Funny, I read his expression of bemused acceptance.
He messed up significantly, she went over the top. But then she made some fair points and enacted a “punishment” that fit the crime (missed dinner with no word? You’ll eat with me now), but was rediculous because she threw her dinner away, so she didn’t have dinner! She knew she was rediculous, he knew he was wrong and they got over it.
Yeah getting mad at Don Draper for coming home drunk, late, and without calling is like getting mad at Roger Sterling for wearing a vest.
I’m also confused by this. Coming out of that scene, has she won (in her head)?
In the end, he did his own thing. Kind of a weird sequence.
100 % agreed. If that wasn’t a tantrum, I don’t know what is. Of course, I don’t like her anyway (neither the character nor the actress) so I may be biased.
As was stated by others, I really didn’t connect with anything that occured in this episode. What was the point of the whole Hare Krishna thing? It was bizarro, like the LSD episode, but that at least led to Roger and whatshername breaking up. Why bring an old character in for one episode, much less a new one (and I thought she resembled Juliette Lewis also) if the story isn’t going anywhere?And I know I’m in the minority but I didn’t much care for the Joan/Don scene. Not that the actors weren’t fabulous - holy cow could those two set the world on fire- but it seemed so uncharacterisctic. Don’t get me wrong; the worst episode of Mad Men is better than the best episode of just about anything on TV today, but I had to give last night’s installment a solid “meh”.
I noticed an interesting hint of where the Lane storyline might be going when he told his wife the reason why SCDP has another shot at landing the Jaguar account. His buddy Mr. Chewing-Gum-on-His-Pubis, from the whorehouse episode, got fired from Jaguar and lost his visa. Lane’s wife says something like, “Oh, that’s why they returned to England so quickly.” If Lane gets fired (or loses his partnership or whatever) for embezzlement, he’d have to go back to England and face jail time for his unpaid taxes.
I looked it up and the guy they kept mentioning really did start the Krishna church in New York City in 1966. Maybe it was a gift to calendar watchers. I’m beginning to hate these made-for-tv timely sequences, especially after the NAACP demonstration that spawned Dawn and led nowhere, the awful Howard Johnson fiasco, and Roger’s out-of-character LSD trip. It happens often but this show especially seemed like the various scenes were written by different people and awkwardly spliced in.
But I’m biased too. Throwing something to show that the character really is ooh, so mad, is one of the worst overused tropes on television. You especially don’t throw messy, sticky, gummy stuff that you’ll have to clean up yourself. So the Megan portion bothered me as well.
When are we getting back to a good Peggy episode?
Oh so you think, until Lane discovers Pete Campbell’s office suicide, switches their Curricula Vitae, and assumes his identity.
I actually thought it was a funny impression of Swami Prabhupada.
Two women throwing tantrums, two divergent audience reactions. In some ways Megan’s reaction is healthy, she gets it out if her system, unlike the former Mrs. Draper who kept out all bottled up inside. Note also that Megan basically was fine after she had her say, even asking Don if he wanted some cheese.
Loved Don and Joan. Lane’s embezzlement is a bit too soap-operaish, and I didn’t like the Mata Hari Krishna subplot.
Quibble department. I was waiting for them to put in a Star Trek reference, but they did it in a ham-handed way. As of December 8, 1966 ST had shown up to “Conscience of the King” and had shown none of the socially conscious episodes yet - especially considering when he must have started to write the script. “A Taste of Armageddon” with the peaceful but deadly war might qualify, but the first real example is “A Private Little War” in February 1968. I’m not sure the presence of Uhura on the bridge, significant as it was, would have inspired such a 3rd season script.
I have to hand it to Kinsey, though - writing Trek fanfic in 1966? That’s what I call being ahead of the geek curve.
I think she might end up pregnant. The references Harry had to seeing his daughter’s face while chanting, having 2 children and one on the way, perhaps they were clues.
She’s too much of a professional for that to happen. Remember, she was a hooker before she was a Hare Krishna, and she still has a hooker mentality. Just as Kinsey in a shaved head and robes is still the same deluded, insecure Kinsey. It’s one of the themes of the show - the cultural markers may change, but the people don’t.
Excellent point! That really sums it up well. You could expand this to include the subtext that advertising methods and content change, but its effectiveness as psychological tool in our commercialized world doesn’t.
Responding to an earlier point – I, too, thought Megan’s reaction to Don’s pecadillo (of not calling to say he’d be late) was over the top. I hate it when characters throw things like that. In that moment, she lost her “just the sort of ‘fighter’ Don needs to keep him straight” status for me.
Read the earlier posts that better explained why Meagan was pissed. It wasn’t because he came home late and drunk, but because he’s slacking at the job he used to love. He needed a kick in the pants, and it seemed to work.
Now, you could argue that it was time well spent to get Joan’s groove back, but still, it wasn’t just this one event that had her pissed-- it was the cumulation of how Don had been slacking for some time. And she isn’t the only one noticing it.
Kinsey was all about showing how socially conscious he was at SC so I could see him writing a terrible heavy-handed allegory even if it wasn’t yet SOP for Star Trek. It’s not as though Star Trek pioneered the use of terrible allegories in (science fiction) literature.
Peggy: “I don’t know… will I catch the Negron Complex?”
Yeah, remember, Kinsey was a fan of The Twilight Zone, which also combined speculative fiction and allegory.
Trivia aside - I recall DeForest Kellley stating in an interview (sorry, no cite) once that there had been a script in the works in which Bones & Uhura went on an away mission and ended up stranded on a planet where the dominant skin color was black, and Bones (a Southern man) would have to pass himself off as Uhura’s slave. So, Harry was probably speaking more truthfully than he realized when he fed Kinsey his line about “a script being written.”
I was just coming in to ask if anybody Trekkier than me remembered this. I think it’s mentioned in one of David Gerrold’s behind-the-scenes Trek books, which I read years ago. I thought of it the moment I heard the story idea.
She irritated me - look at “reformed whore” Dora May Dinglehopper from Buttsville, Ohio - calling herself Lakshmi!! - latching on to the Hare Krishnas. She may or may not be a true believer, but her actions show how she is in it for gain, not blind worship. She isn’t a saved devotee of the Krishnas, she’s an enforcer, or trying to be. She is trying to keep Kinsey in the cult because he’s their best recruiter, so she falls back on her whore-skills to try to make that happen. Dope. I hope hope hope he takes the money and leaves for California.