Quick Take: Mad Men, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"
"What do all the good boys and girls want for Christmas? Lucky Strike!" – Roger Sterling
Review: Mad Men, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"
(S0402) Now that last week's season premiere, "Public Relations," set the stage for where Don, Betty, and the office crew stand in this brave new world of late 1964, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" is able to pull back the storytelling camera a little, bringing in a number of characters that we haven't seen yet this season and, in some cases, for quite a long time.
I'm sure I'm not the only one, for example, who yelled "Glen Bishop is back!" when he pops into the seemingly idyllic picture of Betty (January Jones), new husband Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley) and family shopping for a Christmas tree. Glen (Marten Holden Weiner , son to Mad Men creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner) seems to have solidly shifted his semi-creepy attentions from Betty to daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka). It's hard to say whether Glen is playing out some long range revenge on Betty or if he sincerely has placed his focus on Sally for other reasons, but when he breaks into the Draper residence (oh, sorry, the "Frances residence," as Carla, played by Deborah Lacey, reminds us) with the goal of smashing some eggs and pouring food on the countertops, it's as though he's calling out the unsettled emotional mess that lingers just underneath the pristine surface.
We didn't see much of Betty at all this week otherwise, and even Don Draper (Jon Hamm) played something of a peripheral role for much of the episode. The biggest surprise return came in the form of Freddie Rumson (Joel Murray, brother to Bill Murray), who we last saw wash out of Sterling Cooper in Season Two after pissing himself and passing out before a client presentation. He's back at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce now, at least conditionally, on the back of 16 months of sobriety and a $2 million Pond's Cold Cream account. Freddie and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) get a nice amount of screen time together, and it's striking how the power dynamic has shifted between the two over the course of the series. Let's remember that Freddie helped to raise Peggy out of the ranks of the secretarial pool (sincerely if condescendingly complimenting her reference to Belle Jolie lipstick as a "basket full of kisses" in Season One), which helped to launch her copywriting career. Peggy for her part ends up needing to check herself, apologizing for dismissively (if correctly) calling Freddie old fashioned for how he wanted to handle the creative pitch for the Pond's account.
Meanwhile, much of the momentum for the episode is built around the return of Lee Garner, Jr. (Darren Pettie), the main connection to the Lucky Strike account (along with poppa Sr.) that is responsible for a precarious percent (don't say that word around Roger with a British accent, mind) of SCDP's receipts. Lee's power was on destructive display the last time we saw him in Season Three, when his rejected pass at Sal Romano (Bryan Batt) and the subsequent fumbling of the situation by Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) caused the firm to hit the immediate eject button on Sal's longstanding tenure.
When a post-three martini lunch Roger Sterling (John Slattery) is caught off-guard by a Lee phone call, he mentions SCDP's Christmas party. Garner invites himself, which forces the fledgling ad firm to vastly ramp up the song and dance and hoopla and circumstance for what was supposed to have been a Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) produced modest affair. The "production" of the Christmas party – both in terms of how Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) and team really put it on for an audience of one, and simply in how gorgeous SCDP's office set looks in full party tilt, mid-'60s style – is worth the price of admission alone. There's also a lot of hilarity that ensues in the planning and execution of the party. I particularly liked Roger lines such as: "We need to change its rating from convalescent home to Roman orgy." And Don and Roger's "Did you enjoy ze Fuhrer's birthday?" "May he live for a thousand years" shtick is priceless. But on a more serious note, we see Roger being forced to work like we've never seen him before, even being intimidated by Lee into putting on the Santa outfit for the party.
Speaking of more serious notes, we see Don struggling with being newly single during the holidays, and letting his self-discipline on multiple fronts slide to a disturbing new level. His excessive drinking is being noted (and we're talking about a culture where there's a mini-bar in every office), with Joey even referring to him as "pathetic" when he's forced to call his secretary, Allison (Alexa Alemanni), after forgetting his keys at the office. Allison's visit to Don's apartment to let him in turns into the world's quickest one night stand, and I couldn't help but think about Don's line to Peggy on her first day as his secretary in the pilot episode: "I'm your boss, not your boyfriend." That is, the Don Draper of 1960 would never in a million years consider letting his personal life collides so closely to his professional one. Allison served as an odd sort of proxy girlfriend (or perhaps proxy for a real human connection) throughout the episode, opening the card from Sally early on and reading out loud to Don the children's Christmas wish list. Finally, of course, we get the heartbreaking line about how he can't be with his family on Christmas morning. And we can see that Don is not overly anxious to do any kind of self-analysis overall, as symbolized by his walking out on the Motivational Research Group presentation and quiz.
What's so exciting about this season is that we're seeing a whole different story play out now. We know about Don't past and so do the people around him for the most part, Don and Betty are broken up with everyone in the family dealing with the fallout, and the playing field for the ad agency is entirely different. I have no idea what will happen next week, and I can't wait to find out what happens next.
More thoughts on this week's Mad Men:
Video: Mad Men, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"
Inside the episode, from AMC:
From Around the Web: Mad Men, "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"
