Mad Men Season 2, Episode 5: Like it never happened

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Mad Men Season 2, Episode 5: Like it never happened

POSTED: Friday, August 29, 2008, 5:01 PM

Filed Under: TV Mad Men

If you're gonna do the drivin', I'm gonna do the drinkin'

amctv.com

The good news is that as of Episode 5, Mad Men is totally 100 percent back on track: Great writing and great direction. Pete and Trudy Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser and Alison Brie) enter the brave new world of 1960s fertility treatment, Joan (Christina Hendricks) gets engaged and Rachel Mencken (Now Rachel Katz, played by Philly's Maggie Siff)) turns up briefly just to confuse everyone. Don (Jon Hamm) has a new secretary (Peyton List) who disappoints Joan with her scandalous 8-inch neckline. Don and sometime-mistress Bobbie (Melinda McGraw) screw up big time, and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) saves them. In the process we finally learn a. what Peggy was doing between 1960 and 1962; b. what Bobbie is doing in the series at all, and, by extension c. what the hell this season is supposed to be about.

The bad news is that the author of these recaps has an entire semester of lesson plans to write and cannot give this episode this week the 1000-plus words it deserves. So, in summation, Season 2 is about Peggy. We learn that after her kid was born, she had a nervous breakdown and lay sedated in a state mental ward until Don paid her a surprise visit and schooled her in the ways of pathological compartmentalization, a technique in which he excels.

We know all this because of a subplot in which Bobbie lures Don away from work to hang out at a hotel bar, where they run into Rachel, now married to an awesome 1960s nerd named Tilden (Nick Toren). To dispel the awkwardness, Don and Bobbie take a drive up to her shore house in Long Island. An en route makeout session goes awry, and they wind up in the drunk tank. Peggy bails them out and for her troubles, gets three days of Bobbie smoking cigarettes in her living room waiting for her shiner to heal. Awkward at first, they soon bro down big time, and we finally realize why Bobbie was written into the series to begin with — once the two have thoroughly bonded, Bobbie gives one of the show's most memorable soliloquies. She's sussed out Peggy, correctly, as talented and fiercely driven, but confounded by the gender politics she's been thrust into. Don't try to play by the rules of the men you work with, Bobbie tells Peggy. (I'm paraphrasing.) She departs, and Peggy's hospital stay is recounted in flashback. Next day at the office, she calls Don "Don."

Cue the cultural revolution.

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