Move over Joan, there’s a new Queen Bee at SCDP and she goes by the name Miss Blankenship, icon of disaffected and incompetent secretarial staff everywhere. I’m not sure which of her moments I liked the best – her greeting new applicant Danny (AKA Jonathan out of Buffy The Vampire Slayer) with ‘I don’t work for you’ was hilarious, as was her discussion with Don over his lost award statue (‘Which category?’ ‘Best Actress’). Anyway, broadly drawn she may be but she didn’t stick out quite so much this week as the episode was a rather silly affair all round (with a sleazy twist towards the end).
SCDP were getting their first taste of industry acceptance, with the ever-present Glo-Coat commercial now nominated for a prestigious Clio award (they may give out 50 awards each time, but it’s still nice to be recognised), and the resulting celebrations gave everyone to get even more drunk than usual. This meant that there were some prime examples of hair acting going on during the episode, what with Don’s hair getting more and more floppy the more he drank, as well as Roger’s big hair during the flashbacks showing how he and Don met (Mad Men seems to like making its actors look younger by giving them fluffy hair – Don sported a particularly ridiculous hairdo in the one last season where he met Anna Draper for the first time).
As the episode title implies the Waldorf Hotel was at the centre of this action, forming a link between the flashbacks and the Clios. The awards ceremony took place in the hotel’s dingy dining room – although to be fair it may just have seemed like a miserable place as it was playing host to hundreds of ad men, including smarmy Ted Chaough, whose permanent grin makes me want to throw things at the TV (Ted had an unusual choice of arm candy for the evening in army, and advert, veteran General Frank Alvin, or as Roger referred to him General Rufus P. Bullshit ) and a very clearly off-the wagon Duck Philips, and in the past Roger had used the hotel for secret trysts with Joan. To be honest the title was somewhat misleading as these were fairly minor scenes within the episode. The main point of the flashbacks as far as I could tell was to give Roger another kicking – when he wasn’t getting in the way (getting Danny an interview as he was Jane’s cousin), or dictating his autobiography (featuring such fascinating facts as his mother not allowing him to have chocolate ice-cream as a child as it stained) he was complaining that he hadn’t gotten any recognition for Glo-Coat, and discovering Don in the first place, and then it turned out that he’d only hired Don by accident when drunk. Whereas, in terms of the Clio award storyline, the real interesting stuff – other than the moment at the ceremony where Pete found out that his old nemesis Ken may well be joining SCDP’s account division – happened after Don left the Waldorf.
After all the shit he’s gotten away with over the past three seasons, I think this episode might mark the point where Don finally became more sleazy than sexy And he wasn’t only messing up his own personal life but business as well, by insisting on returning to the office after winning in order to hold an impromptu meeting with representatives of Life Cereal. Depressingly they rejected SCDP’s perfectly good idea for being ‘Too smart for regular people’, putting Don uncomfortably on the spot as he insisted on coming up with a new slogan off the top of his head, which ended up with him inadvertently using the only piece of original work in Danny’s book (‘The cure for the common breakfast’), and naturally the Life Cereal guys loved it.
Celebrating the award and another new account in a bar Don then managed to offend Roger, act like a complete lech to Dr Miller (‘You smell good’ is never an attractive chat-up line) and wander off with what was effectively a groupie (she may be the jingle writer of the winning commercial in the Cake Mixes and Toppings category, but her wandering around the bar asking for Don made her look desperate, and her sex whistling was just weird). As if that wasn’t bad enough he then blacked out for most of the weekend, waking up to an angry phone call from Betty (at least she only had the one short scene in the episode) next to a waitress who looked like a down-market version of his ex-wife, before he dragged his surprisingly haggard body out of bed and soon afterwards passed out again on the couch. The fact that he got the waitress to call him Dick was interesting, perhaps suggesting that he’s more comfortable with his secret past now, or more likely to illustrate just how drunk he was when he ditched the groupie and picked her up.
While Don was busy being unconscious, Peggy was having a miserable weekend, not only had she not been invited to the Clios despite having come up with the original Glo-Coat idea (or at least she believed that she had), but she was stuck in a hotel room with SCDP’s new art director Stan Rizzo, a man so odious that, when discussing his never aired campaign ad for President Johnson, he actually muttered the line ‘The Klan was probably the best thing I’ll be near my entire life’ (although his plan to ‘Riff for a few minutes and speechitize the Vicks experience’ was arguably more hateful). Matthew Weiner must you punish us so much by not only getting rid of witty, debonair and generally quite fabulous Sal, but then replacing him with this prick? …speaking of which, Stan’s obsession with working in the nude was also unpleasant, but gave Peggy the chance to call his bluff by being the first to ‘get liberated’ in the hotel room. She may have earned the ‘Prize for smuggest bitch in the world’ for her troubles, but it also provided the opportunity for her to roll out her rarely seen wit (I’m not saying that she’s slow, but rather the events in her life are rarely a laughing matter) with her supply of penis jokes (‘We only changed one little thing’ being my favourite).
On top of the misogynistic insults (and the lack of recognition), Peggy spent the rest of the episode being referred to as a man, with Roger inviting her to join in the post-Clio victory lap by referring to her as ‘Jimmy Olson’ (of Superman fame) and Miss Blankenship, who despite her wonderfulness is clearly not a member of the sisterhood, booking the hotel room under the names Misters Rizzo and Olson. So it was gratifying that she managed to triumph over everyone this week, getting to take her frustrations out on Don by interrupting his weekend of passing out drunk while the lighting went from day to night in the background (I’ve already registered my dislike of this in my review of episode 4) to inform him that he’d drunkenly nicked Danny’s idea and needed to put it right, as well as passing judgement on all the men in the meeting by telling Don that despite the campaign idea being terrible ‘You and the client were in no state to notice’. Unintentionally, her attempts to get Don to put things right ended up with him hiring the ever persistent Danny – so bad news for SCDP, but good news for me as it means we’ll be seeing more of Jonathan out of Buffy (as he will forever be known).
So what did you think of this week’s episode? Have you gone off Don? Do you think he’ll manage to redeem himself any time soon? Do you share Pete’s disgust that Ken will soon be a full-time member of the cast again? Are you as sick of Harry’s tales of Hollywood as Lane Pryce clearly is? And just how old is Danny? (As Peggy said there’s no way he’s 24). Let’s have a chat about the episode in the comments section below.
