“The Crash” - Mad Men / / Insight on the episode

“Every time we get a car this place turns into a whorehouse” were the last words in the most recent installment of AMC’s Mad Men, and the absurdity of the statement aptly reflects the chaos that occurred within those 44 minutes. Sunday’s episode had the audience diving further into the shrouded ambiguity of Don Draper’s past as well the drug soaked onset of the 1970’s. It was a welcome addition to the latest season of one of the most popular programs on television, and for damn good reason. The entire season has shown us a Don Draper who has reverted back into his old fashioned (get it?) womanizing patterns, and for a while, it left me wondering how much longer this monumentally troubled businessman could keep flipping his moral compass before completely losing his bearings. That quandary was portrayed in a new light last night, as Don and the rest of SCDP/CGC (or whatever they are going to call it now) undergo a frantic, sleepless trip on methamphetamines.

Right from the get-go, the episode begins with Ken Cosgrove hauling ass in a brand new Chevy surrounded by what I can only assume to be belligerent Chevy representatives that decided to get drunk off moonshine and start whipping guns out in the car. One of them covers Cosgrove’s eyes and then WHAM the titular “crash” occurs, except that Cosgrove isn’t the only thing in the episode that crashes. One of the greatest feats Mad Men constantly accomplishes is the show’s ability to depict how people flail and crash only to end up burning themselves into the ground or resurrecting themselves in a miraculous flurry of Phoenix feathers, and this episode is no exception.

The episode centers largely on Don and his confrontation with a crash. We first see him in the connecting hallway between his and Sylvia’s apartments chain smoking cigarettes, and we can tell that this dude has some serious shit going on his head. Don longingly places his ear to the door, hearing Sylvia call out to her husband and the viewer can just feel the jealousy and defeated rage seeping out of his body. Sylvia’s repudiation of Don in last weeks episode crushed him, and if it wasn’t obvious from the look on his face as she walked out, we know very clearly now that he isn’t handling his business in standard Don Draper fashion. The writers of the show took advantage of Don’s weakened state to let us in on a little more about the history of Dick Whitman with flashbacks incorporated throughout the episode.

Before I even get into what Don’s flashbacks reveal and what they could possibly mean, I would first like to mention that shortly into the episode, Cutler calls in his special “doctor” to help the men in the office take a load off their shoulders. Of course, this is done by injecting them in the ass with an unspecified concoction of vitamin B and other ingredients. It was never explicitly stated, but the majority of the firm was tripping face on speed, and in between Stan racing up and down office chairs like a bat out of hell and Cosgrove’s mangled foot from the car accident functioning enough for him to tap-dance, we have Don losing his fucking mind about soup, beauty marks, the perils of losing his virginity and possibly the ad for the new Chevy car.

The introduction of drug use in Mad Men is expected since the show is naturally following the already established course of history, and we all know how many drugs were coursing through the central nervous system of humanity on the cusp of the 70’s. More importantly however, the trip on speed set the framework for the episode, establishing that the audience is going to find themselves in the same entropic haze that the characters are engulfed in. As I struggled to figure out exactly what everyone was freaking out about, I slowly but surely realized that Don was on an entirely different plane than the rest of the firm. While they spent their sleepless weekend narrowing down possibilities for the new Chevy ad (and now I wonder if that’s even what they were doing) we find Don digging through archives for an old advertisement made for a soup company and Kramer-ing into a every single room in the office blabbering nonsense about “having it” and “cracking this whole thing wide open.”

I can almost certainly attribute this to the fact that minutes before receiving his injection of speed, we witnessed Don undergoing a nuclear meltdown after getting shot down by Sylvia over the phone, and here, in a moment of unbridled and unfiltered emotion the audience sees just how deep the split with Sylvia cut into him. This is a perfect representation of one the show’s major themes: loss. Loss is something that drives some men insane and some to suicide, and here, loss has driven Don Draper into a 120mph crash with a brick wall. Although, I will say how I find it interesting that after Sylvia divulges sincere emotions about her lack of trust for Don, accepting the risk of an affair and what each participant has at stake, all Don can muster up is “don’t cry, listen to me. I’m feeling a lot of emotions too.” It makes me wonder if Don is this crushed because of actual, sincere feelings for Sylvia, or if he just feels defeated after losing control of something he thought was his.

From then on, the episode is constant trip through Don’s mind. Throughout his ramblings, we are treated to brief glimpses into Don’s past, and for once, some lucidity on why Don handles his relationships with women (and possibly with people in general) the way he does is provided. The audience is reintroduced to a young Don, struggling with a shit life in a whorehouse and after coming down with a chest cold, his only source of comfort is provided by a prostitute named Amee who bears a striking resemblance to Sylvia and draws a beauty mark on the same exact side of her face. Amee sits besides Don in bed throughout his convalescence and then immediately takes advantage of him, stripping him of his virginity. So, from an incredibly early age, we see that Don easily found comfort in promiscuous, alluring women who were willing to have sex with him.

In present time, we see Don in an equally crippled state (although this time emotionally rather than physically) and in spite of appearing to be frantically at work towards a breakthrough on the Chevy ad, it dawns on everyone that he has been putting all of the effects of the drug towards pitching the perfect advertisement to win Sylvia back. From this, its painfully apparent that almost everything in Don’s life is basically ripping him apart from the inside. He doesn’t give two shits about his job or the people there (Frank Gleason died for shits sake and I don’t think Don even bats an eyelash), and somehow he cares even less about his family. That second point was driven home in an equally absurd fashion, as the majority of the other scenes in the episode revolve around an elderly black woman breaking into the Draper apartment and robbing them blind through the door Don left unlocked to pine and yearn for Sylvia, all the while Sally and Bobby are home alone. This to me is the ultimate representation of how much of a fuck up Don Draper is turning out to be. When Don gets screwed over, he doesn’t think twice about what is going on around him. He focuses strictly on how he can fix his situation, and he hones in on this at a level that borders on sheer obsession.

The complications of getting fucked over because of life decisions is an integral part of the series, and this episode demonstrates exactly how miserable Mr. Big Shot Draper is at dealing with it. Throughout the show it has become increasingly hard to root for him, and even now when he is clawing at his skin, digging through old ads in order to come up with the perfect words to say to a woman to win her back (a situation that Hollywood and TV have trained us to believe in) I find myself wanting to grab Don by the shoulders, slap him across the face and tell him to get his fucking shit together. And when Don finally comes home, ready to present his Shakespearean sales pitch to Sylvia, he is presented with cops in his living room, Betty sitting on his couch calling him out for having an affair in front of Megan and news of the burglary all at once, and the entire weight of Don’s life crashes down on his shoulders as he passes out cold.

One of the final scenes in the episode shows us Don and Sylvia on an elevator together. The tension is thin as ice, and Don’s only response to Sylvia’s inquiry about how life is going is the word “busy.” Clearly, this shows us that Don has gotten over Sylvia as they don’t say a word to each other for the remainder of the realistically long elevator ride, but a question remains: does this mean he is going to do the same exact thing again? A person’s inability to change is another one of the show’s major themes, and after we see Don try his hardest (although the speed probably helped somewhat) to change and attempt to restore a broken, albeit illicit, relationship, what on Earth would make anyone think he would actually change after crashing as horribly as he did.

-Wilson De Gouveia