Mad Men Season 7, Episode 4, “The Monolith”

This episode finds Don struggling mightily to adjust to the terms of his resumption of work at SC&P. Every encounter Don has seems to make him feel small and wounds his pride. Sometimes this is simply a product of the terms of his return. For instance, he catches Jim, Roger, and Lou sitting down for a meeting in the conference room near the beginning, and he’s clearly jealous of being excluded from such high-level affairs. His discontent is magnified by how sharply that meeting contrasts with the mundane and irrelevant task with which he is momentarily occupied: helping the obnoxious Michael move a couch. Likewise, when Harry introduces Don to Lloyd, the man who is installing the computer at SC&P, Harry diminishes Don’s status by introducing Don not only as one the partners, but one of the agency’s three creative directors. It’s accurate, but it still irks Don.

However, other times Don’s difficulty readjusting is deliberately manufactured by others around him, particularly Bert and Peggy. When Don sees an opportunity for a new account with the company installing the agency’s new computer, he excitedly brings the idea to Bert, but Bert is so disillusioned with Don that he doesn’t even entertain the possibility of following up Don’s suggestion. Instead Bert takes the opportunity to berate Don, and makes it clear how inconsequential Don now is to health of the agency. It’s rather clear Bert would like Don to fail, or for Don to at least express some sense of humility. Don is as dead to Bert as Lane is.

The difficulty Don has with Peggy is a bit more drawn out, and is set up by Lou. To his credit, Lou recommends Peggy as the leader of the Burger Chef campaign, and he also gives her a $100/week raise (a hefty sum – the equivalent of a $643/week raise in 2014). In explaining himself to Peggy, Lou claims these unexpected plaudits are a result of her senior status at the agency. However, we know better: Lou probably recommends Peggy for Burger Chef primarily because he doesn’t want Don to get it, and despite his rationale for the raise, there is little to suggest that he sees any value to Peggy other than as a buffer between him and Don, whom Roger insisted be added to the Burger Chef account. This development places Peggy and Don in a very uncomfortable situation, but it’s a very exciting situation for viewers, as it forces the most potent (and at times most toxic) relationship on the show to continue to progress.

We start slowly, however: Peggy spends the entire episode interacting with Don without even exchanging more than a few words with him. Peggy clearly sees the raise and the Burger Chef account as a good news/bad news scenario. It feels nice to get praise from Lou and to be rewarded for her work with higher pay and more responsibility, but she understandably wants nothing to do with Don. Nevertheless, the power games begin immediately, and she deliberately twists Don into knots with her newfound authority over him: in a wonderful scene, she calls him into her office for a meeting, rather than requesting entrance into his. When he arrives, she offers him drink, and then she begins a slew of what Don considers indignities: she motions for him to sit on the couch alongside the most junior creative at the firm, stands in front of them, tells them they’re both on her team for the Burger Chef campaign, and then gives them homework (25 tags for the campaign, due Monday).

The message could not be clearer: Don is no more important than that of an entry-level copywriter, and it has the desired effect, as Don stares daggers at her throughout the meeting, and then angrily throws his typewriter against his window when he gets back to his office. Both Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss are excellent here. Don’s stare could cut through steel, and while Peggy projects condescending enthusiasm, there’s an undertone of nervousness that she can’t quite conceal: her smile slips just a bit when she glances at Don to check his reaction to her announcement. Nevertheless, she’s still extremely pleased with herself for so thoroughly wounding Don’s pride.

However, Don can play these power games too: he blatantly disregards Peggy’s assignment and refuses to attend their Monday meeting, choosing instead to play solitaire at his desk. His choice of activity is a particularly nasty move, as he clearly hoped she would march into his office and catch him wasting his time when he failed to appear in her office, in turn sending a powerful message about what he thinks of her authority. Instead, she sends the junior copywriter to fetch Don, sparing herself some of the bite from Don’s power play, but he still gets in her head with his refusal to work. Peggy will spend the rest of the episode stewing over Don’s lack of cooperation (although it leads to another nice scene between Joan and Peggy, where Joan tries to console Peggy, and vaguely informs her that rules were set for Don’s return. Perhaps this is information Peggy will use to her advantage in the future. Regardless, scenes where Joan and Peggy show solidarity and support for one another are always a treat because they are so rare).

