Mad Men, episode 4.09, running commentary

[yakalskovich]

• Aha. Don and Faye got together while we weren't looking. I like how easy and egalitarian they are with each other, though.
• Heeee James Bond reference!
• Oh dear, no publisher wants to buy Roger's book! Well, I guess his disclosures about Bert Cooper, or Ida Blankenship, are interesting only for his colleagues. Oh, and the watchers of 'Mad Men', but we're in 2010. We, of course, would all buy the book if it got defictionalised. <= Caution, link leads to TV Tropes!
• Yay!! Dr. Creepypants is off to Vietnam! The only person sad about that, oddly enough, is Joan. She cares about the bastard regardless, which is a bit pathetic. I mean, hello, you are Joan Holloway. You are so infinitely far above that insensitive incompetent raping lowlife cockroach, he shouldn't be able to see all the way up to your boobs from where he is!
  
• 'Sadists and masochists' -- not only does Miss Blankenship actually make a deep and interesting remark, she corroborates what Roger wrote about her...
•  Rizzo needs to get fired as well. On the other hand, hello almost-open-lesbian! I wouldn't have thought that anybody at that time would so easily guess that. Perhaps he's just mocking in general?
• Yay that face he made when she licked Peggy's cheek! Whatshername really rocks!
• Oh my, she intentionally set Peggy up with the nice bloke she met at the Factory-oid during the police raid. How considerate!
• Joan wears glasses!! And cute blue stripey jim-jams!
• That bloke jabbers off politics, never realising that a) his opinions are painfully unoriginal and b) Peggy is part of the 'big corporations' thing and knows how it works. Still, he's much better than what she had before.
• Peggy realises that women's rights is an issue quite comparable to civil rights for black people. She arrived there under her own steam, and is completely articulate about it. Also, she realises she is excluded from the usual old boys' network, with shadows of the glass ceiling memeplex already. All on her own! Wow that lady has some serious brains!
• Poor Bert Cooper is still sitting in the lobby; now he's even doing crosswords!
• Joan is wearing the red dress in gratitude! And looking so much more like her old self already.
• Uh-oh! A customer that's not agreeing among themselves. That kind is the absolute pits. I know that from my own experience. My bosses are regularly making that embarrassing kind of spectacle of themselves when they are having some potential new service provider in to pitch. If I'm in on it because it's somehow IT related, I'll just sit there and cringe quietly to myself.
• I am being shallow again, but I really like those sofas -- blue, red, yellow.
• Not a political person! Peggy, you invented women's lib, starting from first principles, about half a decade ahead of time! Like hell you're not a political person. You're the kind of political person that takes on the establishment from within. You're the kind of political person that will end up as the first female board member in the 80s and get a lifetime award from some women's business network when you retire!
• Miss Blankenship did not just die at her desk?!?!!
• She did. Don has a notoriously high turnover in secretaries, but this is positively bizarre.
• I love that line!! 'I would have my secretary do it, but she's dead.'
• Joan in her red dress makes that awful white office come alive at last.
• I love that really broad, genuine smile on Joan. I start getting what she used to see in Roger, too. He can be very considerate.
• This seems to be the episode when the really wild stuff happens. Roger and Joan just got mugged -- was that so commonplace in New York at the time? Good thing she wasn't wearing her pen necklace; that would probably be hard to replace. Her ring from Dr. Douchebag is probably scrap metal inside anyway.
  
• Bert Cooper doesn't have an office any more? Are they so cramped for space?
• Megan, Peggy, Joan and Faye all follow them to the reception and just look at Betty. They just look. Are they trying to make sure she doesn't slap Sallie?
• Interesting last scene, with all these women leaving the office. This was a very woman-oriented episode, from little Sallie to Ida Blankenship...
  

By the way, this was the second time Alice (my internet) conked out while I was watching 'Mad Men', at precisely half past one at night, so I guess they have a fixed automated maintenance spot on the night from Monday to Tuesday. Luckily, once it's streamed, it stays streamed, so I finished the episode and the running commentary, and am posting this in the morning now it's all revived.

My apologies to everybody I fell off the net and dropped thread on!

Comments

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

God bless Miss Ida Blankenship, the astronaut of SCDP. Cooper was really grieving for her. Perhaps she was the woman in the photograph Roger held up and showed to Cooper, asking if he remembered her?

[yakalskovich]

Yes, he was really sad. So was Roger, even though he was hiding it behind the usual jokes. They'd both known her for a very long time. Cooper immediately knew all about her circumstances, and decided to give her a decent funeral.

I remember times when really old people used to have been born before 1900, too...