Wonderful article. One of the joys of Mad Men is the way each season reworks what we thought we knew. Watching S1.1after the end of S5 I realised how much of the next five seasons was prefigured in the pilot. It was all there for the seeing but how could we know at first sight? As Steve Jobs said to the students on their graduation day, you can only join the dots of your life backwards. I wonder if our experience of analysing the show, of changing our understanding of characters through their present actions and flashbacks is like the way we examine our own life stories through current knowledge and sudden realisations?

These are interesting comments. I was noticing the style more since the last blog in this series and wonder about that. This episode was so focused on a major event. It was different and this post by Polan shows why.

I am leaving a short post in haste to you thank you publicly, Dana, for this terrific post written in record breaking time. The experiment was a success! I think your method too brought out was was finest and most penetrating in an episode that, I must confess, did not sit well with me (or the friends with whom I watched). No doubt I'll say more about this when I'm not preparing for an evening seminar and for a busy day tomorrow.

But for now a point that also goes back to the premiere and backs up your sense that there is a lot of metacommentary being made on Mad Men about the show's high-end and narratively ambitious "quality" television form.

It struck me that the cross between pantomime and charades (IIRC) that Peggy's colleague has to perform in order to convey what the comedian said about Vietnam and ears (which had the effect of making the client pull the "Lend me your ears" ad campaign) offered a similar kind of vantage. That is, it seemed to be Mad Men reminding us that in the old broadcast days you needed your co-worker to give you a poor second-hand account of what the TV show you had missed (nowadays the comedian's routine would be available on youtube and/or DVR's and/or the topic of blogs etc. etc.)--thus enabling the kind of television that you are almost required to re-view in order to process.

Anyway thank you again (and thanks to Helena and Jez B for great comments to which I hope Dana and others respond).

Lauren, I had the same thought about the re-acting of the comedian's tv performance. The depth of enjoyment fans get from MM comes not only from the fact that we can rewatch but that we have to go back and rewatch to see all the things we missed first time. Without the online blogs the exerpeince of it would be so much the poorer. For me, there has never been a tv show that has held my interest and been so thought-provoking and I am clearly far from alone.

Last episode we saw Megan being given the next script for her character. Megan has both the surprise of what this means to her and some time to consider the implications for the character, her own career and her marriage. As Dana says, we watch the characters dealing with events a moment at a time but we know that in some office somewhere their lives are mapped out. I did wonder whether 'the heavens are telling us to change' was not only the threat of the cleansing flood but a subtle reference to the writing team who have complete control of this world.

Dana's superb post articulated what has grown so irksome about the show, but with a restraint I can no longer muster. Indeed, "MM is a series that cannot acknowledge intentional agency in the service of consequential change as anything more than foolish"; interpersonal intrigue and individuals' failings cloud any "larger picture" or "longer view." This tack reached for me pitiful conceit as the death of Dr. King — a momentous event worthy of smart and brave representation — became another occasion for the characters to stew in their "me first" solipsism, beautifully iterated by Dana. Then, as now, people can react to political events and moral challenges in political ways, and from an ethical frame of reference. But we scarcely get an inkling of this.

The biggest repercussion felt by the Mad Men was escalating worry that the black rabble (note the movie Don and son saw), in a moment of fury, would sack white New York, maybe make it to the suburbs, and one day bury the goddamn statue of liberty. Concern for security and comfort, premised on an enduring white supremacy, trumped anger at the assassination and concern for deeper tears in the social fabric.

Fine, MLK is now universally lionized in US culture, and maybe the show was trying to reveal the unseemly and likely truth that at the time many whites may have been worried, first and foremost, about the threat of black anger to their world. But surely there are other dimensions to that moment, even potentially in the secluded world of the Mad Men, worth giving voice to. The show once set an extraordinarily high bar for itself. This season, to my eye, it is badly falling the chance to say something interesting (save some minor insights into consumer culture) or constructive about American society. The Wire, by painful contrast, was a sprawling social epic with layers of insight. Mad Men is descending into a highly knotted melodrama that fetishizes a kind of artful, if dreary, detachment. I refuse to believe that this is all the viewers are worthy of, that its detachment is somehow only a reflection of our own.

Don't overlook the obvious reading of Planet of the Apes: a racist fantasy of blacks taking over the planet, precisely what is feared in Mad Men in the rioting after MLK's assassination. It's an interesting use of the film, if only to provide a kind of reconstruction of the film's original context that lets a contemporary (21st century) viewer comprehend the film in a new light.

I would love it, though, if such an insightful and perspicuous observer as yourself, Mr. Polan, could answer a cruder, simpler question: how did the actress who plays Megan every get cast on a "real" TV show? She cannot act. I close my eyes and plug my ears when she's on screen. Can you explain her presence? She's atrocious!

Anonymous, Welcome to Kritik--we're very happy for you to join the conversation though appreciate it if you would "sign" your posts with initials or some pseudonym of your choice. Thanks!