Contributing to Don’s discomfort throughout the episode is his new office, which Don seems to find haunted by Lane’s ghost. Everyone was upset by Lane’s suicide back in season five, but it hit Don particularly hard because he (rightly) felt partly responsible: Don treated Lane rather severely when he discovered Lane had been (temporarily) embezzling money from the agency, and Don refused to forgive Lane or give him a second chance, despite both their amicability and Lane’s previously spotless record. Even though Don gave Lane the opportunity to make up a reason for why he was resigning (and thus sparing him some public shame), Lane killed himself rather than face the shame of living with what he had done.* Accordingly, when Don finds Lane’s old Mets pennant under the radiator in his office, it serves as a disturbing reminder of Don’s culpability in Lane’s suicide (and later, Don will catch himself staring at the corner of the office where they found Lane's body). Based on Don’s behavior throughout much of this episode, Don doesn’t seem to appreciate that the partners have given Don the second chance that Don himself denied to Lane (although after initially throwing the pennant in the trash, later he pins Lane’s pennant to the wall by the door, just has Lane had).

* Lane’s suicide also hit Don hard because it was the second suicide to which Don had inadvertently contributed; back in season one, Don’s brother killed himself after Don severed all ties with him.
 

So, how does Don cope with the expected (and deserved) pressure of Peggy’s authority and condescension toward him, Bert’s indifference toward Don’s contributions, and Lane’s ghost haunting his office? By drinking, of course! He grabs a bottle from Roger’s office and drinks himself into a stupor. It’s a sad and disturbing reaction for someone who seems to be making a serious effort to change his patterns of behavior and turn his life around, although even his terrible coping mechanisms show some sign of improvement here. Note that he remains in the office rather than fleeing to a bar – Dick Whitman would have been out the door immediately after the dressing down Bert gives him, but Don stays and suffers in the office (this is an improvement even over last season, when Don flees to a bar after Sally makes him feel like shit late in the season). Granted, later he decides to call Freddie and catch a Mets game, but this appears to be an impulse born of Don’s drunken stupor (and perhaps memories of Lane’s suicide), rather than a desire to flee the mess he’s currently in.

Luckily, Don has Freddie to once again serve as a cautionary tale. Freddie has been through something similar to what Don’s going through, both in terms of suffering indignation (pissing yourself in front of your coworkers is not exactly a proud moment) and in terms of using alcohol to deal with problems, and he gives Don another kick in the pants this week to match the one he received from Megan last week. Freddie picks up Don from the office and takes him home (Don is too drunk for a ballgame), and the next day, Freddie does what many viewers likely wanted to do throughout the episode, and tells Don to get his act together. When Don complains about wanting his job back (and not the menial work Peggy gave him), Freddie lays into him, tells him to suck it up, and do the work. The only way Don will get his job back is if he swallows his pride and jumps through everyone else’s hoops. Freddie gets through to him, and Don returns to the office and gets started straightway on the tags Peggy requested (much to her relief). Perhaps this is the start of a thaw between them.

Freddie's hard sell seems to have worked on Don, but neither or a hard nor a soft sell works for Roger, who spends most of this episode trying to convince his daughter Margaret (or “Marigold,” as she’s now styled herself) to leave the upstate commune to which she’s fled. Arguably, Roger has been a worse parent to Margaret than Mona, but ironically, Roger’s recent experimentation with drugs and alternative lifestyles leaves him in a much better position to convince Margaret to return to the city (and his experience in winning accounts doesn’t hurt either, as Mona cynically points out). Mona quickly loses her temper with Margaret and storms away from the commune in frustration, but Roger realizes that a slower approach is needed, and decides to stay the night in an attempt to convince Margaret to come back to her family (and especially her toddler son, the biggest sticking point in Margaret’s abandonment of her previous life).

