Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But . . .there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place just as real but not as brightly lit . . . a DARKSIDE. Hello and welcome once again to Witless Prattle's inexplicably consistent, determinedly swift (even when my cable goes out, as it did last week) coverage for Mad Men. Last week was a somewhat grim episode that was so bleak Robert Kennedy's assassination seemed like an afterthought. Let's see if we get back to the rollicking thigh-slapping comedy that Mad Men is known for this week
"THE CRASH"
"Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse."
Appropriate to the overall theme of the episode, we begin with some real Hunter Thompson shit, as Ken Cosgrove, driving an Impala, crashes because he's apparently picked up a group of authentic lunatics to ride around with. This is a bit of a microcosm of what is proving to be Firm Yet To Be Named's overall problem--while GM pays their bills, they're not running any of their work--they have to prepare stuff on a very rigorous schedule, but it's not getting out and has to go through such a torturous approval process that it seems to be bleeding FYTBN white.
Not that Don is really doing terribly well. The whole business with Sylvia giving the old heave-ho has led to him contracting a case of mildly stalking her. It nearly blows everything wide open, and Don is absolutely furious when Sylvia tells him to knock it the hell off and he starts flashing back to when he had a real bad chest cold during his youth in the whorehouse and he was nursed back to health and also got his first lay (this has not been my experience recuperating when I was sick. That's . . .not something I feel like I missed out on). He's feeling bad.
With the death of Gleason (the guy who'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer) and the creative drain Chevy's putting on everyone, really everyone is either sick or their energy flags. This leads Cutler to suggest everyone go up and get a B12 shot in the ass, which causes two things to happen--one, everyone gets a shot in the ass and two, the entire episode gets really effing crazy and almost defies my ability to review it, as just when I think that I may have some notion of what's going on, Culter and Stan are having a footrace, Cosgrove tap-dances for little adequately explored reason, and Stan is letting people throw pencils into his arm.
Man, I can't wait for the 80's when everyone mellows out on calming, blissful cocaine.
It was quite nice of the writers to reference The Prisoner episode "Free For All," wherein No. 6 is drugged to the point of insanity and the whole episode gets so crazy and baroque it makes terrifyingly little sense just to make it plain what we'd be up to tonight.
Meanwhile, Don is getting crazier, Sally's reading Rosemary's Baby and stumbling upon someone breaking into the apartment Sally, proving she probably wasn't the right person to be invested with loco parentis after all (Megan had to go to a play and Don is still buzzed out of his mind) Bobby's not much help when he discovers the person breaking in, which . . .well, that's not the stupidest thing that happens this episode.
Do you know, I think I might actually be high right now writing this. I'm not sure anymore.
That would be this: Don, meanwhile has been busy . . .coming up with the perfect way to woo Sylvia back, even though that wasn't what he got the shot for or what he was supposed to be working on, and everyone's so buzzed on the same shot they can't recognise how crackheaded his logic is. Peggy looks exasperated by all this and finally goes home. She has a point.
Thankfully there is a kernel of insight to be gained by all this--in the wake of the flashback with Don and Amee the whore, we get a bit of insight into Don: namely that after his first sexual experience, Amee got kicked out and he got the shit thrashed out of him with a wooden spoon, and in the immortal words of Lana Kane "A WHOLE lot of shit just made sense."
Man, this was a . . .confounding episode. It was never boring, I'll give it that. I guess after the "Roger takes LSD" episode they just decided "Hell with it, let's do the WHOLE EPISODE like that and see what people make of it." I can't say it was bad--lord knows it wasn't mediocre or boring.
And that's it for this week. Join us next week When Betty decides to dye her hair pink and try out for Gerry Anderson's UFO, Harry Crane's sideburns join into a full and yet somehow infinitely more nasty beard, and Don can't stop rubbing hamburgers all over his naked body. All of these things guaranteed to never happen (unless the doctor hands out more B12 shots) but in the sickest imaginings of Mad Men reviewers looking for a way to button their reviews and tease for next week. Join us next time for "The Better Half!"
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Kazekage's Web "Empire" . . .
It's that time again!
GUNMETAL BLACK has just completed a new update!
Included in this update is:
4 new short stories in the "Stories" section:
-"Downtown Train"
-"Snakes and Arrows"
-"Poison in Power"
-"Loser"
-10 new pics from me in the Gallery
-14 new fanarts
-1 new pic in the Mecha section.
I'm making a positive effort to make sure updates come at a faster clip than they have been. I certainly hope you stop by and like what you see.
GUNMETAL BLACK has just completed a new update!
Included in this update is:
4 new short stories in the "Stories" section:
-"Downtown Train"
-"Snakes and Arrows"
-"Poison in Power"
-"Loser"
-10 new pics from me in the Gallery
-14 new fanarts
-1 new pic in the Mecha section.
I'm making a positive effort to make sure updates come at a faster clip than they have been. I certainly hope you stop by and like what you see.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
MAD MEN 6.7--"Man With A Plan"
A city built upon delusions: New York. There, many ad execs who believe that angst is power, fight battles that happen entirely in a one (and occasionally two) hour block every Sunday night for about 13 weeks at a time. They are the Advertising Sentai: Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Cutler Gleason Chaough and their story isn't over yet!
Man, last week was pretty eventful, wasn't it? Fresh off burning Jaguar and alienating everyone then going after Chevrolet and merging his agency with Ted Chaough's just to get it. Of course, this is all in pursuit of advertising the Chevy Vega, so it's pretty much still a poisoned chalice, but as I said last week--Mad Men doesn't usually jump ahead like this until the end of the season, so let's see what the fallout is likely to be from last week!
"MAN WITH THE PLAN"
"It took 40 minutes to find out no one knows shit about margarine."
So in the wake of the SCDP/CGC merger, there are a lot of growing pains--even with two floors, moving two agencies together is causing no end of friction. Not that everyone's coming along for the ride--Bert Peterson gets fired yet again (and Roger takes a right sadistic pleasure in it--not the ONLY time I'll say this tonight) and everything's getting shuffled around.It's a troubled marriage already--cliques are being formed and new dynamics are causing some friction (Ted Chaough runs the creative side of things with a lighter touch than Don--getting them together to brainstorm about margarine, for God's sake.) Peggy's still not sure where she fits in--she doesn't seem to like the effect that Don's drunken brainstorming session has on Ted and there's a definite difference in approach between the two of them--Ted likes things rigorously systematized and Don likes for sudden bursts of innovation to happen.
Their relationship--confounding and confusing, is a microcosm of what's going on as the merger keeps on--Ted feels like Don's sizing him up more than they're actually doing any work. It's not helped that Ted's tolerance for getting his drank is dwarfed by Don. Peggy gives Don shit for trying to turn Ted into another one of him and they fall into a not-encouraging, yet familiar pattern.
On the plus side, Roger and Cutler are Accounts Bros now. They're getting along great.
Oh, and Ted is a pilot. Given the title of the next episode, this is a worrying association.
Meanwhile, Pete has discovered that it can always get worse. In the wake of losing Vicks thanks to being an utter dicknuts. This has the knock-on effect of marginalizing him at the office to the point where he can't even get a chair at a meeting. To add injury to insult, his mother's going senile and has apparently gone well down the path of getting into "crazy cat lady" territory. Pete handles this with the sensitivity you would think he would--he's an unbearable asshole to her and confounds her willingly. I suppose one could say it's an unpleasant reminder for him that his life is disconnecting around him and he no longer has any place within it, but I think it's more than he's a massive douche who is getting what he deserves. If you scorch the Earth in every direction it's a bit difficult to hang onto much of anything, seeing as how you've already burned it to the ground.
Meanwhile Joan is sick, and it seems like it could be some serious shit--recurring pain, throwing up in her office. This led to some alarming speculation, but apparently it was just an ovarian cyst. The more important news was that Bob, the Phantom of Accounts, actually did something of import to the plot in ensuring she got to the hospital. Joan assumes it's because he was fretting over his job since the axe is swinging in all directions, but her mother's not so sure. In return for her yeoman work, Joan covertly saves Bob's job.
Here's to new alliances, I guess.
The Don and Sylvia thing also sees some motion this week in that she and Don embark on what could only be described as a continuing s/m relationship with Don laying down the law to her and holing her up in a hotel room. This isn't really news--hes been doing this kinda thing off and on as far back as Bobbie Barrett, but it's the first time he's been this overt about it. One wonders if this isn't an attempt to assume some control over some facet of his life given all the tumult with the merger.
In any event, this doesn't work out all that well, as after a few days of being humiliated, Sylvia's Catholic guilt and shame reasserts itself and she breaks it off. Don looks astonished that this could be a thing that is happening to him ("why" is a question that strains the limits of human credibility) and puts up a brave front and tries to go back to Megan and pretend everything's great. He does somewhat less of a sterling job in that regard.
And then Robert Kennedy gets shot and things get worse. So, the answer to the question I was pondering since last week is that the merger doesn't fix very much--it rattles some cages, causes the dynamic to wobble dramatically, and seems to lead to everyone simmering in their own resentments more than a bit. I wondered elsewhere if the notion of putting CGC and SCDP in the same boat was getting the ship righted or putting two sinking ships into a bigger sinking ship. It's not looking good so far.
And that's it for this week! Join us next week when Harry Crane's sideburns take on a malevolent sentience, Pete tells the world that if he could have only one food the rest of his life it would be cherry-flavoured Pez, and Don develops a fetish for Belgian waffles. All this and so much more is absolutely guaranteed not to happen in the next thrilling episode of Mad Men, entitled, "The Crash." With a title like that, it's sure to be the feel-good hit of the season!
Man, last week was pretty eventful, wasn't it? Fresh off burning Jaguar and alienating everyone then going after Chevrolet and merging his agency with Ted Chaough's just to get it. Of course, this is all in pursuit of advertising the Chevy Vega, so it's pretty much still a poisoned chalice, but as I said last week--Mad Men doesn't usually jump ahead like this until the end of the season, so let's see what the fallout is likely to be from last week!
"MAN WITH THE PLAN"
"It took 40 minutes to find out no one knows shit about margarine."
