Mad Men – Recap & Review – Seven Twenty Three

photo: amc

Mad Men
Seven Twenty Three

Original Air Date: Sept 27, 2009

Brittany D. – Staff Writer
brittany@thetwocentscorp.com

Welcome back to another week of what I’m now calling ‘confusion under the surface’. It’s all very cut and dry at first glance, but there are so many layers to this show you can peel them back for days. In the interest of keeping the recaps from being sixteen pages long, I go straight for the surface plot, but in the comments? Let’s go buck wild, kids. Peel back all the layers, and see what we’re left with.

The episode starts with Peggy in bed with a man whose identity we don’t know yet, Betty lying on a fainting sofa, and Don beat up and bloody on the floor of a hotel room. This should be an interesting hour, though for some reason tonight, it felt like two (and not in a bad way).

A nice, unscathed looking Don gives a cursory glance around a room in his house that’s being redecorated. He says it’s hard to tell how much he likes it when he can’t see a price tag, gives a piece of advice and leaves for work. He’s late (been doing that a lot lately.) and finds Connie Hilton sitting behind his desk waiting for him. He wants Don to handle the three Hilton properties in New York, and the congratulations make the rounds in the office. In a meeting with BOL, Sterling and Cooper, BOL tells Don that Hilton and his lawyers want Don to sign a three year contract. There’s a five thousand dollar signing bonus, but Don doesn’t want to sign it. He says he’ll think about it over the weekend, but instead he spends his time at an eclipse with Sally’s class which means Mrs. Maypole is there. Of course there’s a lot of talking back and forth and Mrs. Maypole isn’t very subtle. Somehow Don keeps it in his pants, (I hope that Sally being there influenced his decision.) and the weekend ends without looking at that contract again.

On Monday, Roger asks Don if he thinks he’s more dangerous without the contract, but again Don won’t budge. So, Roger does the next thing he can think of and calls Betty. He tells her to try and convince Don to sign the contract, but it’s the first time she’s heard about it, so when Don gets home they argue. He explains that without a contract, he holds all the power, and Betty argues that it’s only three years. “What’s the matter? You don’t know where you’re going to be in three years?” Don leaves angry (with a drink in his hand) and as he’s driving around, picks up two hitchhikers. They say they’re going to get married at Niagara Falls to avoid the Vietnam draft and as payment, give Don two Phenobarbital. Because on top of it all, Don is now a pill popper.

Of course the inevitable happens; Don starts tripping out in a hotel room and seeing his dad. The nice couple has stolen all but one dollar from him but they did leave the car. Don, don’t you know that you never follow a hippie to a second location? Later, in the office and after explaining he had a ‘fender bender’, Cooper is sitting behind Don’s desk and tells him to sign the contract. “After all, when it comes down to it, who’s really signing this contract anyway?” As Don signs it, he says he wants no more contact with Sterling. He begrudgingly goes home and tells Betty he signed it, though I doubt she even knows what that means.

Meanwhile, elsewhere at the SC, Duck is sending gifts to Peggy and Pete to try and woo them over. Pete refuses his Cuban cigars and tells Peggy that she should send her Hermes scarf back, and she calls Duck to arrange it. Before she goes, she heads to Don’s office trying to get more information on the Hilton account, but he yells at her, telling her that she has a job grown men would kill for and to stop asking for things. Well, that’s an awesome way to talk to anyone, but now Peggy has no real reason to return the scarf. She goes to Duck’s hotel room fully intent on giving it back, but in less than five minutes, Duck is telling Peggy that he wants to give her a wild ride ifyouknowwhatimean, and they wind up in bed.

Back home, Betty, has taken over Francine’s role as secretary in the Junior League. The women are against a water tank going up and draining the local reservoir, so Betty says she knows someone – Mr. Grabbyhands from Roger’s party, otherwise known as Henry Francis who works in the governor’s office. She meets him for lunch, and we learn that Betty was an Anthropology major. I feel like we knew this already. We did, didn’t we? Anyway, he tells her that he can’t help with the reservoir project but that she shouldn’t get up. As the eclipse happens, Betty looks up at it and Henry shields her eyes. When she says she feels a little dizzy, they pass a shop selling a fainting chair. Sometime later, after Betty and Don fight, she buys the fainting chair and gives her interior decorator a heart attack in the process because it doesn’t tie into the room. I’m calling it right now that this thing with Henry and Betty can only end in sex. Probably on that fainting chair.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

Sterling: I watched the sunrise today.
Don: How was it?
Sterling: Average.

Sterling, about Don’s contract:
Sign it and maybe we could put your name out front. After mine. And Cooper, probably.

What did you think of the episode? There are a few things that clearly have to mean something: Betty putting the fainting chair in front of the hearth, and the hearth symbolizes heart and home. Don has been late in every episode for at least the past two or three – what does that mean? And two people sitting behind Don’s desk – symbolically taking away his power? Like I said, discuss the heavy stuff in the comments! Leave your Two Cents and peel away those layers.