Season 7, Episode 2: "A Day's Work"

Anna Peele: There seemed to be a deeper malaise over Don Draper and company than usual in the premiere, which may account for how "boring" it was (I re-watched it twice — obviously I protest too much). It may be Garden State syndrome: watching a narrative about depressed people is dull because depressed people are dull. Mad Men's second episode picks up about ten minutes in, once Don stops his gloomy emotional masturbation and realizes that everyone outside of Sterling Cooper & Partners still thinks he's the prettiest.

But Don's return to "Don Draper" in the eyes of people who don't know better highlighted some highly embarrassing misconceptions. Peggy thinks the flowers from her secretary's fiancé were for Peggy from Ted. Sally, and by extension, Betty and Megan, assumed that Don was still working at SC&P, until she drops by and runs into Old Man Lou's homestead on Don's former claim. When Don asks her why she doesn't call him out, she gives the line of the episode: "It's more embarrassing for me to catch you in a lie than it is for you to be lying." Every woman who has ever pretended not to notice a subway masturbator nodded vigorously and in unison. A passerby calls ur-WASP Roger Sterling a kike. Even Joan is misidentified as someone who gives a shit about secretarial assignments by Peggy and (secret huge racist!) Bert Cooper. Is Cutler the hero of the episode for figuring out that Joanie is more valuable as an accounts woman and taking on the Joan-holding back, depressing orgy master Roger Sterling? Or is it truth-teller Sally, who literally made me tear up by telling Don she loved him with to the most optimistic possible soundtrack?

Tom Junod: This wasn't about malaise. This was Mad Men in full comic mode — though a comedy of errors, ending in a devastating recognition. From start to finish, this episode was zany, with enough people barging through the wrong doors to populate a French sex farce. In his Paris Review interview, Matthew Weiner said the following: "…a scene where one guy thinks he's talking about one thing and the other guy thinks they're talking about something else sounds likes a big cliché. But guess what? That's comedy." Well, that was the whole episode tonight: Everybody gets it wrong, until someone gets it right. I expected this, by the way — Weiner has always been good at following up a bummer of an episode with an antic, effervescent one. Indeed, tonight we might have seen the Mad Men equivalent of "The Bizarro Jerry," full of doppelgängers and mistaken identities, were it not for Don, and Dawn. Sure, Dawn and Shirley call each other Shirley and Dawn. But it's one thing recognizing that as far as their co-workers are concerned, they might as well be interchangeable; it's quite another being treated interchangeably. Is Cooper a racist? Yes; and so is Lou Avery. But that's the way it went tonight — it's all fun and games, until someone gets hurt, or someone else does the hurting.

Who got hurt? Well, Dawn, for one. And who does the hurting? Well, who do you think? In the first scene, Don pays Dawn for services she's providing out of loyalty. She doesn't want the money — she doesn't want to do anything she doesn't feel comfortable doing. But Don insists, and she takes it. And that's the second theme of the episode, interwoven with the comic confusions: Don as corrupter, Don as a man for whom prostitution is an essential human transaction. On Valentine's Day, he winds up going on a date with his daughter, whom he confuses with his ex-wife Betty, because she doesn't say anything when she knows he's lying. But he realizes he's gotten that wrong when he takes her to the diner, and she says, "I'm so many people." Sally isn't Betty; and she isn't so many people, either. She's Don. And when he sees who she is — when he, alone among the show's characters in this episode, has a moment of genuine recognition — he does the same thing that he did with Dawn at the start of the show: He makes her an offer. But she, unlike Dawn, has no compunction about taking it; she's comfortable with it; hell, she's thrilled by it, and it restores him to his former glamour — and former power — in her eyes. It's beautiful, and at the same time devastating, when at the end of their "date" she shocks him by telling him she loves him, because he's not only told her the truth about himself — that he's out of a job. He's also told her the truth about herself, and tried to make her an accessory to his most venal crime.

AP: This episode was particularly funny and, once Don stopped eating crackers and watching daytime TV, unusually bullish on the emotional states of the characters. Because unless we're talking about two different moments, Sally was decidedly un-thrilled about Don's offer to dine and dash. She looks confused and upset. "Really?" After all of Don's transgressions — he was just comforting Mrs. Rosen! — Sally believed there were some mores even he abided by. So when Don pulled out his wallet, they were both relieved. Sally had a father who was trying to be honest with her and could occasionally behave like a regular human and Don realized Sally wasn't like him — while Don was happy to eat a sandwich expensed by McCann Erickson, Sally actually cared where her free lunch came from.