So in the wake of the SCDP/CGC merger, there are a lot of growing pains--even with two floors, moving two agencies together is causing no end of friction. Not that everyone's coming along for the ride--Bert Peterson gets fired yet again (and Roger takes a right sadistic pleasure in it--not the ONLY time I'll say this tonight) and everything's getting shuffled around.It's a troubled marriage already--cliques are being formed and new dynamics are causing some friction (Ted Chaough runs the creative side of things with a lighter touch than Don--getting them together to brainstorm about margarine, for God's sake.) Peggy's still not sure where she fits in--she doesn't seem to like the effect that Don's drunken brainstorming session has on Ted and there's a definite difference in approach between the two of them--Ted likes things rigorously systematized and Don likes for sudden bursts of innovation to happen.
Their relationship--confounding and confusing, is a microcosm of what's going on as the merger keeps on--Ted feels like Don's sizing him up more than they're actually doing any work. It's not helped that Ted's tolerance for getting his drank is dwarfed by Don. Peggy gives Don shit for trying to turn Ted into another one of him and they fall into a not-encouraging, yet familiar pattern.
On the plus side, Roger and Cutler are Accounts Bros now. They're getting along great.
Oh, and Ted is a pilot. Given the title of the next episode, this is a worrying association.
Meanwhile, Pete has discovered that it can always get worse. In the wake of losing Vicks thanks to being an utter dicknuts. This has the knock-on effect of marginalizing him at the office to the point where he can't even get a chair at a meeting. To add injury to insult, his mother's going senile and has apparently gone well down the path of getting into "crazy cat lady" territory. Pete handles this with the sensitivity you would think he would--he's an unbearable asshole to her and confounds her willingly. I suppose one could say it's an unpleasant reminder for him that his life is disconnecting around him and he no longer has any place within it, but I think it's more than he's a massive douche who is getting what he deserves. If you scorch the Earth in every direction it's a bit difficult to hang onto much of anything, seeing as how you've already burned it to the ground.
Meanwhile Joan is sick, and it seems like it could be some serious shit--recurring pain, throwing up in her office. This led to some alarming speculation, but apparently it was just an ovarian cyst. The more important news was that Bob, the Phantom of Accounts, actually did something of import to the plot in ensuring she got to the hospital. Joan assumes it's because he was fretting over his job since the axe is swinging in all directions, but her mother's not so sure. In return for her yeoman work, Joan covertly saves Bob's job.
Here's to new alliances, I guess.
The Don and Sylvia thing also sees some motion this week in that she and Don embark on what could only be described as a continuing s/m relationship with Don laying down the law to her and holing her up in a hotel room. This isn't really news--hes been doing this kinda thing off and on as far back as Bobbie Barrett, but it's the first time he's been this overt about it. One wonders if this isn't an attempt to assume some control over some facet of his life given all the tumult with the merger.
In any event, this doesn't work out all that well, as after a few days of being humiliated, Sylvia's Catholic guilt and shame reasserts itself and she breaks it off. Don looks astonished that this could be a thing that is happening to him ("why" is a question that strains the limits of human credibility) and puts up a brave front and tries to go back to Megan and pretend everything's great. He does somewhat less of a sterling job in that regard.
And then Robert Kennedy gets shot and things get worse. So, the answer to the question I was pondering since last week is that the merger doesn't fix very much--it rattles some cages, causes the dynamic to wobble dramatically, and seems to lead to everyone simmering in their own resentments more than a bit. I wondered elsewhere if the notion of putting CGC and SCDP in the same boat was getting the ship righted or putting two sinking ships into a bigger sinking ship. It's not looking good so far.
And that's it for this week! Join us next week when Harry Crane's sideburns take on a malevolent sentience, Pete tells the world that if he could have only one food the rest of his life it would be cherry-flavoured Pez, and Don develops a fetish for Belgian waffles. All this and so much more is absolutely guaranteed not to happen in the next thrilling episode of Mad Men, entitled, "The Crash." With a title like that, it's sure to be the feel-good hit of the season!
Sunday, May 5, 2013
MAD MEN 6.6--"For Immediate Release"
MAD MEN--A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Don Draper, a sexy, inscrutable womanizer stricken with permanent ennui in a world of social and political upheaval. He also doesn't have a talking car (alas) and this this where my homage falls apart. Anyways--welcome once again to the halfway point of our coverage of Mad Men's penultimate season. Last week, we crossed a a major threshold into 1968 as our gang dealt with the fallout of the assassination of Martin Luther King (which, among other things, gave us another splendid moment of perfect assholery--seasoned with indirect racism-- by Harry Crane) Henry Francis explored the notion of running for state Senate, Don and Bobby fucked off from the main plot to take in Planet of the Apes, and Peggy contemplated buying an apartment. What awaits us this week? There's no time like the present to learn about the past!
"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE"
"It was mutually-assured destruction"
The big news of the week is helpfully in the first scene--apparently Pete and Joan are scheming to take SCDP public, which would net them quite a huge amount of cash for their shares, but before that happens, they have to get Don on board (who's being kept in the dark, not unlike how they froze him out of the Jaguar thing) Pete, in his usual irritating douchebag way, is acting like his conquered the world already, even though it's far from a done deal and tries to use that confidence to get back in with Trudy on one of his rare visits home, in a way that allows him to be both creepy and an asshole. Plus, I have to look at Pete in his boxer shorts. Thanks for that, Mad Men.
There's all sorts of stuff swirling around however, that could screw this IPO thing up--for one thing, there's an ominous meeting with Jaguar that is sure to involve the fallout from Don intentionally blowing up Herb the Jagoff's plan to get the ad money funneled his way. This comes to a head at a ghastly dinner with Ghastly herb and his ghastly wife (leavened only by Marie viciously tearing them down in French--at last, her passive-aggressive viciousness is actually used for good) Don, however, decides to be more overt and when Herb springs his next idea on him (planting one of his guys in on creative so they can better pivot SCDP's efforts in his direction) Don burns the whole thing down by telling Herb to shove it. Whole Herb does have a point that the customer is always right, Don can't see past the utter awfulness that was done to get Jaguar and has (one gets the impression) looking for an excuse to scorch the earth between them.
This has the side effect of torpedoing the IPO and Don incurs he wrath if Pete (because he stole his thunder and ruined his Big Moment) and Joan, who speaks truth to Draper (as Peggy did) that he always thinks of himself first and everyone else . . .well, never, and that his asshole grandstanding meant what she did, she did for nothing.
But as the Chinese say, in crisis there is opportunity as well, and Roger has been diligently working to secure a new client, and that client is Chevrolet (which CGC is also trying for, but more on that later) who has a new car they're trying to launch to compete with Ford's Mustang. Being that it's more important than ever that they get it (and it's only going to get worse) Don manfully steps up to the plate to secure it.
Then things get worse. Owing to seeing his father-in-law in the same whorehouse HE frequents, His father-in-law cuts Vick's Chemical out of SCDP, and when Pete goes to confront him, he utterly eviscerates Pete for being unworthy of his daughter and just a real shitheel. He's uh, not wrong. His father in law implores him to do the right thing, and Pete, being Pete, dimes out his father-in-law to Trudy because Pete wouldn't know the right thing if he woke up in bed with it.
Meanwhile, Abe's dream of living in a hip multicultural part of town is going as well as you'd expect one of Abe's ideas to go--people defaecate on the stairs up to their apartment and Abe is incapable of hammering a nail without causing himself injury. Peggy seems to be in a permanent state of quiet exasperation.Peggy's hallucinating getting all up ons Ted Chaough, which may or may not be the paint fumes, or the tipping point with Abe (who says 1968 is going to be hunky-dory for here on in, proving that left or right, NO ONE is really good at seeing the face of 1968 to come) Peggy liked Ted a lot because he's not Don, who she's worked for and liked it so much she moved over to CGC. Peggy will have a sudden attack of irony in a bit.
OK, back to CGC and the Chevrolet thing. They're tying themselves in knots over it and we meet the other third of the Cutler, Gleason and Chaough partnership--Cutler, who's suffering from pancreatic cancer (I don;t know why you say "hello," I saw "goodbye") Cashing Cutler out will cripple their company if they don't have Chevy's car (having thrown Alfa Romeo overboard to get it) CGC and SCDP are very much in parallel positions--everything is balanced on a hair, and given that CGC and SCDP are both small agencies fighting it out with the big guys (see the Heinz thing earlier this season) More on that . . .right now.
Thing is, when everything's balanced on a hair, and there's nothing left to lose, there are two choices. You blow everything up (as Pete did with his family, Dr. Rosen quitting his job, and Don did with Jaguar) or, seized with a crazy idea that just might work, you roll the hard six.
Just as Don did at the end of Season 3, when he didn't want to work for McCann, he springs an idea at a despondent Ted Chaough. They're both tired of being small fry agencies, manipulated by the bigger agencies to get their creative so they can give it to larger firms.
Don has an idea--why don't they merge?
And they do. They get Chevrolet, they merge and two former rivals are now side by side and Peggy's back with Don, which may or may not be a good thing. Peggy's reaction to the news is utter shock, as you might imagine. Draper kept his word that he'd spend the rest of his life trying to hire her, and Peggy's attempt to get away from him has drawn her back in.
There's hope and fear, because while they scored a big win and did something extraordinary . . .things are still uncertain and they're still hanging on the abyss . . .there's just some more company, and a lot more days in a very perilous year yet to come.
There was a LOT to unpack in this episode. The notion of destruction--due to pride, or fear, or anger, or spite--the idea of tearing people apart and setting people against people on the one hand, the idea of making peace with your perpetual rivals to stave off imminent destruction on the other, and the idea of getting back in bed with the people you've been desperate to flee. I'm kinda shocked this didn't get held back for a season finale, so much heavy-gravity stuff happened. I now have no idea how things are gonna play out for the remaining seven episodes.
And that's all for this week. Join us next week when Peggy makes a playhouse in a refrigerator box, Joan can't stop making Japanese lanterns, Roger is endlessly fascinated with a spinning button on a string, and Pete won't stop huffing mucilage. None of this arts and crafts mania straight from the World Book's "Make and Do" volume is likely to happen in our next thrilling episode, entitled: "Man with a Plan." It's sure to be a tasteful mix of the 60's, 70's, 80's and today!
"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE"
"It was mutually-assured destruction"
The big news of the week is helpfully in the first scene--apparently Pete and Joan are scheming to take SCDP public, which would net them quite a huge amount of cash for their shares, but before that happens, they have to get Don on board (who's being kept in the dark, not unlike how they froze him out of the Jaguar thing) Pete, in his usual irritating douchebag way, is acting like his conquered the world already, even though it's far from a done deal and tries to use that confidence to get back in with Trudy on one of his rare visits home, in a way that allows him to be both creepy and an asshole. Plus, I have to look at Pete in his boxer shorts. Thanks for that, Mad Men.
