Mad Men - Recap: Don-ward Spiral
Recap video and review of Mad Men - Season 6 Episode 8 - The Crash:
"The Crash" has to rank as one of the strangest episodes in the history of Mad Men, if for no other reason than I can't seem to pinpoint exactly what it was trying to say. There's a certain desperation at the heart of the narrative this week, as Don (Jon Hamm) tries to win back Sylvia (Linda Cardellini) and, in the process, ends up getting strung out on drugs with the rest of his staff, culminating in a three day weekend in which nothing really gets accomplished. The episode rivals Roger's (John Slattery) similar drug-fueled haze in "Far Away Places," yet I'd argue that the story here is far more jarring in how it dislodges figures both high and low. It's not just bigwigs like Don getting "energy serum" injections, it's the men in the middle like Stan (Jay R. Ferguson) and Ken (Aaron Staton), and even some of the newbies from CGC who are a bit lower on the hierarchy. What results is office-wide chaos, and what is likely to be the most divisive episode of the season: you're either going to love this for its wackiness and subtextual narrative, or you're going to loathe it for that wackiness and for how it offers subtext in lieu of an actual story. I'm leaning a bit closer towards loving it, if only because it's rare for us to get an episode that's as completely off-the-rails as this (I'm not sure Aaron Staton is going to get another opportunity to tap dance while monologuing, for instance). The subtext-heavy narrative is also in service of illustrating the lasting implications of Don's breakup with Sylvia, and how procuring a car account can both legitimize a firm and turn it into a "whorehouse," in a manner of speaking. There's also likely to be considerable fallout as a result of how everyone acted in their altered states, and that should be an interesting route for the narrative to explore, going forward.
Credit: AMC
So Frank Gleason is dead. Granted, he hasn't been someone with whom we've been all that close (or even all that familiar, beyond the last two or three episodes), yet his death hits the CGC side of the firm pretty hard, particularly Ted (Kevin Rahm), who takes the weekend off following Frank's funeral. This couldn't have happened at a worse time, since the Chevy account has thrown the firm into disarray. Ken is being subjected to all manner of unpleasantries as a result of his job as the point man for the account: he has to chaffeur the Chevy execs around town for drinks, after which they fire guns out of his car while forcing him to accelerate, before covering his eyes so he can't even see where he's driving. This results in an accident that injures Ken's leg and causes him to limp into office the next day, where he announces that Chevy hates everything the firm has come up with, and is giving them the weekend to come up with something new. And so Jim Cutler calls in a physician to give out injections of his special "energy serum" (probably speed) to the employees to help usher them through the grueling 72 hour period. Don, Ken, Stan and several others take injections, and just like that, we're off to the races...
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Don loses it when Sylvia calls to give him the third degree over stalking her. Apparently, he's been staking out her apartment, and her husband has discovered Don's pile of cigarette butts. Apparently, Arnold thinks Sylvia has taken up smoking again, and she fears it's only a matter of time before he discovers the truth. In essence, Sylvia is terrified that Don is going to ruin the good thing she has going with Arnold, saying that if he keeps this up, he's going to learn about the affair and then murder her. While she was merely being hyperbolic, Don worries that Sylvia is genuinely afraid of Arnold. However, she's actually afraid of Don, as he remains insanely possessive and desperate. As if begging for a meeting with a client to make one last pitch, Don pleads with Sylvia to meet with him so they can talk this out, but she refuses, citing how lousy Don has made her feel. Don, always in touch with his softer side, says "I’m feeling a lot of emotions, too,” in the driest manner possible. It really is a testament to Jon Hamm's talents that he could deliver such a painfully unfeeling line, yet still provoke sympathy, as he breaks down after Sylvia hangs up on him (he throws the phone against his cart of alcohol, destroying his only source of comfort other than sex and sleep -- it's no surprise, then, that he decides to take a nap).
