Why don't we have the girls take her to lunch? I mean, she's not disappearing, is she?  -Joan Holloway   "Lady Lazarus," this week's episode, draws its title from a Sylvia Plath poem from the early 60s of the same name, which includes these lines: "I am a smiling woman./I am only 30./And like the cat I have 9 times to die." and also these: "Dying/ is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well."   Both of these excerpts from Ms. Plath make me think in this context of Megan Draper, who said goodbye this week, at (more)

Who knows why people in history did good things? For all we know, Jesus was trying to get the Loaves and Fishes account. – Roger Sterling   Though it had serious undertones throughout, "At The Codfish Ball," played as one of MadMen's most comic episodes to date. The kind of subtle jokes that tend to pop up once an episode were scattered throughout the story, and new characters and some long lost returning characters lent the proceedings an air of near farce. MadMen would never stoop to straight farce, so this week may be the closest they'll ever get. Roger (more)

"Everyone has somewhere to go today." -Bert Cooper My initial reaction to this episode was not good. After 4 years of traditional linear storytelling, with some important flashbacks and dream sequences, all of a sudden and seemingly for no reason we have this triptych of tales told in a disjointed, 1990's, Pulp Fiction fashion. My first thought was that MadMen was violating its own well-established rules. The device of fracturing the timeline served to make some information ambiguous on first viewing, and create hierarchies of shared or unshared knowledge amongst characters and audience. E.g.: When Don calls Peggy at the (more)

"Drip…Drip…Drip…Drip…Drip…Drip…Drip." -Pete and Trudy Campbell's Kitchen Sink   After 4 hours of carefully setting up themes, parallels, contrasts and hierarchies for the season, this week we finally wrapped up the exposition and began exploring these themes in earnest. We're in the middle of the season now, and "Signal 30" was a classic mid-season stand alone episode, with a great deal happening on several levels. Before we get to the story, and by way of review, here are a couple things I said in previous weeks, followed by relevant quotes from this week's episode (call it proof of my MadMen bona (more)

"In my heart, I'm on the verge of throwing you in front of a cab. So however proud of yourself you're feeling right now, just know that everything I'm saying has 'or else,' after it." – Don Draper   A brief MadMen anecdote: Rewatching this week's episode with Mrs. KRObot, we come to the scene where Don opens the SCDP kitchenette cupboard and it contains LIFE cereal. "LIFE!" Mrs. KRObot says, because it's the only cereal I eat. I said back to her: "They represent LIFE." This made her laugh, because she thought I was making some grand artistic reading, (more)