Well, that was one of the most riveting hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. It’s hard to know how to start, except to quote the beginning of Alan Sepinwall’s blog post on last night’s episode:
Damn.
Damn.
Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn.
Damn.
Agreed. “The Gypsy and the Hobo” started with a familiar pace and familiar scenes – Don at work and with Suzanne Farrell, Roger and an old love interest, Joan and her horrible husband. Then Joan cracks a vase over the idiot’s head, Betty has a confidential discussion with the family lawyer, and the pace begins to accelerate; things feel tighter and more meaningful. Even given those signals, the moment when Betty orders Don to open his desk drawer and the scenes that followed were heart-stopping. Narrative time seemed to be infinitely still, with every thing coming to a sudden halt while Don wept over his dead brother. At the same time, it was like watching every hint about Don’s past from the previous two seasons all collapse into one five-minute stretch, and it was all the more effective because he was so unexpectedly truthful. And Suzanne’s presence, hovering just outside the door, added a thrumming, unspoken note of tension underneath the entire proceeding. There’s a ton to say about those scenes and the rest of the episode, but if nothing else, I want to make sure I mention how completely amazing it is that Matthew Weiner and the rest of the writing staff made the decision to enact this turn of events with two full episodes left in the season. Any other show I know would have made this episode the season finale, leaving us with a giant, revelatory cliffhanger. Instead, the aftermath of Don’s exposure will drive the show to this season’s conclusion. It’s great writing.
My favorite of these images is the bottom left, with pieces of Halloween costumes strewn in the foreground
This episode was also perhaps the most blatant entry in Mad Men’s ongoing fascination with holidays and the way they structure time. Season one ended with Thanksgiving and Don’s poignant speech about memory, family and nostalgia. This season has been downright riddled with appropriate festive metaphors and notable days of the calendar year – there was the Kentucky Derby party, the eclipse, and the British invasion on the 4th of July. Now, on Halloween, Don’s costume gets stripped away while his children dress up as figures from the impoverished, misunderstood, marginalized social strata Don once occupied. Betty calls up ghosts from Don’s past, and as he weeps we realize how much Adam’s death has haunted him. Halloween also provided us with the episode’s concluding moment, that thoroughly routine question now laden with new significance: “And who are you supposed to be?” The thematic consistency would almost be too tidy if it weren’t so completely shocking. And of course, these ghosts won’t disappear the next day.
It can’t be an accident that this episode, containing one of the most significant moments in the series to date, was also explicitly aware of its own fictional impact. First, we had Roger and his Casablanca-themed youth. His former lover directly compares their lives with that film, and in her memory at least, the young Roger was already an extra-fictional figure. He boxed, and spent all his money, and basically wandered around Paris “hoping to be a character in someone else’s novel.” Here is Roger now, thirty years later, a prominent but unmistakably supporting character in The Life of Don Draper. Then, there was the Caldecott Farms subplot. The ad campaigns at Sterling Cooper have always had a strong thematic relationship with the rest of the episode, but this one was particularly apropos, especially the focus group scene. Don’s line that he’s “not saying a new name is easy to find,” was the most overt, but there was also that great line from Peggy Olson. As everyone’s gathered in the darkened viewing room in front of a window that looks very much like a screen, Mrs. Dog Food snaps at the ad execs to “turn off” the unpleasant focus group, and Peggy says wonderingly, “I can’t turn it off, it’s actually happening.” For any other television show, that line would have to be some joke about TiVo and the death of destination viewing. On tonight’s episode of Mad Men, though, the scenes between Betty and Don completely achieved that remarkable, all-absorbing fictional suspense that creates a sensation of relentless immediacy for the audience. Who could turn off the television as Don actually fumbled his cigarette? And then, to everyone’s amazement, told his wife the truth?
Twenty-three days until the Kennedy assassination. Two episodes to go.