The dark truth at the center of the episode is that business is always personal.
Bookended by Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” the episode opens with a telling bit of trickery.
Chockablock with instances of characters not shooting, running, attacking, or sneaking away when they can or should.
The purgatorial mood that Matthew Weiner and his crew conjure here sets the stage for Don and company’s final season-long cocktail hour.
This season’s journey toward the final act of Mad Men’s American epic promises to be its most challenging and rewarding.
Lionsgate put every ounce of effort and care into serving up the fifth round of cable TV’s stiffest drink.
Don is a character that allows us to safely indulge, with little in the way of moral inconvenience, our vicarious inner amoral shark.
As it turns out, this low-profile episode is an apt distillation of a largely low-profile season.
Outside of the flashbacks, Mad Men gets a little meta on Emmy weekend by making Don’s winning an advertising award (a Clio) a major plot point.
The early going of Mad Men’s fourth season has given us a whole lot of Don Draper and his nonstop cycle of disintegration and reinvention.
Mad Men continues to hit its stride most indelibly while rendering the off-kilter uneasiness of transition.
Of course change comes for literally everyone, as news of Kennedy being shot fills the airwaves and the uncertainty moving forward becomes much more explicit.
My grandfather always said that nothing good happens after midnight.
The episode places itself in the midst of people trying to cope with the fact that everything is changing, both in the world at large and in their personal lives.
As with much of the products being pitched on Mad Men, no one turns out to be exactly as advertised.