Thanks y’all for these really incisive remarks.

Jeremy, I come at this from a somewhat different perspective since I think the high bar (as you put it) is much harder in the changing historical dynamic. We are no longer in a pre-60s 60s that our culture had forgotten and which could therefore speak to us as though it were some uncanny reflection of the present. We're now in the 60s that we never forgot, have known was coming, and waited for warily since this a 60s to which our present relation (as a culture) is ambivalent to say the least.

I am not offering excuses for what should be judged on its artistic merits (which for me did not hold up). I'm just suggesting that the challenge is different and I think much greater than the challenge of maintaining the quality of, say, The Sopranos or The Wire. These are not historical fictions in any sense and do not therefore face the task of sustaining interest in existing characters while moving into a knowable stream of events.

There were a couple of scenes that felt really off for me. E.g., Abe and Peggy with her implication that his self-interest as a journalist in being on the scene of breaking events is somehow as corrupt as her being caught up in the disappointment of having failed to make hay out of the crisis for a real estate deal. I don't mean that Peggy should be too pure to buy herself an apartment or to bargain: I mean that she should be honest enough with herself to know that whatever his personal stake in it, Abe's job serves the public interest in ways that hers simply does not. (Compare to Don's recognition in the premiere that he is not saving people's lives like the doctor friend he is cuckolding.)

In terms of structure, 6.5 was I think an entirely new thing for Mad Men. That is, world-historical events have generally come at the end of the season so that much time is spent building private stories to resonate with these big events (think of the Nixon/Kennedy election at the end of S1, the Cuban missile crisis in S2, and the Kennedy/Oswald assassinations in S3).

MLK's assassination, by contrast, comes relatively early and it's hard to see how the event will have any lasting impact on the characters we know--that it will be a pivot rather than an endpoint for the season. That's partly because we have not gotten any sense of what MLK meant to these characters. The outraged reaction of Pete (always politically progressive by MM standards despite his personal hypocrisy) and Don and Peggy's sympathy rang true enough but did not add anything to our understanding of them as characters; still less as characters in history. The last time we heard MLK IIRC he was on the radio saying "I have a dream" while Don was making a play for Sally's teacher in S3; i.e., we have known for a long time that he could be *that* crass, as well as something better. So this episode taught us nothing about these characters and still finds the season in a kind of limbo about its relation to the 60s counterculture. Perhaps that's why what Dana calls Don's epiphany did not work for me. I'd need to listen to it again but since when has Don not loved his children? Don may be a negligent father (and terrible husband) happy to delegate parenting to the women in his life, but the problem has never been his lack of loving feelings. If anything Don loves too much: he gets quixotic, splits himself, and lets down the people he loves by screwing up. It's a tragic dynamic but it's not the same thing as not feeling love. The man who pitched The Wheel knew what it was like to love his children; he didn’t need to learn that from Bobby's empathy for the "sad" janitor mourning MLK's death.

I'm delighted that I learned of this blog via the Mad Men, Mad World book--and for that matter I'm glad I stumbled across that book, which I'm now reading.

One tangential note on ways in which present-day TV takes advantage of DVR-ing: AMC's The Walking Dead has taken to inserting a screen full of text in each episode, at the start of a commercial break, and displaying it for only a few seconds. A quick reader can get the gist of it, but the expectation is that an interested viewer will pause the DVR at that point to read it at leisure (or that a future viewer using a DVD or Blu-ray will pause that device). Yet another way of packing more into an episode than can be fully comprehended as it unfolds.

Thanks John! Dana Polan is totally swamped so he will be reading but not offering immediate responses to the comments on his post. He asks me to write though that he is enjoying the conversation and hopes it continues!

The text of Don's epiphany has been posted on a couple of blogs because people found it both hard to hear and puzzling.

"I only ever wanted to be the man who loves children. But from the moment they’re born, that baby comes out and you act proud and excited, hand out cigars. But you don’t feel anything. Especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them but you don’t. And the fact that you’re faking that feeling makes you wonder if your own father had the same problem. [Sigh.] Then one day they get older, and you see them do something and you feel that feeling that you were pretending to have. And it feels like your heart is going to explode."

I find it hard to buy. It you hadn't seen the rest of MM and only this episode it might make sense. But as you say, Don may be neglectful in many ways but there have been scenes where he seemed to be a loving father. The scene in S1.1 where we realise for the first time that is a father is one of many. So why did MW write it? I just don't think he makes the sort of mistakes that this seems to be. And what does that first line mean?

Hi Helena, thanks for posting this!

It's always possible that MW didn't write since the episode was co-written; though I suspect that he did and he would have certainly approved it in either case. Perhaps using Bobby--whose relationship with Don has been less developed than Sally's (and who iirc has been played by 2 or maybe even 3 different actors)--was though to lend plausibility to the idea of Don as falling short of some ideal of a man who loves (his) children. Maybe it would make more sense in comparison to The Fog, the Season 3 episode about Betty's giving birth to Gene which is also an episode that deals with race (under sedation Betty images she is the murdered Medgar Evers if I am not misremembering) and features Don's interesting waiting room conversation with the younger expectant father. There are always ways to make a case for something being more plausible than it seems at first look.

