'Mad Men': Sally and the Chilly 'Forecast'
This week’s Mad Men episode was titled “The Forecast,” and it was chilly, something the characters knew even without consulting the Weather Underground. Mixing real estate with Vietnam, Playland with Sesame Street, it offered a variety of new ways for Don Draper to look pained, and gave a segment of the show’s fans what it had been waiting for: the return of Sally Draper, angrier and more fearful than ever.
As usual this season, plots were raised only to be dropped. Do you think we’ll ever hear what Don comes up with as the grand vision for that ad-agency meeting in the Bahamas? He certainly spent a lot of time trying, Tom Sawyer-like, to get other people to do his work for him, incessantly questioning everyone from Peggy to Sally’s young friends about their hopes and dreams, hoping and dreaming himself of plagiarizing their work for the speech he kept putting off writing.
Meanwhile, guest star Bruce Greenwood starred in another chapter of the soap opera “No Man Is Worthy of Joan,” playing a rich smoothie who chased Joan from coast-to-coast hotels, from the Beverly Wilshire to what looked like a replica of Manhattan’s Warwick. Greenwood was, unlike Don, an honest heel, one who, after capturing his prize beneath the sheets, admitted he didn’t want to get involved with a divorced (twice!) mother of a five-year-old who watches Sesame Street with a grumpy babysitter, who herself watches Mannix on lonely nights. (Life before cable TV was so grim — no wonder she was grumpy.)
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In keeping with the season’s most consistent theme, unlikely characters were eloquent about Don Draper’s failures in life. Prominent among them was the woman selling his bachelor pad, who said, “It looks like a sad person lives here… This place reeks of failure.” I’ve met realtors who bake cookies to make the house smell inviting to buyers, but never one who burns the incense of despair to repel the owner.
The show’s big reveal wasn’t, in the usual Mad Men manner, a spiritual one, but rather a corporeal one: Glen Bishop returned to the show. He had made like one of my favorite superheroes of the Mad Men era and become the Elongated Man, trim and 18 years old, hopeful of claiming Betty (Betty!) as his own.
Once again returning to her role as Blonde Siren, Betty took Glen’s moo-cow stares in stride, never rattled when he pulled her close, and was only mildly shaken when the young man told her he’d enlisted in the armed services to go to Vietnam to fight for the oppressed — no, it turned out he was lying: He’d flunked out of school and did it to get his father off his case (and maybe score with Betty). Alas, that last was not to happen.
The night belonged to Sally because she got all the good speeches and close-ups. She stared with contempt when Glen and Betty exchanged well-hello-there glances, sizing each other up hungrily as Sally waited impatiently to get on with the teen trip to the Rye, New York, amusement park Playland. And she stared with contempt at Don after she believed (with personal history on her side) that he was capable of putting the moves on anyone, in this case one of her 17-year-old friends who flirted with the old man outrageously. It was a great night for Sally’s stares.
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Don, for his part, looked baffled in the wake of Sally’s fury. One reason these final episodes feel so slow and anticlimactic is because Matthew Weiner is regularly putting Don about three to five steps behind the audience. Don is finally realizing things we realized a season or two earlier. Thus his stricken features after Sally made what will go down in Mad Men history as her Great Port Authority Bus Terminal Address, saying her parents are alike in that they respond to flattery in whatever form it takes and proceed to “ooze everywhere,” that she can’t wait to “get away from you and Mom and hopefully be a different person from you two.” Did I mention that Don looked stunned by this revelation, that he, of all people, had raised a teenager who felt little but hostility for him?
Cut to the hallway outside Don’s apartment and the umpteenth time we’ve seen him framed in a doorway — doorways are to Matthew Weiner what, well, what doorways are to Freud: portals to the unconscious.
This episode did a good job of conveying the atmosphere the Vietnam War instilled in many suburban folks — conflicting feelings of anger (Sally voiced the common protest against the war, and was inevitably called “Jane Fonda” by her mother), fear (Sally’s tearful call to patch things up with Glen and say goodbye was easily the night’s best moment), and incomprehension (Glen, like so many tragic young knuckleheads, thought enlisting might solve a few adolescent problems rather than prove a potentially deadly mission).
For the rest, I’ll give Peggy the prize for Best Display of Anger, recognizing as she did that the performance review she demanded of Don was a pathetic ploy to get her to reveal herself and be used by him once again.
That man just reeks of moral failure.
Mad Men airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on AMC.
