Mad Men Recap: Tripping Balls

In this episode, only two of Mad Men’s main characters actually take LSD, but the whole hour feels like a bad trip. There are three separate journeys undergone this week, but at their root is the same sense of dissatisfaction and of seeking an alternate reality as a way to combat real-life unhappiness. The episode unfolds over the course of two days, though it doesn’t become clear that the characters are traveling through the same amount of time repeatedly until about half way through the hour.

Peggy Olsen gets the most screen time she’s had this season — she’s still with her hipster Village Voice reporter boyfriend, but there’s friction between them given her constant preoccupation with her job. He’s upset that she doesn’t appreciate his progressive, proto-feminist support of her career, which is being stretched thin by her lack of affection and attention. She almost immediately offers to break up and leaves the apartment without resolving the fight. Her resentment is carried into work with her, however, and she reams a client for not being capable of appreciating her pitch (it’s the same client from the pilot, who can’t figure out exactly how he wants his Heinz canned beans to be marketed to the young folk) and gets taken off the account as a result.

Her schedule suddenly clear, she goes to the movies in the middle of the day and shares a joint and does some heavy petting with a cute guy wearing a classic beatnik black turtleneck, before returning to the office and falling asleep on Don’s couch. Peggy is searching for something — more approval and recognition of her talents, a sense of balance between her work and personal life, and an acknowledgment of the unique difficulties she faces in her job. She is snapped out of her self-pitying reverie by Ginsberg, who tells her an oblique and weird story about being an alien from Mars while they’re working late at night, a story he seems to have constructed to avoid the reality that he was born in a concentration camp. Deeply affected by this revelation from the obsessively private new copywriter, Peggy returns home and asks her boyfriend to come over to comfort her.

Roger is as unhappy as ever, and his wife Jane is no better (and is being styled this season in truly “Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra” level insane clothes, hair and makeup), so naturally they go to a dinner party with Jane’s therapist and a few other guests who fancy themselves amateur philosophers, and all drop LSD. Roger’s trip is hilarious, unsettling and sad — a vodka bottle plays a symphony when opened, his cigarette contracts and squeals like a party favor noisemaker, he watches the 1919 World Series from his bathtub, he has a conversation with Don. He and Jane lie on the floor together at home, still high, and sadly affirm that their marriage is over.

“You don’t like me,” Jane says sadly.

“I did. I really did,” Roger tells her, but he can barely contain his glee the following morning. Jane balks when he recaps their conversation, blaming the drugs, but ultimately she either accepts that the truth is out and they’re better off dissolving their union, or decides that it’s not worth fighting for anymore.

Finally, Don and Megan’s marriage is threaetening to cause trouble for them at work. Megan is hoping to be part of the Heinz pitch meeting after working with Peggy on it, but Don wants her to come with him to scope out a potential client — Howard Johnson’s, the roadside motel/diner — and she leaves work to go with him instead. She clearly resents not being able to be there for her team, and snarls at Don that she’d like clarification about when she is his wife and when she is his coworker, since it’s hard to tell sometimes. Don, maturely, yells at her and ditches her in the parking lot. Once he’s cooled down he returns to the diner but Megan has vanished, and the waitress’s admission that she was walking toward the parking lot with a group of young men when she saw her last doesn’t make Don feel any better.

He finds her sunglasses in the parking lot, and though it would be tremendously out of character for the show to have Megan abducted, “Law and Order: SVU”-style, it was plenty unsettling to watch Don drink coffee and check his watch obsessively, before returning apprehensively to the apartment in the morning. Once he sees the door has been chained he collapses in relief, but it’s not long before he kicks the door in and chases her around the apartment. Given what happened the last time Don got mad at a woman in his apartment, it’s scary to watch him run after her, and they finally collapse on the living room floor in an echo of their odd role playing tryst in the premiere episode.

“Every time we fight it diminishes us a little bit,” Megan tells Don, and, having exhausted his reserves of anger, he seems desperate to fix the situation, to make things right with her. She stands up and he stays on his knees, hugging her waist and whispering “I thought I’d lost you.” He seems to need her much more than he needed Betty.

The following morning Don heads into work to find an irate Bert Cooper waiting for him in the conference room. He berates him for allowing his creative department to be run by a “little girl,” and it’s not clear if he means Peggy or Megan.

“You’re on love leave,” he tells Don, and the implication is that Don needs to get things under control or else. Don, not used to being scolded at work, sits down dejectedly. Roger opens the door to the conference room.

“I’ve got an effort to make!” he says. “It’s going to be a beautiful day!”

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