart showing the new structure!  Supposedly an “oversight,” but Guy seems too slick by far to permit that sort of an oversight.

He’s not too slick, though, to avoid another oversight: failing to notice a drunken secretary plowing stright toward him astride a riding lawnmower.  In a spray of blood both horrifying and (in the “holy-fucking-shit-did-I-just-see-that?!” manner of Tarantino) comical, the secretary — one of several whose name I can never remember — plows right over Guy’s foot, and then crashes through a door into one of the offices.

I believe I shouted “Thafuck?!” so loudly that at least three of my five cats went tearing straight out of the room, possibly fearful in their dim, feline way that some sort of end-times-level calamity had struck.  The one thing I can say about Mad Men before this episode is that I would never have expected to see a foot mown off by a John Deere; after this episode, well shit, what isn’t fair game?  Expressing that with the sort of reflexive verbosity with which I expressed it will apparently send cats headed for the nearest beneath-a-bed location, but hey, whattaya gona do?  Sometimes, you’ve got to just blurt it out.

Thing is, that mower vs. foot collision is more than just a water-cooler moment of grand guignol; it’s also a powerful reflection of what is going on in the lives of multiple characters on the show.  Several of them have had similar happenings in their lives recently.  I say “similar” not in the sense of having had various body parts subjected to the cruel touch of sharpened steel moving at lightning speed, but instead in the sense of having had something unexpected and (emotionally) painful happen.

Don has been led to believe the visit from overseas means that he is being eyed for a position at the London branch, but finds out suddenly that this is not the case; Lane Pryce is delivered the news that he is being despatched to Bombay, to be a sort of snake charmer; Roger has discovered that he is so far beneath the esteem of London that they’ve forgotten he’s even part of the team. 

Joan, meanwhile, has found out that her husband didn’t get the job he was expecting, which means that she is going to have to keep working … and since she’s just resigned from Sterling-Cooper, this means she’ll be starting all over again in some new job somewhere.  Not only that, it also seems to mean that she is never going to be the wife of a highly-esteemed surgeon, which is what she’s been expecting.  Instead, it seems more likely that she’s going to be the bread-winning wife of a drunken boor who, once upon a time, used to be a doctor.  The future is not looking at all bright for poor Joan; I suspect it may contain more instances of surprise sex.

Sally Draper, also, has had the emotional equivalent of a John Deere drift into her path.  Still wrestling with her grandfather’s death, the anxiety over it is manifesting as jealousy — and fear — of her baby brother.  She reasons that he’s named Gene, he looks like her grandfather, and he lives in her grandfather’s old room; he may as well be a ghost.

Don tells her that she ought not to feel this way, that her new brother is just a baby, and that they don’t know who he is yet, so he can’t be anybody to be afraid of.  Don, of course, can sell anything to anybody, and as the episode ends, he and his daughter and new son are sitting in a chair together, bathed in moonlight, seemingly at peace.

Similarly, some of the other characters are able to find ways of turning their new adversity into opportunity.  It’s unclear how Roger and Joan will be affected by their bad news, but Lane Pryce benefits from Guy’s misfortunes by finding himself in a position to stay in New York instead of departing for Bombay.

Don, meanwhile, gets a phone call from Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate.  Turns out, the guy Don met in the bar at the country club a few episodes back was in fact Mr. Hilton, who remembered the chance encounter, and took the initiative of finding Don so he could ask his advice on an ad campaign.  There’s every indication that Don may have just inadvertently landed a whopper of an account.

In the world of Mad Men – this episode, at least — that’s how it goes: on the one hand, you might get run over by an intoxicated woman in a beige skirt, and on the other, you might get a phone call from a multimillionaire who wants your advice, and is willing to bring you up in the world to get it.

There’s a great little trio of scenes in which at least some of this is eloquently rendered around the theme of light fixtures.  After Joan has found out her husband isn’t getting his job, she tells him to go to bed, and then goes to one of the lights in her apartment; she lingers for a moment in the light, and then turns it off.  Cut to Don, who still thinks he might be headed for London; he’s lying in bed, in the dark, hands behind his head, smiling up at the ceiling, looking at the overhead light wich is turned off.  Cut to Sally in her bedroom, with a little nightlight providing some lessening of the gloom; she huddles near it like a cavewoman near one of the first fires. 

Earlier in the episode, Sally has told Don that she’s afraid of the dark because she is afraid of what will happen when the lights are turned out.  In this collection of moments, Don is the only one who is clearly comfortable with the dark, and maybe it’s only because he has optimism to cling to.

And after all, the darkness is nothing to fear.  Guy MacKendrick is proof of that: the offices of Sterling-Cooper couldn’t possibly be better lit, and none of that light helped keep those whirling blades from kissing his toes.

The darkness and the light are both merely what we make of them.