Tonight’s Mad Men wrapped up on AMC around the same time it was winning its 3rd straight Emmy over on NBC, and fittingly, “Waldorf Stories” was terrific. (Whether its excellent 3rd season deserved the Emmy is another story, as there are a few shows I found more spectacularly entertaining and dramatically powerful than Mad Men last season…one of which wasn’t even nominated, and thanks to its showrunner’s recent anti-emmy tirades, probably never will be.) “Waldorf Stories” was, above all else, frakking hilarious. I was laughing out loud almost the entire episode. But it was also filled with powerful character moments, fascinating backstory revelations, and had a thematically coherent narrative.
The theme of “Waldorf Stories” was the need to feel one’s self-worth. Throughout the episode we saw our characters seeking validation of their status: Don’s desire to win the CLIO; Pete’s desire to be acknowledged as a full partner by both Lane and Ken; Peggy’s desire to be acknowledged by Don for her talent and contribution and to be seen by Stan, the new condescending art director, as the free spirit she prides herself on having become; Roger’s desire to be acknowledged as an important part of the firm; and even Danny--that new dope Don stole from and then hired--wanting to be considered worthy of a job. In the end, everyone but the man who actually won an award came away with at least some semblance of the self-worth they were craving.
Let’s start with those who achieved some portion of their goals this episode:
It has become clearer and clearer as this season progresses, and this has actually been going on since season three, that Peggy feels severely underappreciated by Don. In the season three finale it seemed that Don had rectified the situation by telling Peggy he would spend the rest of his life trying to hire her, which in turn convinced her to join SCDP. But this season we’ve see that wasn’t enough to buck the trend, whether it’s Don yelling at her for the publicity stunt she pulled in this season’s premiere, or the betrayal we now know Peggy feels for Don not acknowledging her role in the Glo-Coat ad that won him an award. Don, being the drunken jerk he seems to have become (and yes, I know this is a vast oversimplification of an incredibly complex character), forces her to work all weekend on a campaign rather than getting to enjoy the CLIOs with everyone else. On this front, Peggy achieves no success and remains vastly underappreciated by episode’s end. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this situation come to a head in the next few weeks.
But Peggy also prides herself on who she’s become as a person. We saw earlier this season how happy she was to be able to hang out with the hippie crowds, whether it was arguing with pretentious starving artists, casually fending off lesbian advances, retreating to back rooms for near-quickies, or smoking pot in public. So when her new partner accuses her of being too uptight to be comfortable with her own body, and even compares her to the pope, she feels deeply offended. He really crosses a line when he tells her she should be ashamed of her body. She calls his ultra-liberal bluff and strips down naked right in front of him, daring him to follow suit. When he complies, revealing an erection, she knows she has at least gained validation as an attractive woman, making Stan eat his words about her body. But she doesn’t gain validation about the liberal, free-spirit she has become until she is able to make Mr. Phony so uncomfortable in his own naked body that he has flee to the bathroom to get dressed. It was great to see Peggy use all her feminine wiles, from her cunning to her sexuality, to turn the tables on that smug son-of-a-bitch. Who’s the uptight one now? It was also a great comic moment at the end of the episode, when she added insult to injury by not-so-subtly referring to Stan’s genitalia as a “teeny change.”
Pete is a full-fledged partner now that he brought in Vick’s, but he doesn’t yet feel he’s being treated like one. Lane decides to bring in Pete’s old rival, who Lane once chose over Pete, behind Pete’s back. Lane’s assurance that he has always liked Pete went some way towards Pete’s personal validation. But Mr. Campbell needed one more thing to truly feel like a partner, an acknowledgment of his superiority by the man who once defeated him, Ken Cosgrove. It was tough to watch the anguish wash over Ken’s face as he was forced to acknowledge Pete as his boss, or perhaps master is a better word for it, based on the way Pete described it. One of the episode’s funniest moments came right after Pete got Ken to bow down to him. Pete leans back in his chair the like big man in the room, and pretends to be a gracious, magnanimous winner by smugly asking Ken about his marriage. Vintage Campbell: always trying to get over on someone, no matter how petty it is.
We know from last week’s “The Chrysanthemum and The Sword” that Roger has been feeling threatened by his increasingly dwindling importance to the firm. Sure he’s responsible for “Lucky Strike,” the linchpin of the whole company; but it’s become widely and tacitly acknowledged by the other partners that beyond “Lucky Strike,” Roger doesn’t have much else to contribute. Lane concedes as much when he explains he needs to bring in Ken because “Roger Sterling is a child, and we can’t have you pulling the cart all by yourself.” After Don wins his CLIO, Roger sits miserable at the bar, depressed at all the credit being heaped on Don and how much he seems to be enjoying it. Making matters worse, Don didn’t even thank Roger for his role in the company and for giving Don his start in the business. When Don admits he was wrong and that Roger is valuable, Roger gets the validation he needs.