There's all sorts of stuff swirling around however, that could screw this IPO thing up--for one thing, there's an ominous meeting with Jaguar that is sure to involve the fallout from Don intentionally blowing up Herb the Jagoff's plan to get the ad money funneled his way. This comes to a head at a ghastly dinner with Ghastly herb and his ghastly wife (leavened only by Marie viciously tearing them down in French--at last, her passive-aggressive viciousness is actually used for good) Don, however, decides to be more overt and when Herb springs his next idea on him (planting one of his guys in on creative so they can better pivot SCDP's efforts in his direction) Don burns the whole thing down by telling Herb to shove it. Whole Herb does have a point that the customer is always right, Don can't see past the utter awfulness that was done to get Jaguar and has (one gets the impression) looking for an excuse to scorch the earth between them.
This has the side effect of torpedoing the IPO and Don incurs he wrath if Pete (because he stole his thunder and ruined his Big Moment) and Joan, who speaks truth to Draper (as Peggy did) that he always thinks of himself first and everyone else . . .well, never, and that his asshole grandstanding meant what she did, she did for nothing.
But as the Chinese say, in crisis there is opportunity as well, and Roger has been diligently working to secure a new client, and that client is Chevrolet (which CGC is also trying for, but more on that later) who has a new car they're trying to launch to compete with Ford's Mustang. Being that it's more important than ever that they get it (and it's only going to get worse) Don manfully steps up to the plate to secure it.
Then things get worse. Owing to seeing his father-in-law in the same whorehouse HE frequents, His father-in-law cuts Vick's Chemical out of SCDP, and when Pete goes to confront him, he utterly eviscerates Pete for being unworthy of his daughter and just a real shitheel. He's uh, not wrong. His father in law implores him to do the right thing, and Pete, being Pete, dimes out his father-in-law to Trudy because Pete wouldn't know the right thing if he woke up in bed with it.
Meanwhile, Abe's dream of living in a hip multicultural part of town is going as well as you'd expect one of Abe's ideas to go--people defaecate on the stairs up to their apartment and Abe is incapable of hammering a nail without causing himself injury. Peggy seems to be in a permanent state of quiet exasperation.Peggy's hallucinating getting all up ons Ted Chaough, which may or may not be the paint fumes, or the tipping point with Abe (who says 1968 is going to be hunky-dory for here on in, proving that left or right, NO ONE is really good at seeing the face of 1968 to come) Peggy liked Ted a lot because he's not Don, who she's worked for and liked it so much she moved over to CGC. Peggy will have a sudden attack of irony in a bit.
OK, back to CGC and the Chevrolet thing. They're tying themselves in knots over it and we meet the other third of the Cutler, Gleason and Chaough partnership--Cutler, who's suffering from pancreatic cancer (I don;t know why you say "hello," I saw "goodbye") Cashing Cutler out will cripple their company if they don't have Chevy's car (having thrown Alfa Romeo overboard to get it) CGC and SCDP are very much in parallel positions--everything is balanced on a hair, and given that CGC and SCDP are both small agencies fighting it out with the big guys (see the Heinz thing earlier this season) More on that . . .right now.
Thing is, when everything's balanced on a hair, and there's nothing left to lose, there are two choices. You blow everything up (as Pete did with his family, Dr. Rosen quitting his job, and Don did with Jaguar) or, seized with a crazy idea that just might work, you roll the hard six.
Just as Don did at the end of Season 3, when he didn't want to work for McCann, he springs an idea at a despondent Ted Chaough. They're both tired of being small fry agencies, manipulated by the bigger agencies to get their creative so they can give it to larger firms.
Don has an idea--why don't they merge?
And they do. They get Chevrolet, they merge and two former rivals are now side by side and Peggy's back with Don, which may or may not be a good thing. Peggy's reaction to the news is utter shock, as you might imagine. Draper kept his word that he'd spend the rest of his life trying to hire her, and Peggy's attempt to get away from him has drawn her back in.
There's hope and fear, because while they scored a big win and did something extraordinary . . .things are still uncertain and they're still hanging on the abyss . . .there's just some more company, and a lot more days in a very perilous year yet to come.
There was a LOT to unpack in this episode. The notion of destruction--due to pride, or fear, or anger, or spite--the idea of tearing people apart and setting people against people on the one hand, the idea of making peace with your perpetual rivals to stave off imminent destruction on the other, and the idea of getting back in bed with the people you've been desperate to flee. I'm kinda shocked this didn't get held back for a season finale, so much heavy-gravity stuff happened. I now have no idea how things are gonna play out for the remaining seven episodes.
And that's all for this week. Join us next week when Peggy makes a playhouse in a refrigerator box, Joan can't stop making Japanese lanterns, Roger is endlessly fascinated with a spinning button on a string, and Pete won't stop huffing mucilage. None of this arts and crafts mania straight from the World Book's "Make and Do" volume is likely to happen in our next thrilling episode, entitled: "Man with a Plan." It's sure to be a tasteful mix of the 60's, 70's, 80's and today!
Saturday, May 4, 2013
IRON MAN WEEK #9--Iron Man 3 (2013)
The good news is it's much better than Iron Man 2, which was a muddled mess that pretended most of the first movie never happened. The plot's clearer and easier to follow, the action is actually pretty well-realized, and while I dreaded having three Iron Man comic refs in the movie that I utterly hate (Extremis! The Mandarin! The woefully stupid Iron Patriot!) it didn't grate on me too bad.
The bad news is, it's not very good, and indeed, barely an Iron Man film. Trying to build a movie around the importance of Tony Stark and Pepper's Potts' relationship is never going to work, because they have the phoniest love affair in a movie brimming with phony shit (I believed in the notion of the genetic whatever stuff they injected you with that let you grow back limbs and burn people or whatever more than any of their scenes together) and despite the movie trying mightily to sell me on how theirs is a True Love, I didn't buy it any more here than I did in the other movies they've been in.
I'd be willing to let that slide if the movie moved along a little more briskly, but then there's that interlude in Tennessee with the cute kid, which stops the movie totally dead and it never quite gets its momentum back. The movie seems to want to have this come across as very emotional even if it's kidding it at every opportunity, but since it never commits one way or another, it feels more like they're just killing time.Plus, the kid is pretty much just a ball of "cute kid" cliches and never really becomes his own character.
The villains are a mixed bag. I know a lot of people have whined about the twist with the Mandarin, but in all honesty, I loved that part--the Mandarin totally sucks and was used appropriately. The other two bad guys don't make much of an impression (mostly because the movie is too busy trying to set up a big third-act reveal to give them the requisite amount of character for it to be the SHOCKING SWERVE it's supposed to be) but I'm sure the brief for the third movie was "look, do whatever, just make sure it's not another guy in an Iron man-like suit again this time," and in that, it succeeded.
The final battle with the multiple armour suits is OK in theory, but it never quite opens up and becomes as awesome as it should be and soon devolved into "Stark fights a guy, suit gets damaged, he hops into another suit, lather, rinse, repeat." The out of armour action sequences are actually pretty good and have some really clever bits in there, but the movie doesn't seem all that determined to apply the same sort of imagination to the armour combat sequences.
So in all, it doesn't make the mistakes Iron Man 2 did, but makes a whole bunch of new ones instead, plus it's an Iron Man movie which is trying really hard to be something other than an Iron Man movie, so while it wasn't wrong footed enough for me to hate it, I can;t say I'm any any hurry to re-watch it again.
The bad news is, it's not very good, and indeed, barely an Iron Man film. Trying to build a movie around the importance of Tony Stark and Pepper's Potts' relationship is never going to work, because they have the phoniest love affair in a movie brimming with phony shit (I believed in the notion of the genetic whatever stuff they injected you with that let you grow back limbs and burn people or whatever more than any of their scenes together) and despite the movie trying mightily to sell me on how theirs is a True Love, I didn't buy it any more here than I did in the other movies they've been in.
I'd be willing to let that slide if the movie moved along a little more briskly, but then there's that interlude in Tennessee with the cute kid, which stops the movie totally dead and it never quite gets its momentum back. The movie seems to want to have this come across as very emotional even if it's kidding it at every opportunity, but since it never commits one way or another, it feels more like they're just killing time.Plus, the kid is pretty much just a ball of "cute kid" cliches and never really becomes his own character.
The villains are a mixed bag. I know a lot of people have whined about the twist with the Mandarin, but in all honesty, I loved that part--the Mandarin totally sucks and was used appropriately. The other two bad guys don't make much of an impression (mostly because the movie is too busy trying to set up a big third-act reveal to give them the requisite amount of character for it to be the SHOCKING SWERVE it's supposed to be) but I'm sure the brief for the third movie was "look, do whatever, just make sure it's not another guy in an Iron man-like suit again this time," and in that, it succeeded.
The final battle with the multiple armour suits is OK in theory, but it never quite opens up and becomes as awesome as it should be and soon devolved into "Stark fights a guy, suit gets damaged, he hops into another suit, lather, rinse, repeat." The out of armour action sequences are actually pretty good and have some really clever bits in there, but the movie doesn't seem all that determined to apply the same sort of imagination to the armour combat sequences.
So in all, it doesn't make the mistakes Iron Man 2 did, but makes a whole bunch of new ones instead, plus it's an Iron Man movie which is trying really hard to be something other than an Iron Man movie, so while it wasn't wrong footed enough for me to hate it, I can;t say I'm any any hurry to re-watch it again.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Way Back When--X-CUTIONER'S SONG
Sometimes, just when you think you have nothing to say and you're plotting your exit strategy from writing about comics, a hardcover sale happens and there comes to be something you wanted to talk about after all.
This is one of those times.
Looked at more than 20 years later, X-Cutioner's Song is one of the more favourably remembered of the big X-Crossovers (Age of Apocalypse being the other) and is also, more or less, the first of a new generation of crossovers across the X-line.
Not that there hadn't been X-crossovers before--there had been since 1987 at least, every summer. But those were usually spearheaded by one writer or one lead writer and not necessarily shaped by editorial. X-Cutioner's Song is like them, only very different, because X-Cutioner's Song has the fingerprints of editorial all over it. This is unapologetically a comic planned by committee to run as efficiently as is humanly possible.
