Mad Men Roundtable: “The Suitcase”
EJ
In TV, you’ll occasionally get a “Box Episode”. When they’re short on money for the season, the show runners will have to create an episode that can be done on the cheap, usually using only a few regular cast members, minimal extras, and as few sets as possible. In years past, these would turn into episodes where the Golden Girls would share a cheesecake and reminisce about all the things that have happened to them over the last year. Or you’d have an episode of Friends where they never left Monica’s apartment. Sometimes, these restrictions lead to brilliance, as we saw in the most reason season of Breaking Bad with “The Fly”. And this week, Mad Men turned a Box Episode into something amazing, with an episode that’s mostly just Don and Peggy in the office, talking. And this being Matthew Weiner, he makes a Box Episode where a suitcase is a key prop and most of the cast is at a boxing match. I love the way he assumes that we know as much as he does.
It might be too early to call it, but I think this is one of the best episodes ever. This could turn out to be the Mad Men equivalent of “Pine Barrens”. (Which was also a Box Episode – 2/3 of the episode is Paulie and Christopher in the woods!)
There are some amazing bits of dialogue early on. Don: “I’m glad this is an environment where you feel free to fail.” Or Peggy: “Should it be funny?” Don: “Actually funny? Maybe. Funny like what I just saw? No.” For the record, this is a pretty close approximation ever week of what Myndi says to me when she reads my part of the Round Table.
You have to feel sorry for Peggy heading up that crew of misfits. When you’re put on a project with Stan, Joey, and Danny, you know that brilliance is not going to come from your efforts. Bunch of knuckleheads. There is a neat piece of characterization with Danny, in a throwaway line of dialogue. They’re talking about James Bond, and Danny mentions that Bond “met a girl underwater”. That would be a reference to Thunderball, which wasn’t released until December of 1965. So that means Danny is actually referencing on of the novels, and he does seem like the kind of guy who’d be an expert in the Fleming novels.
I’m trying very hard not to just write page after page of pointing out specific moments and just saying “That was awesome”. I loved Roger Sterling’s disgust at recovering alcoholics. “He killed a man with a motorboat. You know how you get over something like that? By drinking.” Giving up drinking is a sign of weakness, and it’s not out of the question that he’s headed for heart attack number three. He’s drinking more than we’ve seen since Season One, and whatever it was about Jane that got him to clean up and fly right is long gone.
There’s a really nice bit of continuity with Roger, too. We learn from the tape that Dr. Lyle Evans was responsible for botching Bert Cooper’s… surgery. Back in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”, when Cooper tried to quiet Roger’s rants about the Japanese, Roger asks “Why don’t we just get Dr. Lyle Evans in here?” So angry drunk Roger was on the verge of blurting Bert’s dark secret right there in front of everybody. And it’s a nice resolution for those of us who could not figure out that reference weeks back.
Don’s analysis of boxing points to the societal changes to come. He admires Liston because he’s a guy who puts his head down and goes to work, while Cassius Clay showboats and plays around. You can already see that Don’s starting to lose step with the advertising industry – he’s a guy who just gets the job done, but guys like Pete and their stunts are going to take over very soon. Don thinks endorsements are lazy, but that’s the way of the future. It’s not just advertising of course – society on the whole is moving away from that 1950’s work ethic, and toward the embrace of self-aggrandizers like Cassius Clay. Don Draper is a man who’s fighting the future and losing.
The thing that mystifies me is the mouse. There’s a mouse loose in Don’s office, and there are two scenes about this mouse, to no resolution. We haven’t seen the last of that rodent! Which, as a guy with a mild phobia, I can’t really consider good news. Still, I’m just trying to figure out the reason for the mouse. Unlike virtually everything else between Don and Peggy in this episode, it doesn’t reveal anything about the characters or their relationships. It has to be a setup for something that’s coming. And you just know that it’s ultimately going to be Joan’s problem.
And then there’s Anna. We knew last time she appeared that she didn’t have long, but I didn’t think she’d go this soon. Her death hangs over the whole episode like a shroud – we know, as does Don, from almost the very beginning what happened. And yet, he doesn’t make the call until the end. He knows what the message is and he only holds it together because he doesn’t return that call. His breakdown at the end is absolutely wrenching. And it doesn’t help that what he tells Peggy is the literal truth “The only person in the world who really knows me is gone”. When Anna Draper died, she took Dick Whitman with her. Not the part of Don where Dick still lives, but the actual fact of the existence of Dick Whitman. There’s nobody left who knows and loves Dick Whitman. And if Don still thinks of himself as Dick from time to time, well, Dick is even more alone than Don.
Don sees, or imagines that he sees, a spectral Anna before he makes that call. And this is what gets me – I think it might be the saddest thing in the episode. In his vision, Anna’s holding a small suitcase (a Samsonite, no doubt). But in the morning light, when Don has grieved and sobered up, he comes up with a Samsonite pitch mimicking the previous night’s fight. Instead of thinking about that suitcase that Anna was holding, and what it really means to travel and to put your life inside a box and channeling that into a pitch like the Kodak carousel, he makes a pop culture reference. Either Don has shut himself off so much over the course of the night that he can’t get to those feelings, or Don found something that he can’t exploit – something too painful for him to find the identifiable kernel that will resonate with everybody else. What makes Don a great ad man is that he can scrape those depths of emotion to find what is true and universal, but his grief has left him with something he can’t examine. Don Draper is well and truly lost.
What a fantastic episode.
By the way, check out the new issue of Rolling Stone, which has Mad Men on the cover. There’s a really good feature article that gets at some interesting stuff, and reveals some surprising facts. Did you know Matthew Weiner won $8,500 on Jeopardy? It’s well worth picking up.