Credit: AMC
Don's downward spiral continues as the drugs take hold and he tries to get Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) to recall an ad about soup they'd worked on together. She has no idea what he's talking about, nor does the audience necessarily (or, at least, I didn't -- if Don and Peggy ever worked together on soup, they must not have shown it). Of course, the reason no one remembers this is because it wasn't about soup, it was about oatmeal, and while it initially appears that the ad doesn't have anything to do with the story of the episode, it actually wends its way into the fabric of Don's personal narrative: the mother on the cover of the ad, feeding her son a bowl of oatmeal underneath the tagline "Because you know what he needs," recalls Don's childhood in the whorehouse. The flashbacks detail a young Don coming down with a chest cold that his stepmother fears may be the early signs of consumption. One of the prostitutes makes Don her personal project, first ascertaining that it isn't consumption, and then doing her best to nurse him back to health. And she does a hell of a job with it too...she even takes his virginity for $5 (and if Don's is as big as Jon Hamm's, then there's a $5 footlong joke to be made, though damned if I'm going to be the one to make it).
It's kind of peculiar, in the sense that learning the sexual origin story of someone as ruled (and even defined) by his sexual prowess as Don Draper should have felt more momentous than it did, yet I'm not entirely sure that the narrative ever intended to make a big deal out of it. It's something that's used to further illustrate Don's alienation, and underscore his ambivalent relationships with women, as his stepmother beats the holy hell out of him with a wooden spoon when she finds out what he's done with one of the girls. These flashbacks carry over into the present, as an elderly black woman, identifying herself as Grandma Ida, breaks into the Draper household and convinces Sally (Kiernan Shipka) that she raised her father. Sally is alone babysitting Bobby and Gene while Megan (Jessica Pare) goes to a play with her agent, and though she's persistent in her skepticism of Ida's story, she doesn't know enough about her father to refute it. When Don finally comes home (after his three days of work produces a gibberish pitch that's ultimately useless), he finds Sally, Bobby, Gene, Megan, Betty (January Jones), Henry (Christopher Stanley) and two cops in his house, filling out a report on Ida, a burglar who'd already hit several apartments in the complex. Betty gives Don the third degree over his irresponsibility. Don escapes his persecution by passing out from the drugs, though he does call Sally the next day to assure her that he's alright -- at which point, she admits just how little she knows about her father, a moment that further calcifies Don's complicated relationships with the females in his life, in the sense that he can't really bring himself to tell the truth to any of them. Yet Don seems to at least understand when to let go, as he encounters Sylvia in the elevator that day and hardly says a word to her -- a far cry from the desperate Don three days earlier.
Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC
While Don's storyline is the most substantial, things are pretty fascinating in the office, independent of Don. Stan, hopped up on drugs, pins a picture of an apple to the corkboard above his head, and then invites his comrades to attempt to throw darts at the apple, a la William Tell. Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), the one man who's stone-cold sober, takes the first shot and ends up sinking a dart deep into Stan's forearm. A horrified Peggy takes Stan into a private office to clean the wound, at which point their platonic friendship grows a bit more complicated. He kisses her, and she briefly kisses back, after having politely asked him to stop kissing her neck. She throws a plethora of excuses at him as to why they shouldn't be doing this: she doesn't like beards, she has a boyfriend, etc. Yet Stan is persistent, and he eventually reveals why: his 20-year-old cousin was killed in action in March, having never received the sixteen letters his mother had sent him. It's a story that's painful for Stan to recount, and so Peggy offers the best counsel she knows how to offer, telling Stan to confront his pain and allow it to wash over him. The sooner he deals with it, head-on, the better off he'll be. Drowning it out with drugs and sex won't help. In a sense, Stan is a mirror to Ted, who also kissed Peggy, and who also has suffered a loss from which he's recovering. However, Ted immediately apologized for making a move on Peggy and understood and respected her boundaries. Moreover, he's confronting his pain head-on, as opposed to dulling it with sex and drugs. In many respects, it's the difference between a more mature male sensibility and simple recklessness. Peggy can't help but feel grossed out when she sees Stan on the couch of Lane's old office, having sex with Frank Gleason's hippie daughter, Wendy (who'd earlier diagnoses Don with a broken heart, in one of the episode's weirder moments). Though I don't think their friendship is necessarily compromised, the dynamic between Peggy and Stan has certainly shifted, in irrevocable fashion.
Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC
"The Crash" is certainly one of the stranger episodes of the series, but it's one of the more provocative as well, drawing out personal anguish and illustrating the lengths to which some will go to avoid having to confront that anguish, to their own detriment.
