SPOILERS BELOW FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAS AIRED TO DATE.
Welcome to my first Mad Men write-up. I started watching this excellent series last summer, racing through the first season using my cable’s “on demand” service just in time to catch the second season premiere. I no longer have that cable subscription. In fact, my current satellite package doesn’t even carry AMC, so for the moment I’m forced to purchase the season one episode at a time from Amazon. Oh, the pain of it all.
I actually didn’t take to Mad Men right away. I thought the first episode of the series (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”) was brilliant, but tremendously unpleasant. I had serious doubts that I’d want to spend an hour every week with such horrible, unhappy people. I’m glad I stuck it out, because I’ve since discovered that no series currently on the air gives me so much consistent joy. And “consistent” is the key word. While Lost still has the power to amaze me, Mad Men is without question the most consistently excellent show on television — that I’ve seen, anyway.
So it is with satisfaction but not surprise that I say unto you that “Out of Town”, the premiere episode of Season 3, is a wonderful, fitting start to the new year. It opens with a mind bending set of vignettes playing in Don’s mind as he warms milk for an insomniac Betty. Visions of dead babies and dead mothers flicker before him before finally we see a midwife delivering an infant baby (soon to be Dick Whitman) into the arms of Don’s mother. Is he Moses? In any case, he scalds the milk.
Betty seems to have welcomed Don back into the house, although I had a moment of doubt when she told him she’d packed his valise — it’s only for a business trip. The couple seems to have settled back into their normal routine, which was never a particularly good routine to be in.
Meanwhile, the Brits have taken charge at Sterling-Cooper, though for some reason Sterling and Cooper are still around — Cooper still has his senior partner Japanese-themed office, in fact. No one mentions Duck Phillips, so I don’t know what ultimately happened with him. There’s a new CFO, however, named Pryce (Jared Harris), and he sends Don and Sal on an important trip to Baltimore to soothe the nervous father-son team at London Fog. Before that, however, the brass take the opportunity to fire Burt Peterson, the apparently incompetent head of accounts. This leaves a vacancy which Pryce fills by hiring Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove to split the responsibilities, a decision which leaves Pete absolutely livid. So once again, back to the normal routine.
Don and Sal fly to Baltimore, meet some randy stewardesses (and the flight navigator, for some reason), and Don prepares to fall into bed with one of the ladies. Back to the normal routine. Sal, for his part, calls for a bellhop to fix his air conditioner, and instead gets a surprising sexual advance. Then the fire alarm goes off, everyone scrambles, and Don comes traipsing down the fire escape just in time to see Sal through the window, temporarily sharing his hotel room with an undressed man. Whoops.
“Out of Town” seems to be about people operating in places where they don’t belong, and sort of stumbling because of it. Don is performing domestic duties in the kitchen. Pete and Ken are promoted together and apparently have to fight it out. Sal has a near-tryst with another man, something he has studiously avoided for a variety of reasons (mostly fear). And then there’s Pryce’s assistant John Hooker (Ryan Cartwright), who repulses both Peggy and Joan, but has quite strongly caught the attention of Peggy’s secretary. Hooker is both a fish out of water as a Brit living in America and as a man doing a job normally done by a woman in the 1960s. “This place is a gyocracy”, he laments.
Hooker gets dressed down by Pryce after setting himself up as a placeholder in Burt Peterson’s old office, quite literally scolded for being where he doesn’t belong. Trudy tells Pete that in his ambition and disappointment, he reminds her of her father — a comparison he can’t tolerate. And on the plane back from Baltimore — returning to where they belong — Don pitches Sal a London Fog slogan that serves as a warning to be more discrete in the future: “Limit your exposure.”
Don, of course, is the man who hopped into a car with a girl he’d just met and fled to Palm Springs. He’s not even really Don Draper. His whole life is about being where he’s not supposed to be! But the one thing about Don we can rely upon is that he’s an adulterous bastard, and though we’re disappointed when he takes Shelly the flight attendant up to his hotel room, we’re hardly surprised. And he gets off the best line of the night when, after Shelly tells him that she’s engaged and this might be her last chance to have a fling, he responds, “I’ve been married a long time. You get plenty of chances.”
Like it or not, Mad Men fans, screwing around is where Don Draper belongs. And the show’s poignant ending — aren’t the endings always poignant? — shows Don unable to recount to his daughter Sally the events leading up to her birth. Does he get choked up from the emotion? Or can he just not remember? I don’t think there’s any question that Don loves his wife and children. But advertising is about creating a need, and Don has needs in spades. Through the first two seasons, it’s been abundantly clear that Don is most at home when he’s away from his family, either at the office or in some other woman’s bed. When he’s in Manhattan.
When he’s in town.
Rating: 
Okay, so Season 1 ended with the presidential election of 1960. Season 2 ended with the death of Marilyn Monroe. Unless I missed it, we don’t actually know what year we’re in now, but I don’t see how they can skip past the Kennedy assassination.
