I hope that damn baby stays disappeared. ( Anyway, it’s a toddler now.) Bringing the kid back would turn this show into an ordinary soap opera, and though it has soapy elements, it is more than that.
No, it’s gone.
(I admit, I was one of the last ones thinking that Peggy’s sister was raising Peggy’s baby. They were trying to show that Peggy didn’t like babies at all and I read it as she didn’t like that particular baby.)
Anyway, it was given out for adoption, given the times and Peggy’s general antipathy to children and the idea of motherhood, I’m betting it was a closed adoption. The kid is gone. It will not return.
However, the conversation with Trudy about the kid’s existence … that could happen.
People here keep refer to Mad Men as a soap opera. Why? It’s not:
- A drama, typically performed as a serial on daytime television or radio, characterized by stock characters and situations, sentimentality, and melodrama.
- A series of experiences characterized by dramatic displays of emotion.
No, no, and no. It’s a drama. This is like calling Finnegans Wake pulp fiction.
I agree with you, DQ. But to answer your question, many persons use soap opera to mean drama with large cast.
I might also point out that, though Mad men is heavy on continuity, it is not a serial. There are signfiicant time gaps between episodes, even larger ones between seasons, and the creators deliberately leave out details in a way you don’t see in soaps. If it were a soap, we would have seen Peggy actually giving up her baby, for instance, and the intgeraction between her and the priest would have not been so subtextual.
The time lapses are one of my favorite aspects of the show. When it returns it may be Christmas Eve 1963 or it might be the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964). I am hoping that when they decide to wrap on the show (which hopefully won’t be for a while yet) that they’ll show the ‘future’ a bit since being a show set more than a generation ago they can do. Does Don every jump from that window in the credits for instance, or does Pete enter the Nixon Administration (actually Nixon didn’t like anyone he perceived as a spoiled aristocrat so he probably wouldn’t like Pete). Do Joan and Roger ever get together (perhaps when he’s promoting Woodstock before he dies of cirrhosis, lung cancer, and six forms of heart disease)? It’s conceivable (though unlikely) Don could be alive in the 21st century, moreso for Peggy, pretty much inconceivable for Roger and of course Bert, and Peggy and Pete could still conceivably in the work force as neither would be any older today that Burt Cooper.
And what of little Sally Draper, she of the early divorce culture.
Resumes her modeling career, poses for Andy Warhol, shoots him over artistic differences and convinces Valerie Solanas to take the rap. Or, becomes Conrad Hilton’s mistress (though gets irked when he calls her Zsa Zsa) and tells his great-granddaughters how they should express themselves because she didn’t have the option.
Goes west like Dad did. Becomes part of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Joins a commune, does some soft core porn in LA, takes up a with a simple minded fellow from the south and bears him a child.
Why does everyone keep thinking that Pete’s a Republican. Pete’s a Democrat. Pete’s the only Democrat at Sterling Cooper. It was a major plot point in the episode Nixon vs Kennedy.
I thought I remembered a huge party in the office after Kennedy was elected. Isn’t that the episode where they put the green liquor in the water cooler?
I thought Pete masterminded buying up all the New York TV ad air time to prevent the Kennedy campaign from being able to buy TV air time.
The party was an election night returns watching party. They all expected Nixon to win at the time.
BTW what the Hell was that stuff anyway? 
I can’t possibly have been absinthe, could it?
I don’t remember if they ever came out and said if Pete was a Democrat, but he has been portrayed as more progressive than his colleagues at Sterling-Cooper. He and Don were the only ones who looked uncomfortable during Roger’s blackface scene, his views of “Negros” as an untaped market, ironically he’s been more accepting Peggy as a colleague than anyone else, and he and Trudy were the only ones from the office who refused to go to Roger’s daughter’s wedding.
Also I imagine Peggy would be a Democrat, unlike everyone else she’s from a working class background (granted so is Don, but he’s firmly middle class now). I’m fairly sure she voted for Kennedy. At least assuming she was old enough (was she 20 or 21 in season 1)?
Almost certainly creme de menthe.
IMDb lists so far one goof for this episode involving Joan’s scarf. But I noticed another one. Harry has a hat stuffed in his right coat pocket when he gets in the elevator with Pete. When they walk into the office, it’s in his left coat pocket.
Trivia poster is trivial.
A flashback to another episode, but… the teacher’s brother whose epilepsy leaves him frequently unemployed- was epilepsy untreatable by medication in 1963? (I know it’s still incurable and even the medicated will have seizures but it does greatly reduce the frequency/severity of them from what I understand, while I gathered that he wasn’t medicated at all.)
Draper’s a fool if he doesn’t go after the teacher once Betty divorces him. Of course I’m sure he’d cheat on her before the third date. Probably with Betty.
I think opportunity was a big part of his dalliance with the teacher, and with all his women. I don’t remember if we saw how he met the beatnik woman, but I don’t think Don actively seeks out his sexual partners. He met Rachel and Bobbie Barrett through work. Don didn’t bother to follow up on the teacher’s drunken phone call, and if he hadn’t seen her on the street at 3 a.m., he would probably have forgotten all about her.
With Don living in Manhattan and only seeing the kids on weekends (rare weekends, probably), I’d bet we don’t see the teacher again.
I don’t think we’ll see the teacher again either, AuntiePam but for somewhat different reasons. Don actually does actively seek out his partners when he gets a kind of fixation on them and feels under emotional duress. That’s what happened with Rachel (whom he pursued right to her door in the middle of the night after Roger’s heart attack) and with Suzanne (once again showing up at her door in the wee hours because of insomnia, Hilton-related stress and tensions with Betty following the Rome trip).
All that said, Suzanne isn’t a strong enough character, IMO, to become the new Mrs. Draper and I agree that he’s not going back to Westchester just for a long-term fling. It’s true that he idealized her–that we were meant to believe that it wasn’t just about sex but also about her caring and non-cynical nature. But the basis for that idealization seemed dramatically weak (as others have said). It seems more likely that someone more interesting will come on the scene and that the locale will be NYC or some other advertising milieu.
Could always be wrong of course!
Peggy’s “No” in regards to getting the coffee-
Everyone seems to be focused on that being a Peggy moment. People seem to be forgetting that at that moment it was Roger, Peggy and JOAN alone together. I think Roger was asking Peggy to get the coffee so he could get a moment alone with Joan.
This being Don, once free he might marry Burt’s sister to get her share of the company. This being MAD MEN, she might wear him out and give him a minor stroke on the honeymoon.
Here’s an opinion question: if MAD MEN were on HBO or SHOWTIME it would almost certainly have a lot more graphic sex and nudity. We’d have seen Don’s butt and Joan’s boobs more than our own (whichever is relevant to yoy). Do you think this would detract, add, or be neutral to its quality?