It almost works. Roger can be a very soft touch when he needs to be, here getting into a casual conversation with Margaret that makes her realize how important it was for Margaret to have her mother around when Margaret was growing up. However, it’s not enough to overcome Margaret’s selfishness; she still places her own happiness well above that of anyone else’s, her son’s included. She sneaks off in the night to screw one of the other commune members, and the next day, refuses to go with Roger when he becomes more insistent, and then lays into him and points out his hypocrisy: Roger has no authority to demand Margaret’s return for the sake of her child because Roger himself was more or less an absentee father. For all of Margaret’s talk of forgiveness in the season premiere, it is rather clear here that she still harbors great resentment toward Roger, and that there isn’t anything more Roger can say here to get her to return with him. It’s a very sad scene, and one that John Slattery plays wonderfully (unfortunately the same cannot be said of the actress playing his daughter).

Other thoughts:

- The episode title, “The Monolith,” appears to refer to the IBM computer SC&P is installing.

- Two weeks ago Tom and Lorenzo argued that Bonnie is Pete’s version of Betty in looks only, and that she’s actually much closer to a more mercenary, female version of Pete than she is a clone of Betty. This week seems to bear that out in the brief scene that begins the episode, where Pete and Bonnie discuss how they should introduce one another to their respective acquaintances. Pete has been introducing Bonnie as his real estate agent rather than his girlfriend, and when she takes exception, he protests that it’s “good for business,” fully expecting her to understand and support his rationalization. And then, after Pete concludes a conversation with the Burger Chef rep, Bonnie tells Pete how much she loves watching him work (even though Pete is perturbed over the news the Burger Chef rep gave him about his father-in-law’s heart attack. Seems as though Pete hasn’t made such a clean emotional break with his former life as he’s led others to believe).

- Great music cue each of the three times Don enters the office over the course of the episode. It’s a modified version of a motif the show has used throughout its run – some languorous, melancholy violin – but with more upbeat strings punctuating it. It’s good “approaching a daunting task” music.

- Nice zinger from Peggy over the computer taking the place of the creative lounge: “You know Lou didn't fight for our space. He doesn’t believe in creative because he doesn’t know how to do it.”

- Interesting to note that Roger is both trying to police Don’s behavior (he asks why Don was late at the start of the episode, and later checks with Meredith to make sure Don’s in at the start of another work day) but also push him toward the destructive behavior that landed Don in this mess in the first place (he tries to get Don to have an early morning drink with him).

- I was on edge when Don helped Michael move the couch from the creative lounge to the hallway. Ever since “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency” (when the Putnam Powell and Lowe rep had his foot run over by a lawnmower), any time anyone performs vigorous physical activity, I’m always concerned someone is going to be gravely injured or worse.

- Don and Lloyd talk about whether or not people count stars or think about going to the moon when laying on their back and staring up at the night sky, and later in the episode, Roger and his daughter do just that and talk about the moon. Or the roof.

- It’s interesting to note that when Roger suggests Don join Peggy on the Burger Chef account, no one stipulates who will be in charge, and that Roger seems to think that they’ll work together. However, as the news gets filtered down from Lou to Peggy to Don, the terms of the hierarchy become more and more solidified in Peggy’s favor.

- Not quite sure what to make of the outburst Don directs toward Lloyd. It seems as though Don is calling Lloyd the devil (“You go by many names”), perhaps because Lloyd tempted Don with new business Don could not convince anyone else to take, but that’s as much as I got out of it.

- After four episodes, we’re now over halfway through all of the Mad Men episodes AMC will be airing this year. The splitting of this final season into two halves, each aired a year apart, was inspired by the great ratings success AMC had in doing something similar with Breaking Bad. However, it strikes me as a colossally bad decision: not did the attempt to prolong and bolster the show's ratings fail (the season premiere was very lowly rated), but more importantly, we’ve only just gotten started with the season, and now it’s almost over. Additionally, Breaking Bad episodes were often designed to be fulfilling in themselves, rife as they were with suspense set-pieces, thus splitting the final season of that show in half wasn’t terribly detrimental to the storytelling (although others like Alan Sepinwall disagree). However, Mad Men tells different kinds of stories, ones that are much less self-contained than those of Breaking Bad, and that benefit greatly from the accumulation of episodes. I have a feeling I'll find the conclusion to the first half of the season will be extremely dissatisfying in the way that the conclusion to the first half of the final season of Breaking Bad was not.