The Televangelist: ‘Mad Men’ Season 5, Ep. 6

Baby I just want to be alone in the truth with you

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  • AMC.com
  • “I just want to be alone in the truth with you”



Last night on Twitter, someone remarked that the next episode of “Mad Men” might as well be directed by David Lynch, “because that’s the way we seem to be headed, and I have no qualms.” The dreamlike/nightmarish pall that has permeated the season has still not lifted, and “Far Away Places” (co-written by series creator Matthew Weiner) was a strange and uneasy journey whose surrealism was both engrossing and at times, repelling.

Weiner loves his narrative symmetry, so last night we were shown three parallel and intersecting afternoons and evenings of three couples whose relationships teetered on the edge of the abyss. The three women - Megan, Peggy and Jane - all had a focus on being taken seriously, whether about their jobs, the status of their relationship, or in Megan’s case both. The men - Don, Abe and Roger - were all almost shockingly cavalier. In fact Don, whose arc I’ll speak more about in a moment, was positively gleeful, at least for a time. If that wasn’t the weirdest thing I’ve seen on “Mad Men,” I don’t know what is.

For anyone concerned that “Mad Men” was on a downward slope, that the characters had already done or achieved what we expected of them, and that the only recourse left was to resort to “Grey’s Anatomy”-like storytelling where everyone will end up sleeping with everyone else they work with, twice, with gunmen/bombers/natural disaster/etc to fuel dramatic tension ... well, there’s little danger of that. For one, the biggest change-up in Season 5 has been Don dropping his mopey and self-destructive behavior, which felt last season like it was pulling the entire show down as a kind of Coleridge albatross. Further, there’s a devotion to these characters by now that I think would lead most of us to be ok with the show just being Joan answering phone calls while Peggy, Stan and Ginsberg crack wise in the art room and Roger dictates more moments from his childhood into a sequel to “Sterling’s Gold” (one of my favorite lines from the entire series has to be one of those anecdotes, where Roger states, “I always loved chocolate ice cream. But my mother would only let me get vanilla because it wouldn’t stain anything.” Cracking, Roger, really).

But more than anything, this season has been wholly immersive, with each episode not only leaving behind a number of bizarre stand-out moments (Fat Betty, the fight between Lane and Pete, Zou Bisou Bisou) but creating this intensive atmosphere that, while it’s not as anxiety-inducing or suffocating as “Breaking Bad’s” world, it’s tangible and visceral in its own way.