Mad Men: Mystery Date Rewatch

December 7, 2014 7:03 AM - Season 5, Episode 4

Don runs into someone from his past while Joan makes a decision.
posted by tracicle (12 comments total)

I had forgotten that this was all one episode. This is one of my favorites: Sally dealing with someone totally outside her context, Dr. Rapist (not knowing a damn thing about wine) making an enormous decision without input from his family, Don realizing that Megan may not be as easygoing as he thought, the conversations around the murders.
The accordion is a nice touch, but the line rams it in our faces.

Is everything other than the elevator part of Don's hallucination? I think all the apartment scenes are.
I hadn't noticed the Don/Dawn connection before, perhaps he was the only one who needed a secretary. Or the only one who would accept a black secretary.

One of the themes here is drug use. Don looks for aspirin, the Schaffer, the wine, the beer, Seconal. These are all socially acceptable "drugs," yet have Negative consequences.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:22 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh, Peggy. You go so quickly from being such a badass, taking Roger for all of his cash and almost his watch and bonding with Dawn, to embarrassing yourself.

Don: Your mother lets you [watch TV all day]?
Sally: *I'm on vacation*.

I feel you, Sally.
posted by donajo at 6:25 PM on December 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

I never know what to make of Don's hallucinations--how far they go, etc. And thinking about them makes me go down the weird "Mad Men is just Dick Whitman's syphilis-induced fever dream" rabbit hole. Ack.
posted by ChrisTN at 7:55 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

This was a dark episode full of ominous undertones of horror and fear and the sick thrill people get from hearing about sensational, bloody, twisted crimes and also the sick thrill of possibly being a victim of such a crime. This episode was an introduction to the dark and violent side of the late 60's.

While Don is in a feverish and vulnerable condition, the issues he hasn't dealt and come to terms with arrive in the personified form of Andrea the Succubus who has come to torment him straight from his unconscious (Andrea: "You left the backdoor unlocked.) She tells him: "You love it. And you'll love it again because you are a sick, sick..." Don proceeds to "murder" his unconscious. But he can't force his problems into nonexistence and expect to carry on with the driving motto of his fake identity, "This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened." For the rest of Mad Men that's what we see. Don learning the hard way that he has to come to terms with himself.
posted by cwest at 8:48 AM on December 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Sally dealing with someone totally outside her context

The wtf? face that Sally has while listening to Pauline makes me laugh every time.
posted by cwest at 8:59 AM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Up until watching this today (in part; I had to stop watching halfway through for kid reasons) I had thought Andrea was Bobbie Barrett come back to act as the aforementioned succubus. Binge-watching pays off finally -- I'd clearly forgotten what Bobbie looked like.
posted by tracicle at 10:00 AM on December 8, 2014

I'd clearly forgotten what Bobbie looked like.

Me too. And then I wondered, well, when did Andrea show up before? According to whatever source I checked (IMDB?), this was her one and only episode. In a sense, it worked to emphasize how much we as viewers really don't know about Don's sexual history--we're in the same boat as Megan. But with all the other possibilities that could have given us a sense of continuity, it seemed odd to have Andrea drop in from nowhere.
posted by ChrisTN at 5:04 PM on December 8, 2014

Peggy's conversation with Dawn in the office is really interesting. When they talk about Chicago, Dawn thinks of the riots while Peggy thinks of the nurse murderer. Every white person in the office is talking about the nurse murders but no one discusses the riots. In the long run of history though, the murders are mostly forgotten while the riots would have an impact on US history that's still being felt.
posted by drezdn at 10:55 AM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

In this week's "Oh, Don", Don tells Megan they'll be together until he dies.
posted by drezdn at 11:18 AM on December 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

In this week's "Oh, Don", Don tells Megan they'll be together until he dies.

I harrumphed "Oh, FFS Don." And I don't often harrumph.
posted by cwest at 12:03 PM on December 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

PS Sorry about the misnumbering on this one; I forgot about the first ep being 2 in one. It should be 5.4.
posted by tracicle at 11:25 AM on December 10, 2014

I put in a mod request to renumber this ep and also to add a note to #1 that it counts for 2.
(Which we shouldn't have to do, Matt Weiner!)
posted by Sweetie Darling at 3:30 PM on December 10, 2014 [1 favorite]