Mad Men 3x05 Reaction
Comments (17)
The prison guard's baby didn't survive, that's my interpretation. He's wheeling his wife around and she doesn't have the baby in her arms, survival rates were lower back then...
Early season 3 is probably my least favorite era of Mad Men (except for the premiere). Thankfully that's ending soon.
L take
I just wish that either Don or Betty would have taken the chance to talk to Sally about life and death. She's clearly processing it badly (if that wasn't already clear to them).. Take the opportunity to help Sally process her grandfather's death and get some closure
I know this has been said before but since you guys are back to using Netflix, please make sure the episodes are not out of order. Ep 11 "The Gypsy and the Hobo" and Ep 12 "The Grown-Ups" MAY be switched so double check before watching. It would be... very unfortunate if these got mixed up. The Gypsy and the Hobo goes first.
A ‘bruiser’ is a fighter basically, a brawler
Pete was crazy this episode lol
ever since i heard someone describe pregnancy as body horror it's never been the same
You've literally got a foreign body sucking all your life energy. No woman goes unscathed be it weight, stretch marks, loss of hair, weaker teeth etc. etc. etc.
"Suffocating". What a great way to describe Don's life and relationships. I wasn't working for the company at the time, but some of my current coworkers who were here twenty years before I started have talked about when money was tight and they were instructed to use fewer post-it notes. Sometimes they really do fight over paperclips.
at my first job the finance officer was also the CEO's mother, she was a 70yo woman with medical brain damage, she used to ration supplies like paperclips and tissues. one time on a business trip a friend got a donut and coffee for breakfast and she came over to his desk and told him donut wasn't an appropriate breakfast food item and they wouldn't be reimbursing the expense. when we went to events we used to hide stashes of bottled water like rations in a POW camp because she thought our unpaid volunteers "hydrated too much for free", they'd be dying of thirst and we'd be smuggling them Evian like "don't tell anyone where you got this sister, godspeed"
Don quoting Sal who's quoting Balzac. Nice thread
Great episode, great reaction. I'll always remember Betty ethereally gliding down the corridors. Milena instantly entering 'horror movie reaction' mode like she was expecting a jumpscare from a spooky witch was so funny. IMO Lola is just really emotionally dialed in (they both are tbf) cuz she's tearing up at the senses of things relating to characters, I can't really explain it but its cuz you know Don, and you know Peggy, and you know what they've been through, and there's a gravity there, it pulls you in. I think your assessments of all the characters + their positions in the narrative are just very insightful. Don is a liar and a cheat but I do feel for him when Betty unilaterally decides to call their child Eugene, like welcome to our family Baby Gene, you have the name of a dead old man who fucking hated me and never let me forget it. He seems a lot closer with Sally too, do you think when he found out it was a boy he was like "great, another boy to not throw around the ball enough with". I agree with everything you say - the time to come clean with Betty was really early, before Sally was born. I said this before but I had a somewhat similar situation growing up and for my own mother there was no coming back from that scale of distrust. You either reveal it early or commit to carrying the weight of the lie around forever and ever. Pete's storyline is depressing, his position is one of naive liberalism sure but you can see he's genuinely shocked when the Admiral TV execs straight up tell him they're not interested in being associated with Black America even if it makes them richer... it's genuinely unfathomable to him (Harry understands immediately and backs off, he's probably had this convo before regarding Black issues in TV + has his own prejudices). We can recall Pete was also the only person other than Don to be uncomfortable with Roger's blackface performance. Pete would have LOVED Rainbow Capitalism, you know in 30 years he's pitching Pride Sponsorships 🥰
I noticed on my last rewatch- Dennis is afraid of something happening to his girl. He says, "and that baby, how could I love that baby?" That's what happened to Don, with his mother dying in childbirth, and IMO the source of his deep fear/insecurity that he's fundamentally unlovable. Dennis didn't mean to but he kinda confirmed it in Don's eyes.
To be fair though, it's not like his father loved his mother and hated Don because of that. There are parallels, but it doesn't fully fit.
Medgar Evers was a civil rights leader who was murdered by the KKK in his own driveway. The man in her dream in the kitchen with her parents was Evers. "See what happens to people who speak up" she imagines her mother's advice to her - to be complacent in her life. For a show that centers WASPs, this episode has a lot of nods to the civil rights movement. Lane acknowledging "there's something going on" after the Admiral conflict, Hollis saying "we have bigger problems to worry about than TV, okay".
Mad Men is about the 1960s as a full decade, for better and worse, through the perspective of an almost entirely white cast + it would be sacrilege for the civil rights movement not to bubble up at every possible opportunity (bearing in mind we mostly focus on privileged white business folks). Even Betty, a WASP conservative 'housewife' who doesn't work anywhere near the advertising industry is thinking so deeply about yet another murdered Black body that the imagery infiltrates her dreams.