And how about that other uplifting plot line: Pete Campbell has an awesome girlfriend! It takes lovely realtor (and Don's season four date Bethany ringer) Bonnie to lift him out of the Camus novel he's been living in — "No one feels my existence" — but she does it with some desk sex and something Trudy never had: personal drive. This is not to hate on Trudy, who was more understanding and supportive than Pete ever deserved. But her ambition was ever only the betterment of Pete. If he wanted her to convince her dad to hire the firm to represent Clearasil, great. If he needed a pied-à-terre in the city to screw their Cos Cob neighbors, he got it. Bonnie, like Pete, is a salesman, and she understands what it means to be proud, to be defined by your business successes. And instead of coveting Ted Chaough's slightly better office or complaining that Bob Benson's dick is bigger than his, Pete listens to Bonnie: "Our fortunes are in other people's hands and we have to take them." Does this mean Pete is going to "chew Bob up and spit him out"? Or is that just what Bonnie is going to do to him?

TJ: My favorite Mad Men mode is madcap, and tonight was as madcap as it gets, with great lines (Stan, when he thought Peggy had gotten roses: "It's hard to believe your cat has the money"), and Pete in full hysteria, and a general air of zippy comic clatter. And you're right about Don paying the bill after trying to enlist Sally as co-conspirator. You're also right about Don behaving like a regular human; in the diner, he reacts to something Sally says by looking away, by letting his eyes glance off to the side, and that gesture is the first new gesture I've seen him make in years — and, possibly, the first spontaneous one. But I disagree with you about Bonnie. She's not there to be Pete's lovely girlfriend; she's there to tempt Don, on Don's next trip to LA. There was a strange mercenary tinge to Don's transactions tonight, from his insistence on paying Dawn to his efforts, in the diner, with Sally; and there is mercenary edge to Bonnie every time she's onscreen (Pete, in the last episode: "She turns it on for everyone." Bonnie, tonight: "I love my flowers, and I love you. But I also love the fifteen strangers who might buy this dump.") Don't you think that Don, who grew up in a brothel, might meet his match in… Nah. Let's not go there. In fact, tonight's episode had exactly what I thought the show had to have this season, after the last episode of Season 6: Don dealing with the ramifications of his truth-telling to Sally. I was disappointed in last week's episode because it seemed as though Weiner might fall back on what he always falls back on: Don backsliding and reverting to type. But in this episode, Don wasn't just lying; he was trying to lie, and not succeeding. The truth, as an option, was continually on the table, and eventually, with Sally's prodding ("Just tell the truth"), he took it — and in so doing, he confirmed what has been clear from the start: that his daughter might be the only character in Mad Men who matters to him. She has also sprouted some serious eyebrows in the two months that have passed, in Mad Men time, since the end of last season. Maybe he can't lie to her anymore, because he can't lie to them.

AP: Puberty affects us in strange ways, Tom. I mean, Don transformed from Alfalfa into Jon Hamm between the whorehouse and the Korean War (can't wait for those flashbacks). As for Bonnie, you may be onto something: Nothing turns Don on like a complicated woman he knows he shouldn't fuck. But since Betty, Don prefers brunettes (Dr. Faye was clearly bleaching), and he's been trying so hard to be good this season. At this point, I don't think Matthew Weiner is interested in Don "backsliding and reverting to type." The story he seems to be telling now is how Don Draper re-ascends to Don Draper-dom without the shortcuts of stealing someone's identity and lying about everything ever. And if that's true, the show isn't about Don's downfall. It's back to being about his identity.

TJ: Okay, then: so what happened tonight, and how was the general comedy of errors resolved in Sally's "I love you, Dad"? I mean, you've convinced me that Don, rather than getting it right about Sally, got it wrong — that she's not as much like him as he thought she was. But he reacted, big-time, to Sally saying, "I'm so many people." He clearly perceived it as some kind of opportunity for solidarity, because that's when he suggested running out on the check. I'll have to look at the episode again, to see if she responds with dismay — because I was looking at him, as he realized that he was revealing himself yet again… that he was showing his daughter that he's cheap, in the moral sense. That was the best part of the show for me tonight: Don's responses to Sally. She surprised him, time and again, and he registered surprise. Don never registers surprise, and that he permitted himself something more than a raised eyebrow is what made him appear, as you say, almost human.

AP: What happened tonight was that the show surprised us as much as Sally surprised Don. He deserved her forgiveness. Who could have ever predicted that?

TJ: She also asked the question that is sure to be addressed soon — the question only she could ask, come to think of it: "Do you still love Megan?"

AP: Well, does he?

TJ: No. He loves her. And Bonnie Whiteside.

MORE MAD MEN:

What We Want from Mad Men's Final Season

The Death Images in Season Six

Jessica Pare on the Megan Draper Theories

The Esquire Mad Men Recaps

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io