So far who cares,I hear you asking. Well X-Cutioner's Song is worth looking at because of it's place in history. Y'see, X-Cutioner's Song is the final recovery of a fumble Marvel had been suffering under since most of their star X-Men artists decamped to Image.
For those of you who came in late: About a year before this time, there'd been this big re-alignment of the X-Books, which coincided with Jim lee and Rob Liefeld et al being at their peak of popularity. They all got re-launched books with brand-spanking new variant covers that pumped up the sales numbers and while they were pretty much all shallow spectacle, they sold like golden hotcakes, and they could literally write their own ticket at Marvel.
Then they found out they could write another, bigger, ticket at Image, and them Marvel was left holding the bag with four titles, three of which didn't have big artists to draw (no pun intended) anymore, and since they'd been writing the books (*ahem* sorta . . .) as well, the books were now pretty well cut adrift.
Essentially, Marvel had been pantsed, especially as they'd just been thumping their chests about the big summer crossover that they had in the works called "Sins of the Father." No one knew what it was about, but given that they three biggest artists in comics were working on it, it was going to be huge.
Until of course, they weren't and it wasn't. Scrambling desperately for something to fill that block of time, they moved like lighting and so, X-Cutioner's Song was born, and quickly.
It was decided they'd use this forced course-correction as a way to wind up some rogue subplots banging around from the big line-wide shakeup last year, specifically a throwaway bit Rob Liefeld did in New Mutants #100 wherein it was revealed that under his ridiculous helmet, armoured bad guy Stryfe looked exactly like unarmoured good guy Cable. I doubt very much Liefeld had an explanation for it--it was just a cool way to button a series and hype people up for X-Force, but Marvel never met a continuity backwater it wouldn't strip-mine, so there it is. Cable, for his part, also had a few loose plot threads to tie up--namely, it had been heavily suggested he was Cyclops' son sent forward into the future to battle Apocalypse, because Cyclops is an awful, awful human being and fails miserably at the sort of thing you and I succeed at casually.
That was the plan. anyway.
Taking the field to make this twelve-issue (four issues per month for three months) were Scott Lobdell (who'd managed to be the last person standing after 4-5 people flaked out before him) and Brandon Peterson on Uncanny X-Men, Peter David and Jae Lee on X-Factor, and, side by side with Greg Capullo on X-Force and Andy Kubert on X-Men, and writing prose so purple it could have been a damn Prince album, Fabian Nicieza.
X-Cutioner's Song doesn't need to be 12 issues--it really doesn't. But it doesn't drag either, because there's usually a lot of frenetic action in every single issue so there's never really a moment when people are sitting around for a whole issue waiting for something to happen. This rather schizophrenic melange means that some things don't quite make a lot of sense, like the whole point of the story.
The plot is this: Stryfe. who looks like Cable, shoots Professor X, which then frames Cable and X-Force for the crime. Meanwhile, Apocalypse's flunkies kidnap Cyclops and Marvel Girl, but it's not Apocalypse, it's Mister Sinister (one notes with some amusement that X-Cutioner's Song could easily have been retitled "Three Villains With Unclear Motivations Do Stuff That Makes Little To No Sense For Twelve Issues.") After fighting each other for awhile, X-Force teams up with X-Factor and the X-Men and they fight the Mutant Liberation Front (the job guys of the X-Men universe for the past 2 years) Stryfe stuff baby food down Cyclops' throat and gets all emo with him and Marvel Girl, then suddenly decides to go beat the tar out of Apocalypse in a way that's supposed to explain everything but doesn't, Apocalypse cures Professor X, then everyone goes to the moon to fight Stryfe, and it all boils down to Cable punching Stryfe through a hole in space-time because even Cable was sick of Stryfe being emo.
The payoff for the whole thing was supposed to have been this: Stryfe was Cyclops' son, sent to the future and raised by Apocalypse, who subsequently went renegade and rebelled against Apocalypse and came back in time because of reasons. Cable was his clone who also fought against Apocalypse like Stryfe but for different reasons, and came back in time to stop Stryfe, because of reasons the writers never really seemed to be all that good about staying clear on.
All would be revealed, they promised, and of course, they backpedaled on it. Cable couldn't be the clone. partly because having a franchise character be a clone would just be stupid and not the kind of thing Marvel would ever do, and mostly because Cable was getting his own book that fall.
Plus, the idea of Stryfe torturing his own mother and father (more or less) for a few issues might have been too dark for the early 90's That, and the fact that whoever Cyclops' son was, one of them was going to be a clone created from someone who born from Cyclops and another clone and at some point it just becomes this ridiculous Russian doll situation, doesn't it?
So yeah, by the end of all this, the actual payoff that was promised never comes--with things turned around, nothing Stryfe does makes any sense at all, and at best this only muddles Cable's origins to the point where he'd The Continuity Headache That Walks Like A Man, Cylcops looks like even more of an ineffectual asshole, and hey guys--there's Havok! So the whole ending, even with Stryfe's parting gift of Mutant AIDS (no, really--that's not a joke) the whole thing collapses five minutes after you close the book.
And in this way would set the tone for all the 90's crossovers to come--promising beginning, competent middle, bait and switch ending. Whether it be "Bloodties," "Age of Apocalypse," "Phalanx Covenant," "Onslaught," or "Operation: Zero Tolerance," one could be sure that the destination was never quite the one promised when you struck out on the trip.
"Let the final moves be made. Let time determine the righteousness of my path."
But I come not to bury X-Cutioner's Song, but to praise it. Despite it's muddled finish and air of general cacophany, it has tremendous energy and everyone does a great job with their parts. Brandon Peterson provides some slick page layouts full of crisp detail, Andy Kubert makes people look completely feral when fighting for their lives, Jae Lee does some interesting things with shadow and negative space in the X-Factor issues that give the rare quiet bits some moody introspection, and Greg Capullo's action scenes are so kinetic they flip the comic from portrait to landscape. It has the courage of it's "crazy action movie" convictions, and thus, I find it difficult to reject it our of hand.
The real winner for me, and (in my copy of the HC) the crown jewel is the gimmicks. When shipped to stores, every issue of X-Cutioner's Song came with a card featuring some of the main characters of the crossover (and stumblebums like the MLF and the Dark Riders) with text on the back that supposedly came from Stryfe, written in character (and, had this been published ten years after it was published, could have been excerpts from his Livejournal) and they are glorious. You may have noticed I've been using bits from them to transition topis in this essay.
I'm sure Fabian Nicieza (who I figure wrote all of these) meant that this supplementary material would help flesh out Stryfe's motivations a bit. It doesn't. It does, however, give him even more opportunities to be utterly drama-queeny:
Stryfe? BIG Linkin Park fan, I'm guessing. He was from the future, y'know.
The cards even got their own comic. Stryfe's Strike File was published a little while after and for those of us who hadn't gotten enough goofy purple prose from the original cards got all that, plus a couple of teasers for plot developments to come, plus two characters (Holocaust and Threnody) who didn't debut for another two years and when they did, were completely different to how they were portrayed here.
It's pretty zany, and like X-Cutioner's Song, is an ideal slice of early 90's kitsch--a brief little moment of Peak Comics before the dark times came along and everyone spent the next fifteen years acting like this kind of stuff didn't happen and we were all very embarrassed when forced to admit it.
X-Cutioner's Song is an almost real-time account of the great post-Image course correction over at Marvel. rather than depend on "hot" artists to move books, they would instead, enter a state of permanent crossover, wherein if they weren't in the middle of a multi-part crossover, they were building to the next one post-haste. In short, sell the story, not the storytellers, and sell the story in multiple profitable bits and pieces to keep the money rolling in.
Naturally, being wiser after the event and far more mature and considerate of our audience, they don't do that sort of purely mercenary nonsense anymore.
This is one of those times.
"Now let my ensuing explosion rock both heaven and hell . . .both yesterday and tomorrow."
Looked at more than 20 years later, X-Cutioner's Song is one of the more favourably remembered of the big X-Crossovers (Age of Apocalypse being the other) and is also, more or less, the first of a new generation of crossovers across the X-line.
Not that there hadn't been X-crossovers before--there had been since 1987 at least, every summer. But those were usually spearheaded by one writer or one lead writer and not necessarily shaped by editorial. X-Cutioner's Song is like them, only very different, because X-Cutioner's Song has the fingerprints of editorial all over it. This is unapologetically a comic planned by committee to run as efficiently as is humanly possible.
So far who cares,I hear you asking. Well X-Cutioner's Song is worth looking at because of it's place in history. Y'see, X-Cutioner's Song is the final recovery of a fumble Marvel had been suffering under since most of their star X-Men artists decamped to Image.
For those of you who came in late: About a year before this time, there'd been this big re-alignment of the X-Books, which coincided with Jim lee and Rob Liefeld et al being at their peak of popularity. They all got re-launched books with brand-spanking new variant covers that pumped up the sales numbers and while they were pretty much all shallow spectacle, they sold like golden hotcakes, and they could literally write their own ticket at Marvel.
Then they found out they could write another, bigger, ticket at Image, and them Marvel was left holding the bag with four titles, three of which didn't have big artists to draw (no pun intended) anymore, and since they'd been writing the books (*ahem* sorta . . .) as well, the books were now pretty well cut adrift.
Essentially, Marvel had been pantsed, especially as they'd just been thumping their chests about the big summer crossover that they had in the works called "Sins of the Father." No one knew what it was about, but given that they three biggest artists in comics were working on it, it was going to be huge.
Until of course, they weren't and it wasn't. Scrambling desperately for something to fill that block of time, they moved like lighting and so, X-Cutioner's Song was born, and quickly.
"Let their wills be forged in the stoking flames of Armageddon."
It was decided they'd use this forced course-correction as a way to wind up some rogue subplots banging around from the big line-wide shakeup last year, specifically a throwaway bit Rob Liefeld did in New Mutants #100 wherein it was revealed that under his ridiculous helmet, armoured bad guy Stryfe looked exactly like unarmoured good guy Cable. I doubt very much Liefeld had an explanation for it--it was just a cool way to button a series and hype people up for X-Force, but Marvel never met a continuity backwater it wouldn't strip-mine, so there it is. Cable, for his part, also had a few loose plot threads to tie up--namely, it had been heavily suggested he was Cyclops' son sent forward into the future to battle Apocalypse, because Cyclops is an awful, awful human being and fails miserably at the sort of thing you and I succeed at casually.
That was the plan. anyway.
