Mad Men Season Four: Episode 8, “The Summer Man,” and Episode 9, “The Beautiful Girls”

By Jennifer Baldwin. I’ve always felt we do our resolutions at the wrong time of the year. New Year’s Day, in the midst of bleak winter, feels too dark, too endless for making resolutions and changing our lives. In winter, we’re just trying to survive. A change in lifestyle, a plan for improvement is too much to ask when we’re barely hanging on.

But Summer – ah, summer! Summer is the time for resolutions. It’s the time for rebirth, for changing our lives. It’s the time to finally start writing that novel, the time to finally lose those last ten pounds, the time to be reborn. It’s too bountiful and warm to be anything but a rebirth. The “Summer Man” is the man who lives fully, who faces the world with confidence and verve, who changes his life for the better because he’s sick of the dark, pallid face of life’s winter.

Last week I identified with Peggy, but this week I’m with Don. It’s a writer thing. Whenever we scribes feel down or adrift, whenever life is careening out of control, we turn to the one thing that always feels right:  we write. Don’s got his notebook open, his thoughts spilling out in an epic free-write of soul-baring confessionals and existential poetry. It is through this act of writing that Don regains control of his life. It’s not just a diary or a journal for writing, “Here’s what I did today …” – it’s a way to say, “Here’s what I thought today, here’s what I fear today, here’s what I want today, and everyday, and always.” It’s a way that we writers give our lives meaning. By journaling, by solidifying our thoughts and feelings in written words, we can find a path out of the darkness. In “The Summer Man,” it seems Don is beginning to find his way out of that darkness.

He swims, he cuts back on the drinking, he gets his mojo back with the ladies. My prediction from a few weeks ago came true (sorta): Don and Faye hooked up (sorta). They had a date, the romantic sparks were flying, but unfortunately for my prognostications, they didn’t actually sleep together because Mad Men – even when it’s predictable – is never predictable. It was Don who put the kibosh on having sex with Faye. Color me surprised, but this is the new Don, the journal writing Don, the summer man Don. The Don who wants to be there for his youngest son’s birthday party. Little baby Gene shares a lot in common with Don. They were both conceived “in desperation,” their homes broken by infidelity and upheaval. But for much of last season and the beginning of this season, it seemed like Gene was more Betty’s child than Don’s. He seemed an afterthought to Don.

Things seem to change with this episode, though. Now Don yearns for his son. He seems ready to be there for baby Gene in a way that his own father was not for him. He risks the wrath of Betty to be there at the birthday party. And to Betty’s credit, she’s perfectly civil.

It’s interesting that this episode is called “The Summer Man,” when so much time is spent with the ladies of Mad Men. I could write a billion things about modern feminism and the behavior of both Joan and Peggy in reaction to Joey The Freelancer’s disgusting bullying. Suffice to say, this episode just goes to show how subtle, even-handed, and ultimately un-PC Mad Men really is when it comes to cultural politics. Peggy is the “new woman,” a trailblazer for modern feminism (even if she doesn’t know it yet). She asserts herself like a man, fires Joey, and in the biting words of Joan, confirms to the men in the office that she’s “a humorless bitch.” I’ll admit it; I fist-pumped when Peggy fired Joey. He was an ass.

But Joan is older than Peggy, and her approach is not that of the new feminism. Joan’s approach is the “old school” method of using feminine wiles to get ahead in a man’s world. Joan would have gotten the same result (no more Joey), but she would have done it in the subtler way of the female – using persuasion, discretion, and yeah, okay, a little bit of sex appeal. The show doesn’t say one approach is better than the other, but give it credit for taking the wind out of Peggy’s sails and showing that women were being assertive and getting what they wanted (through uniquely feminine means) long before the “humorless bitch” brigade of modern radical feminism came on the scene.

Finally, Betty so totally still has feelings for Don. Maybe not enough to ever get back with him, but you can tell that she still feels a certain way about Don that she’ll never feel for poor bland, sensible, good guy Henry Francis. My prediction is that Betty tries to put the moves on Don at some point this season.

And just how do the other ladies of Mad Men feel about their men? And how do the men feel about their ladies? The latest episode of Mad Men, titled “The Beautiful Girls,” continues to focus on the show’s female characters, but this week things are much more relationship oriented. All of the major storylines deal with various degrees of male-female relations, from the familial, to the sexual, to the professional: Don and Sally; Don and Faye; Roger and Joan; Peggy and Abe; and even Don (along with Roger and Burt) and poor old Miss Blankenship.

Ah Miss Blankenship! How we will miss you! The Queen of Perversions has shuffled off this mortal coil. Now we only have Roger left to provide the comic relief. I know she’s a minor character, but I can’t believe they killed her off!

Since this episode is for the “Beautiful Girls,” the emphasis is really on how women navigate their relationships with men, and how men try to figure out their relationships with women. As Peggy’s friend Joyce puts it, men are soup and women need to be the pots that hold them. It’s all about making sure the soup is the right one and that things don’t spill.

It felt very much like a set-up episode (as did last week’s). Pieces are being moved, conflicts are being set up, feelings are slowly being revealed. Everything is bubbling to the surface until that point in episode 11 or 12 when things explode. Because of this, I didn’t find “The Beautiful Girls” to be all that memorable as a whole. It worked in pieces, but the pieces never quite came together. This was the set-up; the payoff is, I suspect, still a few episodes away.

That being said, there were certainly some beautiful and heartbreaking scenes in this episode. Sally’s breakdown at the end was devastating and almost too painful to watch. Young Kiernan Shipka as Sally Draper is a phenomenal actress and I think her storyline is one of the show’s most daring. Too often in movies and TV, divorce is treated as a matter of course and very little attention is paid to its effect on children. If we get anything, we get the perfunctory “Spending quality time with one or both of the parents” storyline that ends in pat sentiment and easy answers. The reality of divorce for children, however, is often much more difficult and never so easy. Divorce stories in movies and TV have changed somewhat in recent years (see one of my favorite films about divorce, The Squid and the Whale) and I’m glad to see that Mad Men is part of this change.

My favorite storyline of the episode, however, was the Roger-Joan plot. Seeing Roger and Joan finally hook up was — I’m not going to lie — pretty awesome (even if it was in a gross alleyway). The heartbreak, of course, was that despite every feeling in her heart pulling her towards Roger, Joan’s head took over and ended the brief affair. I don’t normally like seeing married characters cheat on their spouses (paging Don Draper!), but for Roger and Joan, I make an exception. Here’s to hoping Dr. McRapist Jerkface bites it in Vietnam and Jane divorces Roger for a younger man. Then Roger and Joan will be free! Since nothing happy ever happens on this show, I know I’m crazy for hoping, but I can’t help it. Silver Fox and Big Red need to be together.

Finally, I’m intrigued by where things are going for Faye. Is she “the one” for Don? Will their relationship last? Is she the woman Don will be married to “by the end of the year”? She certainly seems to want their relationship to work; she’s crushed when it seems like she’s ruined things with Sally. She opens up to Don and admits her anxieties about becoming a bigger part of his life and dealing with his children. We get quite a peek into Faye’s feelings this episode and we see her vulnerability. I must say: I like her. I think she could be really good for Don. But I’m concerned about what Don is feeling. Is he falling in love with Faye? Will his relationship with Faye be different from all the others? Will it last? For Don’s sake (and for Faye’s), I’m hoping the soup doesn’t spill.

Posted on September 22nd, 2010 at 9:07am.