Recap: Man Men – Season 3, Episode 5: “The Fog”
Articles | Sep 15th, 2009
Sunday’s Mad Men seems like it was written while listening to a lot of Jefferson Airplane. Or maybe they just had leftover marijuana from episode three and they smoked it. I have no clue. Either way, it was filled with scenes evoking horror.
“The Fog” beings with the Draper’s being called in to meet with their daughter’s teacher. Sally hasn’t been acting right lately. I wonder why? Could it be that her grandfather just died? It seems Sally got into a fight at school and it’s during this discussion that a flash of Sally wiping blood on off her face comes across the screen. It seems Sally has also inquired about civil rights martyr Medgar Evers. One problem I tend to have with Mad Men is that while the dialogue is natural, it’s also rushed. I had to replay the scene to catch the reference there. And it’s an important one when we get to Betty’s hallucinations. The interaction between Don and Sally’s teacher is good stuff too. We see the empathy in her face, the emotion that Betty clearly has a hard time bearing.
Yet, those scenes are just a warm up for Betty going into labor. She gets wheeled down a sparse hospital hallway and confuses a janitor for her father. She isn’t even on drugs yet. The hospital scenes give us a sense of foreboding. I wasn’t around in 1963, but where all hospitals meant to look like insane asylums? Thankfully, nothing too dreadful happens. Betty has dreams of her father mopping up blood in a kitchen with her mother and a black man we can assume is Medgar Evers. The dreams she has add to her childlike behavior and persona. She is regressing into her childhood as she is giving birth. As she continues to push, she calls out for Don and asks the nurse, “He’s never where you expect him to be. Have you seen him? Have you been with him?” It only makes us wonder if Don will be around for this child.
Peggy isn’t left out of this episode. She and Pete are both being courted by their former Head of Accounts, Duck Phillips. However, they are being recruited as a team and Pete is having no part in it. She decides to meet with Don and ask for a raise. Unfortunately he tells her that he’s literally fighting for paper clips. He’s not far off. One of the best scenes of this episode comes when Don walks out of an expense report meeting. This week’s funny line goes to: “It has also been brought to my attention that a credenza has disappeared. A theft that I believe necessitates a conspiracy.” Pete would rather not have their meeting with Duck publicized. When he confronts Peggy, he tells her “Your decisions affect me.” Obviously, Pete is still upset with Peggy about the whole giving up their baby and keeping it a secret thing.
So “one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.” And one episode of Man Men gives you a major head trip.