Bottom line for me though: it didn't work and I suspect the writing of that scene came about because of the pressure to tie something as momentous as MLK's assassination to something meaningful and emotionally powerful in Don's life. The same pressure perhaps has found season so far more interested in revisiting the traumas of Don's childhood than the show has been for a while--the previous episode had the first flashback to Don's childhood story since S3.

We shall see....

I don't have any trouble accepting the Don-and-Bobby scene. While I'm undecided on its intended meaning for us (the audience) if taken on its own, its meaning for Don seems clear enough when we consider it in light of Don's bedside confessional. His outing with Bobby sparked something in Don, which is expressed (also pretty clearly, if you ask me) in the "epiphany" that Helena quoted: it sparked a new, genuine fatherly feeling in him, and also some retrospection and introspection on his part.

The speech as a whole, I'd say, is one of those turns by which the show keeps us hopeful, however distantly, about Don's prospects for improvement (to use a rather clinical term). At the same time, it reminds us he has some justification for feeling and behaving as he usually does.

Regarding its first line, Helena, for me it amounts to saying "I wanted to be a good father," without putting it so directly and flatly.

Lauren : I was thinking of The Fog too. I'll try to watch it again and see what I see.

John Branch : so much of this episode is about communication : clear, confused, misunderstood and out of time. So when Don says, 'I only ever wanted to be the man who loves children' I just feel that it has to mean more than I wanted to be a good father. I don't know what it is though!

John Branch it's the bedside confessional that seems off to me - not the scene with Bobby which was just fine.

Helena, you will be expert on the topic if you manage to find time rewatch the Fog.

Well, Lauren, I watched The Fog and, boy, is it relevant to The Flood, and how. There are two big themes : the birth of Gene and racial tensions.

While Betty is in labor, Don talks with Dennis Hobart, in the waiting room. Dennis is a first time father-to-be. Dennis had an image in his mind of the perfect birth, congratulations and throwing a ball with his son. The reality is much more stressful and the waiting is also boring. He worries that his wife will die and he won’t be able to love the baby. Don tries to be comforting saying, ‘our worst fears lie in anticipation’ to which Dennis says, ‘are you so sure about that?’. He tells Dennis that a nurse told him to remember that ‘your wife is in a boat and you are on the shore’. He also says he doesn’t throw a ball with Bobby often enough.

Dennis is a prison guard in uniform and talks about his job saying he bets Don has nightmares he’ll end up in Sing-Sing. I do, says Don. He also talks about the inmates. He says he realizes the ‘animals’ were all babies once and they probably blame their mothers and fathers for their problems. To which Don says, ‘that’s a bullshit excuse’.

Don looks conflicted through this whole exchange, but Dennis says to Don, ‘you’re an honest guy, believe me, I’m an expert’. He wants to tell God, but tells Don instead that he, Dennis, sees this as a fresh start, he is going to be a better man and demands of Don, ‘tell me you heard me’. But when Dennis later passes Don in the hall way as he pushes his wife and new baby out to the car, Dennis blanks Don.

In her drug-induced dream Betty sees her dead parents and her mother is comforting a black man who is bleeding from his head. She says, ‘you see what happens to people who speak up?’

Pete tries to talk to Hollis in the elevator about tvs. Hollis is clearly anxious and worried that he will get into trouble. Pete says, ‘do you think I’m a bigot?’ He just wants an honest conversation about tvs. Hollis says he doesn’t’ watch tv, ‘we’ve got bigger problems to worry about than tv’. Pete looks at him and says, ‘you don’t watch baseball? I don’t believe you’. And they both acknowledge each other as, perhaps closer to being equals.

Later, Pete pitches the negro market to Admiral with ‘integrated’ ads for black and white people in magazines like Ebony. Admiral questions that that’s legal. Pete almost confused says, ‘of course it’s legal’.

Later Pete gets a ‘flogging’ from Lane, Roger and Bert because Admiral are so angry about being pitched as a ‘colored tv company’. Pete says, ‘but they are! It seems illogical to me that they’d reject an opportunity to make more money’. Roger says, ‘I’m going to have to pretend I had you killed’. Lane thinks it would be ok for SC to pursue the black market saying, ‘I’ve just moved here, I’m a stranger in a strange land, but I can tell you there is definitely something going on’.

In a sweet kitchen scene Don makes a snack with Sally and reassures her that everything’s going to be fine. He says, ‘I thought you were going to be a boy … not all surprises are bad’.

And as Pete walks in to see his bosses, Roger says, 'Well, if it isn't Martin Luther King!'.

The episode is set in June 1963.

Thanks Helena! That is all really interesting. I am traveling now with a tight schedule and so cannot say more but wanted you to know I had seen this and enjoyed your expert recap.