In this week’s episode of Mad Men, The Beautiful Girls, we all learn the lesson, “Remember when you thought it might be fun to have lived in the 60s? Well, it WASN’T.” At least not if you’re a woman and certainly not if you’re Sally Draper.
Seriously, I think Sally may be the most tragic character in all of Mad Men. I mean, really, she is totally effed. Her parents suck! Betty is unfeeling and doesn’t appear to actually give much thought to her children besides how they make her look to outsiders and Don is just oblivious. I tried to give him a little credit for taking her to the zoo and being generally sweet with her, but it was still a major fail. I think Don loves his kids but he does not know how to talk to them or parent them. How awful that Sally was sitting in his office, screaming about how much she hates living with Betty, and all Don can do is look around helplessly for someone else to come parent his kid? In three years Sally’s going to be turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Let’s also add daddy issues to her list of therapy topics. By the way, therapy? Doesn’t seem to be working so well…
Kiernan Shipka is a great little actress. They really lucked out with her. Ugh, when she did that face plant at SCDP and then sobbed to Meghan about how it wasn’t going to be all right, or when she told Don goodbye in that tone of defeated finality? How could you not feel sorry for her?
I’m really drinking the Betty haterade this episode. She doesn’t even notice that Sally is missing and worse, she doesn’t even seem to care. She seems to get more spiteful glee out of knowing Don’s been inconvenienced by Sally’s appearance than by the fact that her daughter is actually safe. And then at the end of the episode when she comes to collect Sally and tells her she was “worried about her” so she could look like Mother of the Year in front of Joan, Peggy, et. al. I wanted to reach into the TV and smack her. Of course we know Betty has her own issues but I think that’s really been put on the backburner this year and they’re making her frustratingly one-dimensional and villainous. It’s starting to get to the point where I don’t give a flying fig what Betty is up to. I mean we’ve already seen multiple episodes this season where she has little to no screen time and I never miss her. At the end of this episode I was all ready to go and drop-kick Betty straight out of this show.
Was it bad that I laughed through the entire sequence from when Peggy discovered Mrs. Blankenship dead body to when Harry came out of the office yelling about his mother’s afghan? For all the gloom and doom, this show is so hilariously macabre. And while I admit to being disappointed that Pete has had virtually no storyline since like three episodes ago, the shots of him moving Mrs. Blankenship’s body through the glass conference room walls were priceless. Especially the background shot where you can literally see him make the “Me?!” gesture when Joan shows him the body.
As for Joan and Roger, I really like them both separately and together but I hated that they went there with them again. It seems like such a regression, especially for Joan. I’m praying the writers aren’t so obvious as to get Joan preggo with Roger’s illegitimate child, kill off Dr. Rapist in Vietnam, and leave her a single parent. Are they??
Okay, I think I got what Peggy’s lesbian friend Joyce was saying about men being soup and women being pots, but they couldn’t come up with a better analogy than that? I found that whole scene to be really awkwardly scripted. And then the line, “Are you angry or lovesick?” Maybe I’m being dense but I didn’t have a clue what that meant. Are we to infer that Peggy was torn between liking Turtlenecked Beatnik (I don’t know why, seeing as he proved to be a huge douche) and being pissed at his belittlement of the women’s movement? Because I really didn’t get the feeling she was all that into him after he came by SCDP with his dumb manifesto.
The final shot of three “beautiful girls” was definitely gorgeous but it was also totally unsubtle, in my opinion. Like, look here: three women of different ages with different colored hair who’ve made different life choices, all pondering about how they fit into this patriarchal society! And the lesbian in pants can go down the other elevator! Usually Mad Men isn’t so obvious.
Odds and Ends:
-Rum soaked French toast! I'd eat that.
-By the way, making like the third black person on this show a mugger? Nice job.
-“Oh right, we’ll have a civil rights march for women.” DOUCHE ALERT. If the turtleneck didn't already tip you off.
-Didn’t touch on Don too much this week, but I thought he and Faye were going to take it slow? Guess that’s out the window.
-I approve of Joan’s glasses.
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