SEASON 7, EPISODE 9.
Because Mad Men has such a moody house style, it was hard to recognize at first that this episode is a farce -- bitter, a little sluggish, and with some dark shadows, but with appropriately outsized comic premises. (Funnily enough I was just reading something about Kafka reading early pages of The Trial to friends and how he had trouble getting through because everyone was laughing so much.) The sad story of Diana the waitress tugs the heartstrings, but look at it from Don's perspective: He basically gives away a million dollars because he thinks this mystery woman is going to take away his pain -- and it turns out pain is what she's after. Then he discovers his furniture is missing.
Okay, so it's not A Flea in Her Ear. Maybe it's because the principals are now sufficiently comfortable (financially and dramatically) that I can't worry about them, or maybe it's the dank smell of the approaching end that's encouraging me to detach, but whatever it is I'm not inclined to take the suffering in this episode very seriously. And there is suffering, copious suffering. Even Pretty Megan, usually associated more with insufferability than suffering, has her nerves convincingly flayed; she has moved past gentle, make-believe separation into the hard reality of divorce and, worse yet, it's shoved her right back into the maw of her family, and I may be dense but I only realized when Megan's sister was blubbering about having to fly back to *Paris all by herself that she and the old lady aren't charming gallic goofs, they're horrible, self-centered monsters and it's understandable Megan would be freaked out that Don won't be around anymore to rescue her from them.
Or from scumbags like Harry Crane. It's perfect that the one thing ringing in her ears after that humiliating encounter is "I can't believe Don threw you away... you don't think he could have helped you?" -- as is made obvious by her bitterness at the lawyer's meeting (with no lawyer), and by the writers making the implicit callback to Campbell's and Sterling's bitter speeches about bitter divorced wives. It begins to seem that the writers share my feeling that no one on this show is going to learn anything.
But hey, comedy! We have Mimi Rogers as a boss dyke artiste who can also approach a problem from, as it were, the other direction, leading to some beautiful one-upgirlship between Peggy and Stan ("She tried the same thing with me -- but she didn't get as far"). That was good enough by itself, but then showing Stan at home with Elaine, showing only the tiniest glimmer of awareness that losing a power struggle wasn't the worst thing he did, was even better. Warm fandom may be a bad perspective from which to watch this show; the picture's clearer from farther away.
*UPDATE. Commenter shortstop points out that the Calvets are from Montreal. In fairness to myself, that is an easy thing to miss. sundaystyle makes a good point:
I don't care about Diana, Waitress of Death, or Pima swanning around out-butching the guys... if Weiner's going out on a note of existential despair, I hope the remaining episodes focus more on Peggy, Don, Pete, Joan, Sally, Betty and Roger. They're the characters we've been watching since the beginning.
Yeah, the more comfortable I get with this being Just a TV Show rather than a deathless work of art, the more I want to see character payoffs, too. If you share my tedious preoccupation with Mad Men, you might enjoy Matt Zoller Seitz's recap; good catch, Jeff Strabone! (But isn't it weird that Don's record library still has Martin Denny in it?)