In one of my favorite, if slightly predictable, scenes from last night’s episode, Paul Kinsey manages to inspire intelligent ad copy despite his drunken late-night office escapades. The pleasure of the scene comes both from Peggy and Don’s surprisingly sympathetic responses to a familiar writer’s tragedy (“I hate when that happens”) and, of course, from Peggy’s impressive on-the-fly thinking. Trying to find the benefit of telegrams over phone calls, Peggy hits on Paul’s wistful Chinese aphorism, “the faintest ink is better than the best memory” and turns it into copy for Western Union. A telegram, unlike a phone call, leaves a permanent physical trace that can be framed and kept as a memento. After railing against Peggy’s use of her gender, which Paul views as an unfair advantage, it’s deeply satisfying to watch him gape at Peggy in amazement when she turns his own idea into the concept for a great ad campaign.

Eat your heart out, Paul Kinsey

The scene is about Peggy earning her male peer’s respect in the workplace, something she deserves and has often been denied. But as is so often the case on Mad Men, the shallow, manipulative ads, which appeal to our basest instincts and unthinking emotional responses, also provide important subtext for other aspects of the plot. The many plot threads were so thoughtfully, subtly entangled in this episode that it’s almost a shame to pull them out and set them against each other in a comparative way, but nevertheless: thanks to Betty finally submitting to curiosity and breaking into her husband’s locked desk drawer, we now understand that the faintest ink may be better than the best memory, but it’s also far more dangerous.

What, after all, is Betty examining as she sifts through the documents in Don’s shoebox, his tombstone for Dick Whitman, but pages and pages of faint ink? She finds pictures that say “Dick and Adam, 1944” on the back, a deed to a house in California under the name Anna Draper, and most damningly, a decree of divorce between Don and Anna Draper. The documents are dangerous because they live in a permanent, physical place outside Don’s ever malleable, ever playacting identity, and for some reason he can’t bring himself to destroy them. (What’s more, he’s even continuing to create them, giving Suzanne Farrell’s little brother his business card.) The ink is also dangerous because it forms an incomplete narrative. Sure, you have the telegram to permanently remind you of the message you received, but it can only retell the message’s content, not its context.

Dick Whitman's papery remains

From the beginning, that’s what Mad Men was striving to be – a retelling of more than just our surface assumptions about the 1960s. It’s easy to grow distracted from that initial intent, because as the show progresses we get all caught up in the singularity of Don Draper and the whole cast of characters. The earliest episodes, though, were more about showing us both the typewriter – the physical reminder of the period, the newfangled ink-slinger – and then also showing us Joan Holloway reassuring Peggy Olson that the typewriter would be simple enough for a woman to use. We saw the faint remnant ink, but we also got to see its surprising, forgotten context. It was lovely to see that early intention return, now carefully embedded inside an ad campaign and a character’s plot line.

Much of Mad Men’s punch has always relied on the juxtaposition of our contemporary perspective with the unflinching portrayal of urban corporate America in the 1960s. We watch Betty down a gimlet and take a puff on her cigarette while she’s nine months pregnant, and we love the frisson of transgression it gives us. Many of the best of those moments go unspoken – one of my favorites from season two happens after Don buys his new Cadillac and he takes Betty and the kids out for a picnic. They lounge on a blanket after lunch, music playing from the open car door, and when they’re done, Betty blithely shakes the trash onto the pristine green grass, folds up the blanket, and walks away. The scene is all the better for its winking silence.

The subtext of “Wee Small House” operates on the same principle, but does so in a far more explicit way. While Don struggles with Conrad Hilton’s demanding requirements and Betty continues to entertain and reject Henry Francis, Sal Romano finally falls victim to the homophobia we’ve all feared since season one. Lee Gardner Jr. comes on to him, Sal exercises his perfect right to work in unmolested peace, and Don’s irritability finally expresses itself by lashing out at someone else’s inability to keep secrets. Thanks to Connie, Don has had to quash his wayward ways (at least professionally), and resents the continuing existence of others’ hidden lives. We saw it recently in Don’s impatience with Peggy’s ambition, and now Don’s previously secret knowledge of Sal’s sexual preference causes him to strike out against Sal.

This is the type of plot that usually goes without commentary on Mad Men. We see, understand, and are saddened by the social context that permits and even encourages homophobia. But for whatever reason, “Wee Small House” goes farther. Underneath Sal’s disgrace, we see Don listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech early in the morning with his daughter’s teacher, we hear clips from the memorial service for the four girls who died in a church in Birmingham, the neighborhood women discussing the march on Washington, and perhaps most importantly, we see more from the Drapers’ “girl” than we’ve ever seen in the past. While we’re upset when Don fires Sal, the real emotional response to injustice comes out of these scenes, watching Carla and her employers while we hear Martin Luther King Jr. in the background. We feel the weight of cultural memory as Carla listens to “[her] station” on the radio, and we’re certainly not allowed to watch without anger as Betty shakes her head and wonders if civil rights are just “not supposed to happen right now.”

"Do you know how bad it must be, for the negroes to descend on Washington like that, just to be heard?"

The parallel is not subtle, and Betty’s comment about civil rights ensures we catch the drift. The 1960s were the time for civil rights, but it won’t be Sal’s time for decades to come. It’s the first time I can recall Mad Men not only capitalizing on our shock about the past, but also using that shock to rebound with explicit commentary on the current day. With Prop 8 and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it is still an open question for some people about whether gay rights are not supposed to happen right now. Watching Carla stand quietly in the kitchen and listen to the funeral service on the radio, Matthew Weiner’s contemporary answer sounds  clearly from his historical fiction.