Taking the field to make this twelve-issue (four issues per month for three months) were Scott Lobdell (who'd managed to be the last person standing after 4-5 people flaked out before him) and Brandon Peterson on Uncanny X-Men, Peter David and Jae Lee on X-Factor, and, side by side with Greg Capullo on X-Force and Andy Kubert on X-Men, and writing prose so purple it could have been a damn Prince album, Fabian Nicieza.
"I hold the shiny silver quarter. It catches the devil's light just so."
X-Cutioner's Song doesn't need to be 12 issues--it really doesn't. But it doesn't drag either, because there's usually a lot of frenetic action in every single issue so there's never really a moment when people are sitting around for a whole issue waiting for something to happen. This rather schizophrenic melange means that some things don't quite make a lot of sense, like the whole point of the story.
The plot is this: Stryfe. who looks like Cable, shoots Professor X, which then frames Cable and X-Force for the crime. Meanwhile, Apocalypse's flunkies kidnap Cyclops and Marvel Girl, but it's not Apocalypse, it's Mister Sinister (one notes with some amusement that X-Cutioner's Song could easily have been retitled "Three Villains With Unclear Motivations Do Stuff That Makes Little To No Sense For Twelve Issues.") After fighting each other for awhile, X-Force teams up with X-Factor and the X-Men and they fight the Mutant Liberation Front (the job guys of the X-Men universe for the past 2 years) Stryfe stuff baby food down Cyclops' throat and gets all emo with him and Marvel Girl, then suddenly decides to go beat the tar out of Apocalypse in a way that's supposed to explain everything but doesn't, Apocalypse cures Professor X, then everyone goes to the moon to fight Stryfe, and it all boils down to Cable punching Stryfe through a hole in space-time because even Cable was sick of Stryfe being emo.
The payoff for the whole thing was supposed to have been this: Stryfe was Cyclops' son, sent to the future and raised by Apocalypse, who subsequently went renegade and rebelled against Apocalypse and came back in time because of reasons. Cable was his clone who also fought against Apocalypse like Stryfe but for different reasons, and came back in time to stop Stryfe, because of reasons the writers never really seemed to be all that good about staying clear on.
All would be revealed, they promised, and of course, they backpedaled on it. Cable couldn't be the clone. partly because having a franchise character be a clone would just be stupid and not the kind of thing Marvel would ever do, and mostly because Cable was getting his own book that fall.
Plus, the idea of Stryfe torturing his own mother and father (more or less) for a few issues might have been too dark for the early 90's That, and the fact that whoever Cyclops' son was, one of them was going to be a clone created from someone who born from Cyclops and another clone and at some point it just becomes this ridiculous Russian doll situation, doesn't it?
So yeah, by the end of all this, the actual payoff that was promised never comes--with things turned around, nothing Stryfe does makes any sense at all, and at best this only muddles Cable's origins to the point where he'd The Continuity Headache That Walks Like A Man, Cylcops looks like even more of an ineffectual asshole, and hey guys--there's Havok! So the whole ending, even with Stryfe's parting gift of Mutant AIDS (no, really--that's not a joke) the whole thing collapses five minutes after you close the book.
And in this way would set the tone for all the 90's crossovers to come--promising beginning, competent middle, bait and switch ending. Whether it be "Bloodties," "Age of Apocalypse," "Phalanx Covenant," "Onslaught," or "Operation: Zero Tolerance," one could be sure that the destination was never quite the one promised when you struck out on the trip.
"Let the final moves be made. Let time determine the righteousness of my path."
But I come not to bury X-Cutioner's Song, but to praise it. Despite it's muddled finish and air of general cacophany, it has tremendous energy and everyone does a great job with their parts. Brandon Peterson provides some slick page layouts full of crisp detail, Andy Kubert makes people look completely feral when fighting for their lives, Jae Lee does some interesting things with shadow and negative space in the X-Factor issues that give the rare quiet bits some moody introspection, and Greg Capullo's action scenes are so kinetic they flip the comic from portrait to landscape. It has the courage of it's "crazy action movie" convictions, and thus, I find it difficult to reject it our of hand.
The real winner for me, and (in my copy of the HC) the crown jewel is the gimmicks. When shipped to stores, every issue of X-Cutioner's Song came with a card featuring some of the main characters of the crossover (and stumblebums like the MLF and the Dark Riders) with text on the back that supposedly came from Stryfe, written in character (and, had this been published ten years after it was published, could have been excerpts from his Livejournal) and they are glorious. You may have noticed I've been using bits from them to transition topis in this essay.
I'm sure Fabian Nicieza (who I figure wrote all of these) meant that this supplementary material would help flesh out Stryfe's motivations a bit. It doesn't. It does, however, give him even more opportunities to be utterly drama-queeny:
"The final move. White king against black king. Yet here, nothing but grey reigns supreme.Shades of grey, of uncertainty, confusion, anger, love and hate.
Shades of me.
Shades of you.
Shades of them."
Stryfe? BIG Linkin Park fan, I'm guessing. He was from the future, y'know.
The cards even got their own comic. Stryfe's Strike File was published a little while after and for those of us who hadn't gotten enough goofy purple prose from the original cards got all that, plus a couple of teasers for plot developments to come, plus two characters (Holocaust and Threnody) who didn't debut for another two years and when they did, were completely different to how they were portrayed here.
It's pretty zany, and like X-Cutioner's Song, is an ideal slice of early 90's kitsch--a brief little moment of Peak Comics before the dark times came along and everyone spent the next fifteen years acting like this kind of stuff didn't happen and we were all very embarrassed when forced to admit it.
X-Cutioner's Song is an almost real-time account of the great post-Image course correction over at Marvel. rather than depend on "hot" artists to move books, they would instead, enter a state of permanent crossover, wherein if they weren't in the middle of a multi-part crossover, they were building to the next one post-haste. In short, sell the story, not the storytellers, and sell the story in multiple profitable bits and pieces to keep the money rolling in.
Naturally, being wiser after the event and far more mature and considerate of our audience, they don't do that sort of purely mercenary nonsense anymore.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
MAD MEN 6.5--"The Flood"
If it's Sunday at ten o'clock, that can only mean it's time once again for Mad Men, our weekly sojourn into the world of 1960's advertising, ennui, sideburns, and horribly patterned jackets. Last week was another thigh-slapper of an episode, featuring Joan giving Harry Crane the DEATH STARE, Harry Crane being an asshole, Don being an cheating asshole, Pete being a repulsive asshole, and Megan looking sad and weepy. Oh, and in an attempt to score the Heinz Ketchup account, SCDP wagered what they had of their business and lost.
What exciting thing does this week's episode hold? Let's find out!
"THE FLOOD"
"Don't do anything stupid"
"It's too late--I'm going to Harlem in a tuxedo."
It looks like things are going to go one way--it's time for the Ad Club of New York's awards ceremony and Megan's up for an Award as is Peggy (and their respective agencies are given a seat somewhere in New Jersey, apparently) and things seem set up for a really ghastly evening full of sublimated tension, when the news drops--Martin Luther King has been shot. Needless to say, this stops the world dead in its tracks (though not so much that Pete can't be an asshole about--some things can't be put on hold.
Proving how unusual this episode is, Bobby actually gets a subplot to himself (not a big one, but when they remember a Draper child other than Sally, it's well worth noting) wherein he's completely aggravated by an uncertain world and wallpaper that doesn't line up (in what must be said is a rather laboured metaphor for the events of the episode and those promised) but I did get a kick out of he and Don going to see Planet of the Apes. Meanwhile, a whole season after all of this got set up, Ginsburg actually gets a follow-up on his subplot, as his Topol-esque father sets him up on a blind date, and Ginsburg, ever eager not to play to stereotypes, Woody Allens his way through the whole thing. I'm sure these kinds of things endear Ginsburg to some people, but . . .dear Lord, it's like the greatest stereotypes of yesterday and today and there's not much character to it.
The death of MLK leads to an interesting ripple effect--given most of the characters are trapped in a city that's threatening to blow itself apart (in a country equally close to blowing apart) Pete calls Trudy, and you get a sense that it took the upheaval of an assassination for him to get how badly he screwed thing up with Trudy, but contrition or not, she's not having it (and good on her) Pete looks shattered after she hangs up on him, trapped om a city busy burning itself down. This leads to him getting really pissed off that Harry's main source of upset about the whole business is they're losing TV ads, which gets on Pete's nerves to the extent that he straight-up calls him a racist (which Harry doesn't exactly make a case against--he's now two for two with being an unbearable dicknuts on a weekly basis) and Bert has to keep it from exploding into a straight-up fist-fight.
Meanwhile, our other "favourite" peripheral characters are happy to get in on the jerk-assery as well--Megan's dad thinks it's splendid news, which Megan summarizes as "I'm so sick of his Marxist bullshit." Betty decides to needle Don about not picking up the kids and forcing him to drive through Harlem because the one thing Betty Draper can not afford to have is a sense of proportion. Also, her with black hair is really weird. But things are going well-ish for her, as this whole thing has really lite a fire under Henry's hard-line conservatism and he's setting his sights on a seat in the state Senate. He also thinks that the MLK thing is as bad as it's going to be. The lesson here is DON'T put a lot of faith in Henry Francis' predictions if you know . . .anything . . .about 1968.
Oh, before I forget, Roger's prospective client--Randall the insurance agent--was a ray of sunshine in a very bleak episode, as he both acted like he'd wandered in from a David Lynch movie and is completely insane. The scene where Roger, Don, Stan, and Ginsburg have to listen to him rattle off his batshit idea and chant like Tecumseh. Don looked even more exasperated than he did when he and Megan were being scouted for some swinging action. It was sublimely hilarious.
Oh, and Peggy's appalled that he rental agent would use the race riots as an excuse to try to underbid for her prospective apartment, but not so much that she doesn't try it out anyway. They don't get it, and Abe's not much help, as that would get in the way of his insufferable effete liberalism, and proposes they try for something in the west 80's.
In the wake of all this and the fact that Don has tried to cope with this by crawling into a bottle and retreating (you can kinda see as he might do, given the last time a major seismic event like this happened--the Kennedy assassination--his life fell apart around him) and he finally tells Megan why--he's not really sure he loves his kids all the time, and hates himself for pretending in the moments in between. Megan looks a little appalled, but given that Betty doesn't seem to love her kids at all (that would, after all, require emotion, and Dr. Soong hasn't installed her chip yet), Don's kind of the least worst parent by default, if nothing else.
