Plasma Pool

1. I watch both Mad Men and on Entourage on Sunday nights. The difference in quality is usually glaring — I only watch the latter out of some bizarre commitment to the cultural zeitgeist even though the show is no longer part of that same zeitgeist — but last night their plots seemed remarkably similar.

Don’s gambit to run the rival ad company — I think it was CGC, but I honestly don’t care — and their Don copycat Ted Chaough was a master class in introducing an uncompelling villain and then dispatching him with shocking ease; it’s as if Doug Ellin himself were advising Matthew Weiner and his staff on “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”

At the start of the episode, Chaough is stealing lost clients from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce with little problem. It turns out he has a spy, our old pal Smitty (without Kurt, it seems), although it’s unclear exactly what the company is really doing is learning who SCDP has lost and then proposing new campaigns before anyone else can jump in on it. Whatever the case, Chaough is getting cocky: he even makes fun of Don at Benihana and sends him a bottle of sake after the first Honda meeting ends in failure.

So SCDP acts like they’re making a TV commercial to bankrupt the rival company, except they’re not (I must admit I loved the shot of Peggy riding a motorcycle around the studio), and Don brings a motorcycle into the office to show the commercial director, and the commercial director reports back to the rival, and they make an ad, and the Japanese apparently don’t like it, but they do like Don because he’s handsome and honorable and doesn’t want to be part of their bake-off. Everything turns out great for SCDP in the end! Someone call up Ari Gold so they can hug it out!

This was not interesting to watch. Why not have made the other company a legitimate rival instead of a plot-filler for an episode, stretched this out to a few episodes so we could have actually felt the possibility of SCDP going under, and then maybe had things turn out fine with at least some amount of attrition.

The stakes of this season are clear: SCDP is in precarious financial position and could go under. But no matter how well-designed the new office is, there have been precious few specifics surrounding actual campaigns and day-to-day operations to depict their relative lack of money. The stakes are only known because Lane Pryce mentions them every time he’s onscreen, not because they’re actually felt by the viewer.

2. After Roger yelled at the Honda contingent for turning his best friends into goo, Don and Pete confronted him about his lack of professionalism and general fuckupery for a company that needs all the business it can get. (Note: I think this would have been an issue even if SCDP were rolling in money.)

Anyway, during the discussion, Pete tells Roger that he’s only being difficult because with every new client Pete brings in, SCDP becomes less dependent on Lucky Strike, and by extension Roger.

This isn’t exactly accurate — Roger proves throughout the episode that he does actually hate the Japanese — but it makes explicit a conflict between the two characters that’s been brewing for a while. Unfortunately, Pete made it so explicit that it’s now relatively inert, seeming more like a way to pass dramatic time than a legitimate source of tension.

Once you’ve made it this explicit, where can you go from there? This was a total failure of writing and a sign of just how few ideas the writers seem to have right now.

3. I’ve said before that Betty is my favorite character on the show, but that’s becoming less and less the case as she turns into a horror show rather than a conflicted, endlessly confused woman. For proof of how far she’s fallen, take a look at the scene in the psychiatrist’s office from this episode, particularly the moment in which she peers at the dollhouse and smiles.

Betty is now an endlessly awful mother and barely a recognizable human, but this scene held some promise as a chance for her to open up a bit and express some emotions. She did for a minute, speaking about her childhood, but then closed up again, intent to remain a shrew for the rest of her time on the show.

I suppose this scene humanizes Betty in that it shows her as having reasons for her terrible ways. But explaining behavior doesn’t automatically make it dramatically compelling, and the writers seem to be having an increasingly difficult time treating Betty like anything other than a huge bitch who hits her kids and scolds them endlessly. Killing her father last season may have been the worst decision they ever made, because he at least gave her a reason to be happy.

This scene would have been mildly tolerable if its awfulness hadn’t been compounded by the ridiculously heavy-handed shot of Betty staring at the dollhouse in the therapist’s office, content with it’s make-believe world of happy couples and 2.5 children in every backyard. It served to make her seem like some low-grade female version of Terry O’Quinn in The Stepfather, except Mad Men isn’t a slasher movie.

In other words, the writing staff seems to have lost control of her character. A few more clunkers and I’ll have to argue that they have no vision for the series, too.