Mad Men - Season Premiere Recap - A Straight Line to You-Know-Where

Recap and review of Mad Men - Season 6 Premiere - The Doorway:

Mad Men is the most literary show on television. It's layered like a postmodern novel, filled with ideas and themes that are skeptical of the order of things. It's a televised Rorschach Test that allows the viewer to see in it what they would. For example, it would be easy to read Don (Jon Hamm) vomiting at the memorial for Roger's (John Slattery) mother as a response to the eulogy provided by a friend of the deceased, who recounts the ways in which Roger's mother loved him, which serves as a reminder to the former Dick Whitman that he never had a maternal figure to love him, save for the woman who died bringing him into this world. That would be a perfectly reasonable assumption to make about the show's thematic structure. Sure, it's a stretch, but it's just as valid a reading of the scene as the supposition that Don simply had too much to drink. That Mad Men provides us with this fabric of possibilities is what makes it one of TV's most compulsively compelling shows.

Credit: AMC

"The Doorway" is an episode concerned with mortality, of whether the lives we lived have been lived rightly, or if we've made a mistake that is too late to retract. This is best represented in Don's existential character arc. The episode begins with a point-of-view shot of a heart attack victim, whom we learn is the doorman to Don's building. The man pulls through, but it's a stark confrontation with his own mortality; in many ways, "The Doorway" is a parade of confrontations for Don -- with mortality, with his fidelity, and with his past as Dick Whitman. The episode is set towards the end of 1967, and Don and Megan (Jessica Pare) are on vacation in Hawaii. In the time since season 5 ended, Megan has become a minor celebrity, having scored a role on a soap opera -- this is contrasted, somewhat, to Don's work life, as he's becoming something of an anachronism to the people working beneath him. His staff is increasingly shaggy and unkempt, eschewing the perfectly-manicured, high-ballin' look that the series has typified. Though men like Roger and Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) remain as freshly-pressed as ever, there's a certain sterility to the look of Don Draper, as if to communicate that this is no longer someone you can talk to. He's on an island alone. You'll never understand him, and he'll never understand you. And maybe it's just as well, as it's becoming increasingly apparent that he might not entirely understand himself. Don has been reading Dante's The Inferno, and it gives the episode its most relevant passage, when Don, through voiceover, says, “Midway through our life’s journey I went astray from the straight road and awoke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” This is representative of the episode's most noteworthy development: Don has cheated on Megan.

Credit: AMC

We find out at the end of the episode that Don has been having an affair with Silvia (Linda Cardellini), the wife of Don's friend/neighbor, Dr. Arnold Rosen (Brian Markinson). Silvia is the one who gave him The Inferno, though it can hardly be said that she gave him his crushing sense of loneliness and despair. As the couple relaxes in bed together, Don proclaims that he wants to stop the affair. Silvia, as if catching on to Don's sense of defeat, and understanding that this is an empty statement on his part, simply offers a reassuring "I know". Don is returning to his womanizing ways, but it's a strictly nominal return. His heart isn't really in it, though it's hard to tell if his heart is really in his marriage to Megan. He's a man caught in the doorway, remaining indecisive as to which side he wishes to remain on. This affair will almost surely come back to haunt him. As with the lighter that he inadvertently swaps from an Army private while in Hawaii, the past always comes back to haunt us, try as we might to discard it.

However, the overarching thesis of the episode doesn't stop with Don. Roger has been seeing a psychiatrist, yet he doesn't seem to actually be engaging with the process beyond making lame jokes in between existential observations that only occasionally hit the mark, such as when he compares life to going through a series of doors. He argues that the experiences in life that are supposed to change you ultimately don't amount to much at all. "Look, life is supposed to be a path, and you go along, and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change your direction, but it turns out that’s not true," Roger states. "Turns out the experiences are nothing. They’re just pennies you pick up off the floor, stick in your pocket, and you’re just going in a straight line to you-know-where.” While it doesn't feel as though Roger has entirely given up, he does exude an air of desperation and resignation in his life, as when he talks about how his first wife guilt-tripped him while his daughter hit him up for money. Roger is a man who seems to exist less for himself than for other people -- for instance, his 91-year-old mother, for whom he was the shining light. She passes away near the start of the episode, and it leads to a rare bout of introspection in Roger, who lashes out at his mother's memorial, and eventually gives in to his grief, alone in his office. It's a grief that's brought to the surface only by the sudden death of the shoeshine man at his office building. With both his mother and the shoeshine man gone, Roger has suddenly lost two people with an uncoerced affection for him. Roger is a man bombarded by death this week, forced to confront his own mortality, and a life of questionable merit.

Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC

Betty (January Jones) is having some of the same issues. In searching for Sally's (Kiernan Shipka) runaway friend, Sandy, she is confronted by the abandoned possibilities of her youth. Sandy's mother has recently died, and though she occasionally comes across as nonplussed by the loss, she's very much of a young girl in transition. She's a violin prodigy that had her sights set on Juilliard, until a rejection letter has her suddenly eyeing up California as a way out of the same lethargic, middle-class existence to which Betty has now been confined. Once a model, Betty is now a pudgy shell of her former self. In many ways, Betty has been worn down by her marriage to Don Draper, to the point where she doesn't really have much left for current-husband Henry, or for herself. As she searches for Sandy amidst a community of squatters, Betty plays the adult, helping to teach the squatters how to cook and generally playing a maternal figure to young adults who simply don't care. They want no part of what they perceive to be her bourgeois lifestyle. They send her on her way, though not without revealing that Sandy has hopped a bus to California, and it's anyone's guess if she'll actually make something of herself, or if she'll simply walk the same path Betty tread.

As for Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), she's becoming more and more like Don in how she works in her new environment. Granted, it's not exactly new to her, but it's new to us. To that end, it's interesting to see how she fits in, as she already has full command of her authoritative voice, not only dictating her demands to her underlings (telling them that their supposedly unique ideas are painfully similar, while also inadvertently disallowing them their New Year's Eve holiday), but also coming through in a pinch. When a comic goes on TV and makes a joke that ends up hurting a potential ad campaign, Peggy has to come up with an entirely new solution in a short window of time. The tooth-and-nail business of advertising has always been among Mad Men's most compelling aspects, and it's expertly deployed here, as Peggy works to create an entirely new campaign from top-to-bottom. It doesn't feel like a story that's as substantial as the others in the episode, but it's crafted well.

Credit: Michael Yarish/AMC

"The Doorway" is one of the most ponderous episodes of Mad Men in recent memory, which means that it's kind of difficult to talk about, since so much of what happens is beneath the surface. Except Don cheating again -- yet so much of why that happens is embedded within Don's character, and the existential crisis that's been picking at him for years. In many ways, Mad Men is more self-referential than any show on TV, since so much of it is wrapped up in past wounds -- and the occasionally destructive ways with which people deal with those wounds.