This was a pretty heavy episode, and I was pleased they didn't really beat the MLK event into the ground. This was more about the fractures that happen in the wake of something like that and where they point the characters in the wake of something like this. Don gets pushed inward, Henry gets ambitious, Pete has a macrocosm event that sheds a light on what a mess he made of the microcosm of his home life, and Peggy's just trying to find her way through. Oh, and Randall went utterly batshit crazy.
Big events change people, and the big events are just getting started.
And that's all for this week. Join us next week when Roger, Don, and Bert decide to open up a pet store as a front for a ring of burglaries, Joan nets the coveted Johnnie Walker Black account because she ordered it, and Peggy can't stop playing with Tinkertoys. All of these things are guaranteed NOT to happen in seven days in a little tale they're calling "For Immediate Release." It'll be "fun!"
What exciting thing does this week's episode hold? Let's find out!
"THE FLOOD"
"Don't do anything stupid"
"It's too late--I'm going to Harlem in a tuxedo."
It looks like things are going to go one way--it's time for the Ad Club of New York's awards ceremony and Megan's up for an Award as is Peggy (and their respective agencies are given a seat somewhere in New Jersey, apparently) and things seem set up for a really ghastly evening full of sublimated tension, when the news drops--Martin Luther King has been shot. Needless to say, this stops the world dead in its tracks (though not so much that Pete can't be an asshole about--some things can't be put on hold.
Proving how unusual this episode is, Bobby actually gets a subplot to himself (not a big one, but when they remember a Draper child other than Sally, it's well worth noting) wherein he's completely aggravated by an uncertain world and wallpaper that doesn't line up (in what must be said is a rather laboured metaphor for the events of the episode and those promised) but I did get a kick out of he and Don going to see Planet of the Apes. Meanwhile, a whole season after all of this got set up, Ginsburg actually gets a follow-up on his subplot, as his Topol-esque father sets him up on a blind date, and Ginsburg, ever eager not to play to stereotypes, Woody Allens his way through the whole thing. I'm sure these kinds of things endear Ginsburg to some people, but . . .dear Lord, it's like the greatest stereotypes of yesterday and today and there's not much character to it.
The death of MLK leads to an interesting ripple effect--given most of the characters are trapped in a city that's threatening to blow itself apart (in a country equally close to blowing apart) Pete calls Trudy, and you get a sense that it took the upheaval of an assassination for him to get how badly he screwed thing up with Trudy, but contrition or not, she's not having it (and good on her) Pete looks shattered after she hangs up on him, trapped om a city busy burning itself down. This leads to him getting really pissed off that Harry's main source of upset about the whole business is they're losing TV ads, which gets on Pete's nerves to the extent that he straight-up calls him a racist (which Harry doesn't exactly make a case against--he's now two for two with being an unbearable dicknuts on a weekly basis) and Bert has to keep it from exploding into a straight-up fist-fight.
Meanwhile, our other "favourite" peripheral characters are happy to get in on the jerk-assery as well--Megan's dad thinks it's splendid news, which Megan summarizes as "I'm so sick of his Marxist bullshit." Betty decides to needle Don about not picking up the kids and forcing him to drive through Harlem because the one thing Betty Draper can not afford to have is a sense of proportion. Also, her with black hair is really weird. But things are going well-ish for her, as this whole thing has really lite a fire under Henry's hard-line conservatism and he's setting his sights on a seat in the state Senate. He also thinks that the MLK thing is as bad as it's going to be. The lesson here is DON'T put a lot of faith in Henry Francis' predictions if you know . . .anything . . .about 1968.
Oh, before I forget, Roger's prospective client--Randall the insurance agent--was a ray of sunshine in a very bleak episode, as he both acted like he'd wandered in from a David Lynch movie and is completely insane. The scene where Roger, Don, Stan, and Ginsburg have to listen to him rattle off his batshit idea and chant like Tecumseh. Don looked even more exasperated than he did when he and Megan were being scouted for some swinging action. It was sublimely hilarious.
Oh, and Peggy's appalled that he rental agent would use the race riots as an excuse to try to underbid for her prospective apartment, but not so much that she doesn't try it out anyway. They don't get it, and Abe's not much help, as that would get in the way of his insufferable effete liberalism, and proposes they try for something in the west 80's.
In the wake of all this and the fact that Don has tried to cope with this by crawling into a bottle and retreating (you can kinda see as he might do, given the last time a major seismic event like this happened--the Kennedy assassination--his life fell apart around him) and he finally tells Megan why--he's not really sure he loves his kids all the time, and hates himself for pretending in the moments in between. Megan looks a little appalled, but given that Betty doesn't seem to love her kids at all (that would, after all, require emotion, and Dr. Soong hasn't installed her chip yet), Don's kind of the least worst parent by default, if nothing else.
This was a pretty heavy episode, and I was pleased they didn't really beat the MLK event into the ground. This was more about the fractures that happen in the wake of something like that and where they point the characters in the wake of something like this. Don gets pushed inward, Henry gets ambitious, Pete has a macrocosm event that sheds a light on what a mess he made of the microcosm of his home life, and Peggy's just trying to find her way through. Oh, and Randall went utterly batshit crazy.
Big events change people, and the big events are just getting started.
And that's all for this week. Join us next week when Roger, Don, and Bert decide to open up a pet store as a front for a ring of burglaries, Joan nets the coveted Johnnie Walker Black account because she ordered it, and Peggy can't stop playing with Tinkertoys. All of these things are guaranteed NOT to happen in seven days in a little tale they're calling "For Immediate Release." It'll be "fun!"
Sunday, April 21, 2013
MAD MEN 6.4--"To Have And To Hold"
In 1963, a crack advertising firm was sent to New York by a series of economic factors for a crime they didn't commit. These men and women promptly escaped from being bought by McCann Advertising and escaped back to Madison Avenue. Today, still sought after by many clients, they survive on clients like Jaguar, 1960s-era angst, and meaning gazes into the middle distance. If you have a problem, if you need something sold, maybe you can hire . . .THE MAD MEN
[Shame on you, Internet, for not having a Youtube of Mad Men in the style of the "A-Team" intro for me to slot in here. However, feel free to imagine it being here and being totally awesome.]
Last week was a pretty grim episode, wasn't it? I mean, sure, it has the awesomeness of having Trudy utterly humble Pete in ways that even the Iron Sheik wouldn't unleash on someone, and Don torpedoing Herb the Jagoff's attempt to get all the ads to feature him, but . . .yeah. Bleak stuff, even for Mad Men.
This week, the title of the episode is "To Have and To Hold," which is the title of the soap that Megan's on. Does this mean something? Let's find out.
"TO HAVE AND TO HOLD"
"We're sitting here waiting for the phone to ring: this IS high school."
We open with that rarest of things--a continuing plot thread from last week (this early, it's quite the thing) Pete and Don have a clandestine meeting (in Pete's hellaciously depressing apartment in the city) with the Heinz Ketchup rep from last week--the one that the Bean rep lost his shit about in an epic "If you so much as look at him, I'll kill all three of us" wobbly. They make plans to work in secret on a spec project to woo Heinz to SCDP, and Don puts Stan in a windowless room to work on the campaign, which so far seems to be Don and Stan hitting a joint and debating what a hot dog really wants on it.
This leads to another baller-move Draper presentation, followed quickly by Peggy's presentation (so much for secrecy) and a wonderful scene where Draper's crew sits with Peggy's crew and learns they've both lost, and even though they're rivals, there's a quiet moment of understanding between the two of them--as small firms, they fight over the scraps.
Well, right before Ken Cosgrove comes in and tells them their secret project has cost them the Heinz beans. Nothing wagered, nothing gained, but a little wagered and everything's lost.
That might be important later.
Meanwhile, Joan gets a visitor--Kate (who I think was her roommate from way back in Season 1? I may be wrong there) She's repping for Mary Kay, but planning to interview with Avon because women competing with women is really rough. This is contrasted with Joan, who's now a partner at SCDP (with all the gnashing of teeth the memory of that entails) and Joan's mom--who, you'll recall spent most of Season 4 punching holes in her boat is actually proud of her, because she has money and power.
Think on that--we'll come back to it a little later. In the meantime, take a shot of Johnnie Walker.
Meanwhile, Dawn (Don's secretary that they hired to take the curse off being construed as racist last season) gets a subplot, which is pretty stunning on its own, but more for the knock-on effect. She punches fellow secretary Scarlet's time card so she can skip out on five hours worth of work, and this draws the attention of Joan, who inflicts her DEATH STARE on both of them, forces out the truth, and she fires Scarlet on the spot, threatening to do the same to Dawn.
Unfortunately, Scarlet's Harry Crane's secretary and fuck-buddy and this touches off Harry Crane's molting from "homunculus with ridiculous sideburns" to "Omega-level asshole" and he storms into a meeting of the partners, demanding a partnership, as he's just dreamed up an idea to help Dow Chemical (who SCDP DID get it seems) to prop up their sagging image, as it's been suffering given that they're y'know, dumping napalm on people at this time in history. The trouble is, baller moves like that are beyond Harry's ken, and he's not quite smart enough to know that, and continues to run his mouth even after he gets a fat commission check threatening that he's going to fuck off an ply his trade elsewhere. Cooper dismisses his theatrics with laser-guided insults and Roger manages to up even his usual level of withering contempt.
Joan, meanwhile, is done with this shit, and the only thing you can do when that happens is a girl's night out. So she and Kate go to a single's bar, then another, which primarily consists of drinking and picking up guys, and Joan looks rather OVER the whole damn thing. This culminates in a great scene where, the day after, Joan and Kate are talking about where Joan in and how Kate admires her. Joan, knowing what got her there, doesn't see anything special about what she's done or where she is, but Kate tells her it's there--it's available, and she can take it.
That might be important later.
But hey, that soap opera thing with Megan? She's got a big role and a love scene, which weirds Don out a bit, but not as much as when a dinner with Megan's work friends turns into an invitation to an orgy. Don's expression is pretty damn priceless as they stammer out a polite declination, but it's just a hilariously awkward scene. Don doesn't swing that way, it seems.
It would get in the way of his cheating, after all. He accosts Sylvia in the elevator and hits the "stop" switch (Can you DO that in elevators without getting in trouble? Because they do it on TV all the time) and they make plans for some canoodling. There is an added layer of irony in the fact that Megan is playing at having an affair while Don is having an affair.