Now let’s get to the big fish. Donnie boy. Oh, Don. How far have ye fallen from grace? Last week featured a Don Draper at the peak of his powers, and left us to wonder if Don had truly begun to pull himself out of his freefall or if this was just a momentary resurgence of vintage Don. “Waldorf Stories” gives us our answer as Don sinks deeper into the bottle and into debauchery than ever before.
When Don first wins his CLIO he exudes pure elation, and perhaps for a short time, it was genuine. In particular, his drunken high-off-of-victory pitch to Life Cereal was riotously funny. When he started vamping on his pitch and slurring his words at a million miles per hour, I was half laughing and half covering my eyes in fear of what he might do. When he started rattling off new slogans one after another, I thought that was it, the moment he drove the clients right out the door in horror. I mean, it seemed like he might be throwing out slogans for the rest of the episode. Just when I thought the scene couldn’t get any funnier, he plagiarizes the slogan from Danny, the wannabe ad man whom Don mocked mercilessly earlier in the episode. And what could make the scene even funnier than that? THE “LIFE” PEOPLE LOVED IT!!!!!
It was after his miraculous pitch to “Life” that his apparent jubilance transformed, or perhaps revealed itself to have been all along, a cover for his overwhelming sense of not deserving the award. There are two huge pieces of evidence for this. 1) He literally leaves his award at the bar as he stumbles to a hotel room with an apparent advertising groupie who wanted to sleep with him just for being Don Draper. But as we know, he is not Don Draper, the man who was given the award, he is Dick Whitman, which brings us to our second piece of evidence. 2) When Don wakes up on Sunday beside a completely different gorgeous woman from the brunette we saw before, she refers to him as Dick, not Don. In his drunken state, his true feelings had unintentionally emerged…something I’m sure most of us can relate to. He doesn’t feel like Don Draper, a deserving winner of a prestigious advertising award. He feels like Dick Whitman, the undeserving fraud who stole another man’s life. Side note, I thought the transition from night-to-morning was seamless, and when we learn he is now lying next to a blonde instead of a brunette, my jaw dropped. Sex and Booze. Booze and Sex. This is what Don Draper’s life revolves around now as we learn that he blew off his weekend with his kids for one of hedonism and self-loathing. He is so drunk he doesn’t even remember he stole Danny’s slogan, and as a result he is forced to hire this untalented hack the next day (though he is still able to spin it to Roger as if it were a favor for him).
We get another glimpse of why Don feels like a fraud with the episode’s flashbacks of how he got into the advertising business in the first place. We’ve often wondered how Don made that transition. Was it by giving an incredible speech? Showing Bert or Roger a portfolio of incredible pitches? As it turns out, Roger scoffed at his portfolio and left it on the hotel room floor. But Don’s entry into Sterling Copper was no less stunning or brilliant. He sweet-talked Roger into having a drink with him at ten in the morning. He then got Roger so drunk that he couldn’t possibly remember anything the next day. And then, in the episode’s utterly mind- blowing final scene, he just shows up at Sterling Cooper the next day and claims he’s been given a job. Can you believe the balls on this guy? Wow. Just. Wow. And Roger is either too embarrassed, or perhaps just doesn’t care enough, to argue with it. I mean what was the worst case scenario? That Don sucks at his job and Roger fires him a few weeks later. No biggie. And I know some people have been writing online that maybe Roger did say “welcome aboard” off-camera and then just forgot about it. But give me a break, if that really happened there would be absolutely no dramatic reason in the world not to have shown it. And the look Don gives Roger in the elevator, nervous and making sure his story was bought, seals the deal. And so began the legend of Don Draper in the advertising world. A total con. It’s no wonder Don feels like a fraud accepting this award.
As brilliant as this episode was, it was much lighter fare than some of this season’s earlier episodes. In fact, this makes two episodes in a row where the A-plot was built around comedy rather than drama. I would expect Mad Men to return to a more serious mode next week, lest it veer too far off in the other direction.
Other Thoughts:
-Absolutely loved that after Don learned he had stolen Danny’s ad, he tried to buy him off for 50 dollars, and then had the gall to act outraged when the kid wouldn’t settle for a hundred. Unfortunately for Don, Danny is not as dumb as he acts. Who knows, maybe he’ll turn out to be the next Don Draper. After all, he got his start in the biz in a remarkably similar way, as a result of his new boss’s drunken blackout. And he’s already come up with one slogan that sold. Still, seems unlikely.
-Poor Duck is still a drunken mess. It was both hilarious and ironic to see Don taking such sadistic pleasure in it. After all, Duck is merely a mirror of Don’s own present state of being. Don’s pleasure in Duck’s failure was similar to the glee he took from Danny’s hilariously incompetent portfolio. Don’s life is a train wreck and misery loves company.
-Ted Chaough was at the CLIOs, still acting as smug as ever…guess Don didn’t destroy him completely. Loved the verbal spelling of his bizarre name.
-Did Don’s drunken pass at Faye Miller wreck his chances with her? I suspect not.
-Don’s poor kids…they really have TWO awful parents, don’t they?
-Is Don still rattling off slogans for LIFE? Here’s one for him: “LIFE, it sucks when you’re sober, kids.”
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