MAD MEN -- Season FIVE Official Thread....

I thought Megan stole the show with her singing.... Great set of legs there...

She seems to have Don all figured out.... Glad it's back on the air...

 

'Mad Men': The Cast's Off-Season Controversies
http://tv.yahoo.com/news/-mad-men---the-cast-s-off-season-controversies.html

 

My guess is Summer 1966. They had "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" from '66 play over the end credits, one of the last episodes of Season Four had Don and his daughter see the Beatles play Shea Stadium in August of 1965, and Joan's baby looks to be only a couple months old. I'm guessing that roughly a year has passed.

Roger had a really funny line at the birthday party, something about how frustrating it is to see someone else with something that you wanted first (Megan of course). He always gets the best one liners on the show it seems.

 

Did you not here them referring to Memorial Day weekend?

 

Mad Men's plots are pretty mundane on the surface. What lies underneath is the good stuff.

What happened in this episode is pretty boring on the surface: Megan throws a surprise party for Don. Lane finds a wallet. Peter wants a bigger office. Joan is on maternity leave.

The drama isn't in whether Lane is racist or not. It's how his actions are interpreted by others. One big theme of this episode was how actions are misinterpreted by others. Examples: Megan did not send out invitations to Don's party until days before the party, causing various characters to read into why they were invited at the last minute. Joan reads the Sterling Cooper advertisement to mean she will be fired.

The episode is book-ended by cause and effect. A few young guys throwing water out the window ends up with Lane forced to address a roomful of African-Americans applying for work at his firm.

 

I enjoyed the return episode.

 

Okay but for ME the drama is not alone in how things are interpreted or misinterpreted but also in intentions and actual actions. Your mileage perhaps varies. And my responses were to Driver8's that Lane's action regarding the wallet "was oh so subtly racist." I didn't feel that was accurate, my interpretation of the action I guess.

 

Watched it with my wife and when that segment started - she KNEW I was transfixed.
It was Soooooo Good.
The only other musical segment in a television series that got to me like that was a scene a while back in Boardwalk Empire where a hooker played the banjo topless and did a sweet little tune.
I am just a deviant that way , I suppose.

 

The thing about racism is that it's not usually as simple as "he is racist" or "he is not racist." It's not so black & white (sorry, couldn't resist).

Lane is probably intellectually pro-integration and civil rights. But yeah, I think given the tone of the episode, he subconsciously didn't want to "risk" leaving the wallet with the black cab driver. And his amusing stuttering dismissal of the male black applicants ("you're free to leave") shows the natural discomfort of someone in his position, of his time.

I also took the sudden influx of black applicants to be an act of civil rights activism. Such actions were organized, planned thoroughly, and participants were trained appropriately (including Rosa Parks, for example). I think they understand the ad for what it was- a mockery of a business rival- and are using it to their advantage. That's why they all showed up on the same day.

While viewers are hoping the company will hire one, remember that for every Heinz (who want to capitalize on the young peoples' movements without actually understanding them) there will be old clients who will object. And we know SCDP is not exactly flourishing, just seems to be getting by.

 

I agree that the "apply-in" might have been arranged. I still don't think that Lane would have entrusted that wallet to a white cab driver. . . or even to some of the firm's employees. But I could be wrong.

 

Did Lane notice the girls picture in the cab or the office? I can't remember.

 

You know what I find interesting about race in Mad Men- there are no out-right virulent open racists. And I know there must have been plenty, even in hip New York. I guess they don't want us to hate the characters.

I mean there's Roger, who did the black-face thing, but he thought he wasn't being insulting. And Cooper is the token conservative and he'd probably would be afraid of things "moving too fast" and "why do the black keep wanting so much," which some people were saying.

Yeah I'm guessing, based on what we know of these people. Just interesting that one position on the spectrum isn't being represented.

Then we have Pete as the most anti-racism which we've seen for a while and I think that's hilarious because he's also the most annoying person and otherwise pretty conservative minded.

And Don... the cipher. He just seems to not have an opinion on the whole matter.

I think my favorite scene was Lane Price with Joan. Good TV shows bring pleasantly unexpected relationships, and this oddball friendship between Lane and Joan is really charming.

Also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vFOzG3GYqo&feature=share

 

The office iirc.

 

The one openly civil rights activist the show had. . . is no longer with the firm.

I find Peggy's attitude that "women have it as bad" interesting.

 

Actually, growing up in the very conservative state of Kansas in the 50s and 60s I encountered NO out-right virulent open racists.
The danger lay in the acceptance of the status quo and people who did not like it challenged or felt threatened by it.
I don't find it odd at all that the small group of relatively sophisticated individuals at a New York advertising firm would not be openly virulent racists.