Irony, however, is something that happens to other people, and Don is an asshole about it, all but calling Megan a whore for kissing guys for money . . .and then Don tottles off and bangs Sylvia, who at least gets a pointed shot at Don by saying she prays for him to find peace. Good luck sister--that search has been on for years now.
This was a pretty good episode, and felt a lot more thematically "together" than most episodes this early in the season. Joan's story was touching and sad and paralleled Don's--like him, it seems she's never happy even when she has what she "wanted." Megan's not happy because she can't make Don happy and the firm can;t be happy with Heinz baked beans, and lose everything when they get greedy.
Again, that might be important later.
And that's it for this week. Join us next week when Pete takes up playing with Tinkertoys, Roger can't stop making Devil's Mountain with his mashed potatoes, and Bert Cooper drops acid and insists that everything be bolted down and would you please use the chains this time. All this and more is guaranteed NOT to happen in the next exciting episode, "The Flood." Wear your hip waders!
[Shame on you, Internet, for not having a Youtube of Mad Men in the style of the "A-Team" intro for me to slot in here. However, feel free to imagine it being here and being totally awesome.]
Last week was a pretty grim episode, wasn't it? I mean, sure, it has the awesomeness of having Trudy utterly humble Pete in ways that even the Iron Sheik wouldn't unleash on someone, and Don torpedoing Herb the Jagoff's attempt to get all the ads to feature him, but . . .yeah. Bleak stuff, even for Mad Men.
This week, the title of the episode is "To Have and To Hold," which is the title of the soap that Megan's on. Does this mean something? Let's find out.
"TO HAVE AND TO HOLD"
"We're sitting here waiting for the phone to ring: this IS high school."
We open with that rarest of things--a continuing plot thread from last week (this early, it's quite the thing) Pete and Don have a clandestine meeting (in Pete's hellaciously depressing apartment in the city) with the Heinz Ketchup rep from last week--the one that the Bean rep lost his shit about in an epic "If you so much as look at him, I'll kill all three of us" wobbly. They make plans to work in secret on a spec project to woo Heinz to SCDP, and Don puts Stan in a windowless room to work on the campaign, which so far seems to be Don and Stan hitting a joint and debating what a hot dog really wants on it.
This leads to another baller-move Draper presentation, followed quickly by Peggy's presentation (so much for secrecy) and a wonderful scene where Draper's crew sits with Peggy's crew and learns they've both lost, and even though they're rivals, there's a quiet moment of understanding between the two of them--as small firms, they fight over the scraps.
Well, right before Ken Cosgrove comes in and tells them their secret project has cost them the Heinz beans. Nothing wagered, nothing gained, but a little wagered and everything's lost.
That might be important later.
Meanwhile, Joan gets a visitor--Kate (who I think was her roommate from way back in Season 1? I may be wrong there) She's repping for Mary Kay, but planning to interview with Avon because women competing with women is really rough. This is contrasted with Joan, who's now a partner at SCDP (with all the gnashing of teeth the memory of that entails) and Joan's mom--who, you'll recall spent most of Season 4 punching holes in her boat is actually proud of her, because she has money and power.
Think on that--we'll come back to it a little later. In the meantime, take a shot of Johnnie Walker.
Meanwhile, Dawn (Don's secretary that they hired to take the curse off being construed as racist last season) gets a subplot, which is pretty stunning on its own, but more for the knock-on effect. She punches fellow secretary Scarlet's time card so she can skip out on five hours worth of work, and this draws the attention of Joan, who inflicts her DEATH STARE on both of them, forces out the truth, and she fires Scarlet on the spot, threatening to do the same to Dawn.
Unfortunately, Scarlet's Harry Crane's secretary and fuck-buddy and this touches off Harry Crane's molting from "homunculus with ridiculous sideburns" to "Omega-level asshole" and he storms into a meeting of the partners, demanding a partnership, as he's just dreamed up an idea to help Dow Chemical (who SCDP DID get it seems) to prop up their sagging image, as it's been suffering given that they're y'know, dumping napalm on people at this time in history. The trouble is, baller moves like that are beyond Harry's ken, and he's not quite smart enough to know that, and continues to run his mouth even after he gets a fat commission check threatening that he's going to fuck off an ply his trade elsewhere. Cooper dismisses his theatrics with laser-guided insults and Roger manages to up even his usual level of withering contempt.
Joan, meanwhile, is done with this shit, and the only thing you can do when that happens is a girl's night out. So she and Kate go to a single's bar, then another, which primarily consists of drinking and picking up guys, and Joan looks rather OVER the whole damn thing. This culminates in a great scene where, the day after, Joan and Kate are talking about where Joan in and how Kate admires her. Joan, knowing what got her there, doesn't see anything special about what she's done or where she is, but Kate tells her it's there--it's available, and she can take it.
That might be important later.
But hey, that soap opera thing with Megan? She's got a big role and a love scene, which weirds Don out a bit, but not as much as when a dinner with Megan's work friends turns into an invitation to an orgy. Don's expression is pretty damn priceless as they stammer out a polite declination, but it's just a hilariously awkward scene. Don doesn't swing that way, it seems.
It would get in the way of his cheating, after all. He accosts Sylvia in the elevator and hits the "stop" switch (Can you DO that in elevators without getting in trouble? Because they do it on TV all the time) and they make plans for some canoodling. There is an added layer of irony in the fact that Megan is playing at having an affair while Don is having an affair.
Irony, however, is something that happens to other people, and Don is an asshole about it, all but calling Megan a whore for kissing guys for money . . .and then Don tottles off and bangs Sylvia, who at least gets a pointed shot at Don by saying she prays for him to find peace. Good luck sister--that search has been on for years now.
This was a pretty good episode, and felt a lot more thematically "together" than most episodes this early in the season. Joan's story was touching and sad and paralleled Don's--like him, it seems she's never happy even when she has what she "wanted." Megan's not happy because she can't make Don happy and the firm can;t be happy with Heinz baked beans, and lose everything when they get greedy.
Again, that might be important later.
And that's it for this week. Join us next week when Pete takes up playing with Tinkertoys, Roger can't stop making Devil's Mountain with his mashed potatoes, and Bert Cooper drops acid and insists that everything be bolted down and would you please use the chains this time. All this and more is guaranteed NOT to happen in the next exciting episode, "The Flood." Wear your hip waders!
Sunday, April 14, 2013
MAD MEN 6.3--"The Collaborators"
It's time once again for Mad Men! One of the most highly-regarded television shows of our time by some, an excuse for good-looking people to look mopey and broody to others and for the person who writes this blog, a handy and reasonably easy excuse to have regular content on Sunday nights. Last week--Betty suggested her husband get in on a little rape, Don thought about Death, went to Hawaii and came home and banged Lindsay Weir and Peggy cracked the whip in an effort to sell headphones and everyone looks hideous because it's 1968 and facial hair and ridiculous jackets stalk our land like two giant stalking things. This week, it's still 1968, and what are our people up to? Let's find out!
"THE COLLABORATORS"
"He's demanding the unreasonable. How does that make him any different from anyone else who walks through that door?"
Our story begins with Pete and Trudy entertaining the folks back in the suburbs. The guys flirt with Trudy, because despite Community not being invented for nearly 50 years, they know what they like, and they like what they see. Meanwhile, Pete, resplendent in a jacket that makes me think 1868 is the year fashion gave up and went home early, sets up a rendezvous in his apartment in the city.
This is paid off with a scene with Don making time to go bang Lindsay Weir again. Apparently, the notion that Don and Megan was going to have dinner with the doctor and his wife got his loins in a tizzy, and so he goes to her apartment for a quick tumble.
This leads to a rather telling moment during their pillow-talk, when Don flashes back to the day his mom dropped him off at a whorehouse (which, this being Depression-era, is about as sexy as dying of scurvy) and the man of the house laying down the law about how it is. It's a small scene, yet explains so much, as does the follow-up scene at the end of the episode. Don is deeply fucked up. In other news--water is wet and fire is hot. Keep breathing.
During the pillow talk, meanwhile Lindsay (OK, her name's Sylvia, but I only really know her from Freaks & Geeks) and Don grapple with the guilt they feel over what they're doing. Don tries to talk about it in his favourite terms--"It never happened." But unlike before, when drawing a line under the past promised a new beginning and a new outlook, now Don uses it is a blanket excuse to escape and do what he wants to do.
It's like he's become Bobbie Barrett. He enjoys being bad, then being good when he's home. Lindsay even says he seems to enjoy not only the sex, but the fact he's putting one over on Megan and the doctor guy.
The notion of lying and lying to oneself to keep the Jenga tower of lies you build from falling over is further underlined when Megan confesses to Sylvia that she's miscarried, and what's more, given what being on maternity leave could do to her career, she's not all that sorry it went down that. And yet she is. Sylvia tries the whole "you wouldn't be a good person if you didn't feel bad despite how hard you're trying to tell yourself that you don't feel bad" spiel, which only seems to make Megan sadder, and causes her to bow out of the dinner.
Meanwhile, Peggy fails once again to get the people working under her to do their best work--too much scaring, not enough encouragement. During a phone call with Stan, he explains to her that it's a bit of an ask to expect the people who work under you to like you (best case scenario, they respect you) During their shop-talking, Peggy tells Ted Chaough about something going on with Heinz at SCDP, which let's talk about right now.
Don and the boys take a meeting with the guy from Heinz beans, who brought along the head of the ketchup branch. This leads to the beans guy throwing the Ketchup guy out and ranting about how much he hates the ketchup guy and makes a veiled threat that he'll burn his bridges at SCDP before he lets them near ketchup.
Stan tells this to Peggy, who mentions it to Chaough, who parlays it into a meeting with the ketchup guy. This puts Peggy in an uncomfortable position, as this is now her actively hurting SCDP. Chaough reminds her that wars are won through the exchange of secrets (as this is all taking place during the Tet Offensive, war is much on everyone's mind) Peggy at least has the good sense to feel icky about the prospect.
But dear readers, none of that compares with what an appalling ass Pete makes of himself. His little afternoon delight wit the neighbour spirals into a nightmare--her husband beats her and sends her to Pete, and the whole mess comes out in front of Trudy, who's finally had enough of this bullshit (she was willing to accept his philandering, but not fouling their own nest) and throws Pete out. Pete replies with his usual wormy bravado. You know . . .you'd think that when his little dalliance last season needed shock therapy to erase Pete from her brain he would take that as a sign. And yet, you would be wrong.
