All posts tagged "Peggy"

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SFCararmia noted on the "Mad Men" blog Basket of Kisses that Don's hat is a prominent symbol of his backsliding, his inability to get with the times.* Don and Roger both prominently and repeatedly wore hats in this episode, and there was a lot hat-oriented business going on. This is bad news.

Spoilers!

[rebelmouse-image 24749655 alt="peggy don" original_size="500x303" expand=1]Let's start off with talking about a concern of mine: Don's alcoholism. Not in that I'm concerned that Don, a fictional character, is an alcoholic. I'm not worried about his health or anything. What I worry about is this as a plot device. I'm allergic to giving a character a disease, whether self-inflicted or not. Whether a character is struck with cancer or an addiction, it's a short leap from "fascinating TV show with some amount of suspense" to "afterschool special". The only show I can think of that avoided this trap---and even then, it was only barely---was "The Wire", and part of that is that Andre Royo, who played Bubbles, has charisma to burn. (The other part is that they made his recovery process an opportunity to make the character more complex.) The problem with introducing disease as a plot line is that the disease often becomes the defining feature of the character, especially when the character is an addict. It's kind of boring and often moralistic in ways that just don't make for good TV. But I remain hopeful. If anyone can pull it out, it's the writers of "Mad Men".

[rebelmouse-image 24749014 original_size="560x375" expand=1]Sorry to bump it to Tuesday again. But alas, we were too busy to watch it Sunday night, so had to watch it last night. That may perhaps be the most melancholic script ever built around a birth, which is one of the touches I really appreciate with "Mad Men". Betty's hunched shoulders and pause before she went to tend to the crying infant was a heart-breaking touch. When Peggy asked Don if all this is old hat, I thought to myself that this would be a better question to ask Betty. Because it seems more and more that she's the one thinking that. The hardest part of watching them try to patch it up is that I sense that they not only love each other, but they really like each other. You see glimpses of their chemistry. But it's not each other, it's the trap that they find themselves in.

Spoilers, as usual.