 

I thought the first couple of scenes seemed a bit stiff, the cast was trying to find there rhythm with one another again. But after that the ease and timing seemed right on.

Beyond the race issue, what I found interesting is the theme of of tight the budget was, almost a dig at the battle between Weiner and AMC. Did everyone notice how the office was beginning to look beat up, the markings on the wall and posts.

 

Sure, but there were other clues that suggested the year, not the month. I just laid out all those I picked up.

 

In the first season Roger asked (before the retail heiress came in) "do we have any Jews on staff?" and Draper half-jokingly answered "not on my watch" so I think he probably leans the wrong way. He does play that card pretty close to the vest though. Odd that Campbell is so often a schmuck about everything else and then he's so progressive on race.

 

Season 4 ended in Fall 1965, with Joan pregnant. Season 5 tips the viewer that it is happening after Memorial Day weekend. Joan is on maternity leave.

The only problem is how much the actors playing Don's kids grew in that time (18 months between end of Season 4 and start of Season 5)!

My favorite little moments in last night's show were:

- Pete Campbell seeing Peggy with the baby stroller. He almost had a panic attack.

- When they are moving Pete's stuff into Harry's office, Pete's shotgun is sticking out of the box.

 

Well apparently this was not the first episode filmed for the season. . . .

 

Actually it was only an issue for Kiernan Shipka (Sally), as the actor playing Bobby is new....

 

You're probably right: Lane's decision not to entrust the wallet to the cab driver was arguably just as "classist" as it was racist. Would he have left it with a white cab driver? Maybe, maybe not. The motive for his decision was likely that some sorts of people (i.e., people like Lane) can be trusted with valuables, and that others can't. Of course, the irony was that, while Lane didn't steal any money from the wallet, he did steal the picture from it, and did engage in an improper conversation with the owner's girlfriend, and, then, when the (clearly ethnic white lower class) owner showed up, he behaved more "classily" than Lane did - either not noticing, or, more likely, pretending not to notice that the picture was missing, and then giving Lane a reward and saying something to the effect of "that's how we do business," even though Lane was clearly on a higher social/financial level than he was.

I think there was also an implicit contrast between the way the owner of the wallet "did business" and the way that Lane/SCDP "did business" in the scene that followed, where they metaphorically poured cold water on the hopes of all of the black job applicants, just as the rival agency had literally poured water on the black marchers at the beginning of the episode. SCDP's "equal opportunity employer" ad shows how they "do business," i.e., they run ads that are more concerned with poking a stick at their competition - (the "equal opportunity employer" ad), when they had no intention of actually hiring a black copywriter - or with making themselves look good (last season's "Why we no longer take cigarette accounts" ad), when they only turned their back on cigarettes because Lee Garner, Jr. turned his back on SCDP, and everyone in the office still smokes like a chimney - than they are with doing business the right way, the way that Lane implicitly presents himself as the exemplar of when he appoints himself as more worthy of holding the wallet than the cab driver.

Finally, I may be grasping at parallels here, but I do think that there was a parallel between the Lane/wallet subplot and the scene with Roger and Harry where Roger persuades Harry to give up his office by reaching into his pocket and pulling out $1,100 in cash, which prompts Harry to ask "Why do you carry so much money on you?" I think that did set up a contrast with the lost wallet, which I believe had $100 in it, $100 that Lane was clearly tempted to keep for himself, because his wife had just nagged him about coming up with the tuition deposit for his son? I think there was also an implicit contrast between Roger, who is a creep, but has the money and power to get his way, reaching into his pocket for a wad of cash to make a problem (Pete wanting Rogers's office) go away, and the owner of the lost wallet, who carries around 1/10th the cash that Roger does, reaching into his wallet to generously give a reward to a man who didn't deserve it.

And, then, maybe I'm really clutching at straws here, but there was also the scene where Joan's mother offered to take Joan's baby for a walk, and to buy formula for the baby, and reached into Joan's purse for a $10 bill, prompting Joan to remark "$10? Really?" Later in the episode, Joan remarked that she had gotten "her money's worth" from her mother's visit, with the implication that her mother had been dipping into her purse on more than that one occasion, so I don't think that the "Lane finds a wallet" story was quite as isolated from the rest of the show as it might have appeared at first glance.

 

If it was in fact a new Bobby (I thought it was, too), then, if I'm not mistaken, that would actually be the third actor to have played Bobby so far.

 

I don't know Driver, I think you may be reading to much into this. But that's okay.

Next week's episode should be good.

 

It is

How many more do you think there'll be before the show is over?