Meanwhile, things are not so rosy with Jaguar. Herb the icky ass Jaguar rep comes in and tries to brace Joan, who drops him with a precision insult and not all the Bactine in the world will salve that SICK BURN. Herb wants the agency to pitch his Jaguar bosses for more local radio spots highlighting his dealership rather than the marque. Don, hating him, hating what it took to get Jaguar, and hating the whole idea does, in what was the one decent thing he did the whole episode, does a shittier job of selling the Jaguar bosses on Herb's idea than Han Solo did trying to convince the guy on the radio everything was fine in the Death Star jail.
There's a whole current this episode of secrets being destructive, but secrets being power, and secrets being key to winning the war. Chaugh tells Peggy secrets win wars, Doctor guy tells Don they're losing the war, and Don and Roger liken appeasing Herb to the Munich conference. The notion of secrets being part of war also links up the notion that they're also as destructive as any weapon can be.
Roger mentions to Don, after his performance, that "[Don] had a choice between war or dishonour and chose dishonour. You still might get war." Pete got his war. Don may yet get his.
And that's all for this week. Join us next week when Don invents robot pants, Roger does his best to beat the world record for Donkey Kong despite the fact that it hasn't been invented yet, Joan builds a TARDIS, and Bert Cooper learns the secrets of Caste Grayskull at last. All of these things are virtually guaranteed not to happen in an episode they just had to call "To Have and To Hold." C'mon. All the cool kids are doing it.
"THE COLLABORATORS"
"He's demanding the unreasonable. How does that make him any different from anyone else who walks through that door?"
Our story begins with Pete and Trudy entertaining the folks back in the suburbs. The guys flirt with Trudy, because despite Community not being invented for nearly 50 years, they know what they like, and they like what they see. Meanwhile, Pete, resplendent in a jacket that makes me think 1868 is the year fashion gave up and went home early, sets up a rendezvous in his apartment in the city.
This is paid off with a scene with Don making time to go bang Lindsay Weir again. Apparently, the notion that Don and Megan was going to have dinner with the doctor and his wife got his loins in a tizzy, and so he goes to her apartment for a quick tumble.
This leads to a rather telling moment during their pillow-talk, when Don flashes back to the day his mom dropped him off at a whorehouse (which, this being Depression-era, is about as sexy as dying of scurvy) and the man of the house laying down the law about how it is. It's a small scene, yet explains so much, as does the follow-up scene at the end of the episode. Don is deeply fucked up. In other news--water is wet and fire is hot. Keep breathing.
During the pillow talk, meanwhile Lindsay (OK, her name's Sylvia, but I only really know her from Freaks & Geeks) and Don grapple with the guilt they feel over what they're doing. Don tries to talk about it in his favourite terms--"It never happened." But unlike before, when drawing a line under the past promised a new beginning and a new outlook, now Don uses it is a blanket excuse to escape and do what he wants to do.
It's like he's become Bobbie Barrett. He enjoys being bad, then being good when he's home. Lindsay even says he seems to enjoy not only the sex, but the fact he's putting one over on Megan and the doctor guy.
The notion of lying and lying to oneself to keep the Jenga tower of lies you build from falling over is further underlined when Megan confesses to Sylvia that she's miscarried, and what's more, given what being on maternity leave could do to her career, she's not all that sorry it went down that. And yet she is. Sylvia tries the whole "you wouldn't be a good person if you didn't feel bad despite how hard you're trying to tell yourself that you don't feel bad" spiel, which only seems to make Megan sadder, and causes her to bow out of the dinner.
Meanwhile, Peggy fails once again to get the people working under her to do their best work--too much scaring, not enough encouragement. During a phone call with Stan, he explains to her that it's a bit of an ask to expect the people who work under you to like you (best case scenario, they respect you) During their shop-talking, Peggy tells Ted Chaough about something going on with Heinz at SCDP, which let's talk about right now.
Don and the boys take a meeting with the guy from Heinz beans, who brought along the head of the ketchup branch. This leads to the beans guy throwing the Ketchup guy out and ranting about how much he hates the ketchup guy and makes a veiled threat that he'll burn his bridges at SCDP before he lets them near ketchup.
Stan tells this to Peggy, who mentions it to Chaough, who parlays it into a meeting with the ketchup guy. This puts Peggy in an uncomfortable position, as this is now her actively hurting SCDP. Chaough reminds her that wars are won through the exchange of secrets (as this is all taking place during the Tet Offensive, war is much on everyone's mind) Peggy at least has the good sense to feel icky about the prospect.
But dear readers, none of that compares with what an appalling ass Pete makes of himself. His little afternoon delight wit the neighbour spirals into a nightmare--her husband beats her and sends her to Pete, and the whole mess comes out in front of Trudy, who's finally had enough of this bullshit (she was willing to accept his philandering, but not fouling their own nest) and throws Pete out. Pete replies with his usual wormy bravado. You know . . .you'd think that when his little dalliance last season needed shock therapy to erase Pete from her brain he would take that as a sign. And yet, you would be wrong.
Meanwhile, things are not so rosy with Jaguar. Herb the icky ass Jaguar rep comes in and tries to brace Joan, who drops him with a precision insult and not all the Bactine in the world will salve that SICK BURN. Herb wants the agency to pitch his Jaguar bosses for more local radio spots highlighting his dealership rather than the marque. Don, hating him, hating what it took to get Jaguar, and hating the whole idea does, in what was the one decent thing he did the whole episode, does a shittier job of selling the Jaguar bosses on Herb's idea than Han Solo did trying to convince the guy on the radio everything was fine in the Death Star jail.
There's a whole current this episode of secrets being destructive, but secrets being power, and secrets being key to winning the war. Chaugh tells Peggy secrets win wars, Doctor guy tells Don they're losing the war, and Don and Roger liken appeasing Herb to the Munich conference. The notion of secrets being part of war also links up the notion that they're also as destructive as any weapon can be.
Roger mentions to Don, after his performance, that "[Don] had a choice between war or dishonour and chose dishonour. You still might get war." Pete got his war. Don may yet get his.
And that's all for this week. Join us next week when Don invents robot pants, Roger does his best to beat the world record for Donkey Kong despite the fact that it hasn't been invented yet, Joan builds a TARDIS, and Bert Cooper learns the secrets of Caste Grayskull at last. All of these things are virtually guaranteed not to happen in an episode they just had to call "To Have and To Hold." C'mon. All the cool kids are doing it.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Just Sayin--The News Roundup Edition
Hi all. Just a brief pop-round in-between Mad Men reviews and not having any new comics to talk about that I might highlight some things that spoke to me in the last couple weeks.
In the recently returning Comics of the Weak, the dynamite duo of Tucker and Abhay pondered the issue of the day with regards to the comics and Abhay weighed in on the whole Rick Remender "Alex Summers ain't down with the word 'mutant' tempest in a teacup that raged across the internet for a couple days and just as swiftly stopped, but not before this little gem from Abhay about how fans and pros interact:
Elsewhere, Gavok from 4thletter spells out my problems with the new 52 Captain Marvel/Shazam stuff with an elegant, concise, pointed explanation of it:
Obviously, we don't see eye to eye about that last part, but in the interest of proving these aren't all just to parrot my views, I'm leaving it in the quote.
Graeme McMillian, like me, wonders why the hell it's 2013 and we are still meant to give a crap about Hank Pym (non clit-punching scene category)
And finally, we end as we began, as Abhay, in part a rather great series of reviews, examines some trends he finds maddening in comics.
In the recently returning Comics of the Weak, the dynamite duo of Tucker and Abhay pondered the issue of the day with regards to the comics and Abhay weighed in on the whole Rick Remender "Alex Summers ain't down with the word 'mutant' tempest in a teacup that raged across the internet for a couple days and just as swiftly stopped, but not before this little gem from Abhay about how fans and pros interact:
"Remender denies responsibility, and relentlessly blames comic fans:
at first the horrible fans misinterpreting his words, and then the
horrible fans who spurred him to tweet in a way that was misunderstood.
That’s just comic pro SOP. “None of these characters mean anything! Read all about them!” Comic fans didn’t write that speech– comic fans are only for being pissed on. The blame goes to them, regardless.
Elsewhere, Gavok from 4thletter spells out my problems with the new 52 Captain Marvel/Shazam stuff with an elegant, concise, pointed explanation of it:
"Post-Flashpoint, the character is simply known as Shazam. He doesn’t
have his own series yet, but has appeared in the pages of the current
Justice League comic. The big change is that teenaged Billy Batson is a
tremendous asshole and only got the power because he told the wizard
that pure-hearted people don’t exist and the wizard was just like,
“Welp, good enough.” While Black Adam is out there, ready to fight him,
Captain Marvel and his buddy Freddy Freeman intend to use his newfound
abilities for profit. So far it’s pretty great."
Obviously, we don't see eye to eye about that last part, but in the interest of proving these aren't all just to parrot my views, I'm leaving it in the quote.
Graeme McMillian, like me, wonders why the hell it's 2013 and we are still meant to give a crap about Hank Pym (non clit-punching scene category)
"Hank has no central personality traits that the creators who handle him
can seem to agree on, and that’s plagued him throughout his existence –
It’s also, I’d argue, why his hitting Jan has become the defining fact
of his character despite numerous attempts to rehabilitate him; at least
it’s something unique that people remember about him outside of “he
messes with his size a lot and created Ultron.” But even since then:
We’ve seen him suicidal and then come to terms with his position in
life, then come to terms with it again and reclaim former identities to
express that, and then again and again. Is he the (somewhat jerky,
infallible) Scientist Supreme, still, or a (sensitive, emotionally
aware) teacher at Avengers Academy?"
And finally, we end as we began, as Abhay, in part a rather great series of reviews, examines some trends he finds maddening in comics.
"What is all this, do you think, this insistence upon surrender? Why,
this persistent message that to do anything but surrender to the status
quo makes one a figure of mockery? What makes comics so eager to trumpet
fake heroics, phony, ersatz heroics, but so dismissive of protest, of
an actual examples of courage from the least powerful among us? Is it
just the particulars of the “creative community” involved, a
community that never fought for each other, that routinely betrays its
greatest artists, a community whose heroes suffocated communal effort in
their womb? Why would we expect any better…? Or is it more than that?
Maybe it’s just young people, just youth itself and youth’s silly hopes
and impractical dreams of a better tomorrow, that comics find so
laughable. Comic books: middle-aged men, to the rescue!"
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