Plasma Pool

This essay is part of “Point-Hyperpoint: Mad Men,” a rollicking series of posts devoted to discussing AMC’s drama series. Spoilers abound. To read the entire series, please visit this page. To see all of Plasma Pool’s “Point-Hyperpoint” discussions, please click here.

Last week, I complained that Mad Men was entering into third-season doldrums where the show’s typically strong thematic connections fell by the wayside in favor of goofy plot developments. I wrote some standard prescriptions and proclaimed that Matthew Weiner had to regain some focus, even if that focus changed from episode to episode. Then they went and proved me terribly wrong this week with “My Old Kentucky Home,” one of the best episodes in the history of the series.

There’s some thematic continuity in the episode, which Tim Goodman wrote about quite nicely at his blog, but what made this episode so great was something much simpler: it put the show’s expertly drawn characters into interesting situations and let us watch them do interesting things. So let me apologize for my comments last week. Sometimes you explain things in a complicated way when the better answer is an easy one. Like Paul Kinsey, I like to show off my education.

There were two somewhat shocking scenes in “My Kentucky Home,” and the first one is quite obvious: Roger Sterling put on blackface and sang a really racist song for his young bride, who was just tickled pink by the whole thing. It’s easy to say that this scene represents the prevailing racial attitudes of the time, but as Ta-Nehisi Coates says here, it’s more about the how these old money WASPs live sheltered lives. Whatever Roger Sterling’s doing here is very different from the Southern racism of the same era.

The other crazy moment was thematically similar to Roger’s bit, but for very different reasons. OH MY GOD WATCH THE CAMPBELLS DANCE!!!!

Look, there are many things I could say here about this dance, but let’s be honest: it’s funny because they look like performers at the Dork of the Year Awards. Like Roger, the Campbells seem to be under the impression that what they’re doing is socially acceptable, as if they could go onto a dance floor in some non-country club part of America, do the same routine, and become the heroes of the social order like in some Bizarro World version of Dirty Dancing. This isn’t just a matter of the couple doing the typical Pete Campbell thing and acting like they think this is how people want them to act. They are clearly having the time of their lives, because this is how they have fun. They dance like fools and smile the whole time. Paul Kinsey had it right: this is the way the world ends, although I’m willing to bet a cappella groups are somehow involved, too.

Don, of course, is disgusted by almost everything that happens at the party, presumably because these people have no knowledge of how the other half lives. When Don tells the only other person at the club who seems to be willing to make his own drink (played very well by Chelcie Ross, aka Harris from Major League) about how he used to pee in well-to-do people’s cars at the local roadhouse, you get the feeling that what he really wants to do is pay off the valet and take a leak in someone’s Rolls Royce. (It’s also worth noting that the people Don pranked at the roadhouse probably knew nothing close to the wealth enjoyed by Roger and his ilk.) This scene is great because of its small moments, particularly the way Don never stops making drinks while he tells his story. This is a man who is willing to get his hands dirty even as he entertains others.

The other big plotline of the episode occasionally veered into cliches. The relatively proletarian creative team of Peggy, Paul, and Smitty have to work on Bacardi ads, but they’re bored, so they decide to call up Paul’s drug dealer friend from Princeton who looks kinda like Tom Cruise and score some reefer. Some of their lines are a little too “My First Toke” for my tastes — there were times when I thought Peggy would say she’s never seen her fingers fing — but it was all worth if for the scene where Peggy tells Olive, her secretary, about how she doesn’t have to worry about the future for the new working woman. Peggy would never say those things while sober, but everything she said was right, and Elisabeth Moss played it with just the right combination of weed-induced certainty and vulnerability.

So more like this one, please. There have been some complaints that this episode didn’t go anywhere, but as I said a few weeks ago, this show has never depended on plot turns or big revelations. It excels because the writing staff and cast combine to create great characters. Sometimes it’s enough just to watch them be themselves.