Mad Men Recap: "New Business"

“New Business.” The client changes. The crisis stays the same. Two words sum up the dramatic impetus for almost every Mad Men episode and season, for individual decisions and broad plot twists. No new business was chased during this episode. But, the one episode outlines the root conflicts of the entire series.

Two Don scenes provide the bookends. In the first scene, Don stands next to Betty, playing Dad and making milkshakes. It looks like it could be a flashback. It is, for Don, to the family life he ruined. In the last scene, Don walks back into his apartment: cold, empty and a quite literal metaphor for his present and future.

Between the bookends, we witness the rise and fall of Don’s brief relationship with Diana. In the series’ first episode, Don asserts romantic love is something someone like him invented. Fittingly, a central flaw in his relationships with women is casting himself in romantic narratives of his own invention, with little regard for the partner. With Diana, we experience the hollow artifice at every instance.

Don catches the ill-at-ease brunette’s eye at a diner. Don creeps her out. The chemistry is instant. She thinks she owes Don sex after Roger’s $100 tip. They meet again. Don hunts her down at another restaurant. Their romance kindles. She shows up at his apartment at 3am, drunk and lonely. He will be her savior and New York tour guide. He has no idea what she needs saving from. Arnold spells out the truth in a brilliant, awkward elevator scene. Diana ends it before it hits second gear.

Reminiscing with Don about divorce, Pete asks “You think you’re going to be starting your life over and doing it right. What if you never get past the beginning again?” Don responds with a curt “watch the road.”

Megan returns to New York and departs the episode $1 million richer. (Good luck depositing that personal check.) Through her, we see the principal dilemma faced by every female character: how do I escape an inevitable, stifling domesticity? How do I succeed on my own terms in a male world?

While married to Don, Megan faced a persistent battle to succeed independently of him. She couldn’t in practice or in perception. Legs up came through Don’s intervention. Lifestyle came through Don’s checkbook. Everyone around her viewed her marriage, fairly or not, as a naked economic transaction. Even after her marriage ends she can’t escape that stigma–or men. She visits a man Harry Crane to help her find another man to be her agent. Mad Men’s bumbling, smarmy heel presumes she is DTF to advance her career.

Marie Calvet, Megan’s profoundly unhappy mother, personifies the unhappiness she sought to escape. However hollow, being used physically by Roger provides some sort of passion and meaning.

At their divorce meeting, Megan cuts Don down, telling him directly what he is: “an aging, sloppy, selfish liar.” He attempts to clean up the mess that relationship created with money. In previous seasons, Adam revealed Don for what he was: Dick Whitman. Don tried to buy him off with money. Lane Pryce uncomfortably reflected to Don what he was: dishonest with those closest to him and in a free-fall. Don tries to buy him off twice: replacing what he took from the company provided he resigns and later paying out the full life insurance payment. Don responding with cash ahead of candor tends to end with tragedy.

A new character, the “artist” Pima Ryan, epitomizes the show’s central motif. She knows internal conflict. She identifies it in others and exploits it with temerity for her own gain. Stan, as Pima notes, hates himself. He hates the dishonesty of what he does for a living. He wants his ego stroked as an artist and as a man. Peggy wants recognition of her status and success. She also wants recognition as an attractive woman. Pima’s “art” is advertising, in its purest, most cynical form.

The question now is how Mad Men will end. Predictions, for a show that has spiced subtlety with a character getting run over by a lawnmower, are futile. What the ending will determine is whether an insightful, beautiful, well-written period drama was enough.