Cynthia Hawkins looks into the secrets and conspiracy theories behind Mad Men’s 11th episode in Season 6.
Because Matthew Weiner has me scrutinizing even the wallpaper patterns of the Mad Men sets in search of clues, I was quickly obsessed Sunday night with identifying the precise episode of the television series that Peggy, in her apartment, and then Ted, at home with his family, are watching near the end of “Favors.” With a little help from my dad, I can tell you they’re watching Jack Lord in the pilot episode of Hawaii Five-O on September 20, 1968. Clues to what, you might ask? Symbolism. Greater meaning. Foreshadowing. Hell if I know. But Don started this season on a beach in Hawaii reading Dante’s Inferno and now various characters are watching the premiere of Hawaii Five-O. It has to mean something! Or nothing. Or perhaps if there’s no there there, that might mean something in itself. Right?
Point is, I’m pretty obsessive, and I’m not even among the most obsessive Mad Men viewers. These would be the people who’ve been busy lately theorizing about Bob Benson, the snappy dresser who materializes with fresh cups of coffee like an office jinni. Is he another incarnation of Don Draper? Both have alliterative names with the same number of letters. Maybe he’s even destined to be the “falling man” of the opening title sequence. Is he an FBI agent investigating Don/Dick Whitman? Is he going to kill Megan Draper (because, you know, there are those Megan/Sharon Tate theories too)? My favorite line of Bob Benson theorizing, though, is that Bob is the time-traveling son of either Peggy and Pete or Joan and Roger or the time-traveling Bobby Draper. No one has suggested that he might be the time-traveling, dimension-shifting son of the real Don Draper and Anna Draper of an alternate universe, but I don’t think we should rule that out just yet.
More on Bob later, but for now let’s contemplate Hawaii Five-O a little more than necessary. One of the snatches of dialogue you can make out if you replay it enough times to qualify you as neurotic is the governor’s description of Hawaii as a state “in the ocean where two of the three billion people on earth meet and touch.” And this got me thinking about the nature of this episode in which so many of the small moments between certain characters intersect with the small moments of certain others. All this connectivity … with no real connection. More on meeting and touching later, but for now lets segue into our recap proper:
Shit Pete’s Mother Says
Sit Pete’s mother down on the sofa with Peggy for two minutes, and oh the schadenfreude! Mistaking Peggy for Trudy, Mrs. Campbell clasps her gloved hands on her lap and says, “I can’t tell you how much it relieves me to see you and Peter reunited.” Peggy thinks she must mean how the merger has entwined their professional paths again, but then Mrs. Campbell adds, “I’m glad you both swallowed your pride. If nothing else but for the good of the child you have together.” Zing! I keep waiting for Peggy and Pete’s secret son, given up by Peggy, to figure into the story again, and here the issue seemingly surfaces with Peggy’s smile wavering like a snapped wire. And if that wasn’t awkward enough, Mrs. Campbell goes on to discuss the “physical satisfaction of love” she’s experienced with Manolo, the assistant Pete had hired (upon Bob Benson’s reference) to look after the increasingly senile Mrs. Campbell.
Though Mrs. Campbell has high hopes for Pete and Trudy’s reconciliation here, this barely contained train wreck of a conversation has the accidental effect of inching Pete and Peggy toward each other again. In what looks like a momentous, all-guards-down bonding moment, Peggy fills Pete in on the Manolo details as she, Pete, and Ted wait over dinner and drinks, lots of drinks, to catch a plane. “Stop it, please,” Pete says in reaction. “I don’t even want to think about her brushing her teeth.” The big surprise here for me was the discovery that Pete has the ability to laugh in a natural, human-like manner.
It’s less funny to Pete when Mrs. Campbell’s Manolo reveal inches Pete and Bob Benson toward each other. Pete sits Bob down to second-guess Bob’s recommendation of Manolo on the grounds that Manolo has started an inappropriate romantic relationship with his charge. Bob dismisses this, explaining that Manolo’s interests don’t “turn that way.” With that twinkle dancing on his white-toothed grin (I swear you can hear it ding), Bob defends the emotional attachment of “taking very good care” of someone. “When it’s true love it doesn’t matter who it is,” he says, looking rather expectantly at Pete. Then their knees touch. And if Bob truly is Pete and Peggy’s time-traveling love child, things just got weird.
Sally Draper, Key Master
The other series of interconnected moments are made possible by the Rosens’ son Mitchell who is in imminent danger of being called up to serve in Vietnam. We first meet Mitchell, who might be a time-traveling Jonas brother, consulting with Megan since she might know of someone in Canada who could take him in. Though Don tries to distance himself from Mitchell’s predicament, he eventually ends up striking a deal with Ted to help him secure a spot for Mitchell in the National Guard. And Sylvia Rosen is particularly grateful. Really, really grateful. Just when we thought Don might have gotten to the root of his Sylvia obsession, enabling him to move forward, back down the slippery slope to Sylvia he goes. Cue the meeting and touching.
Sally and her friend Julie, in the meantime, have briefly met Mitchell themselves in the lobby of Don’s apartment building. Any episode with Sally, I think, is a little more interesting for it. Her appearances are generally the only times I feel emotionally invested in the show because, in a way, she is the surrogate viewer. She’s close enough to the same age in 1968 as a sizable segment of the show’s demographic would have been, and even those born a bit later can still sympathize with the sort of old-school family dynamic in which children and their parents existed in nearly separate spheres. It’s this same dynamic that allows Sally to be removed just enough from the grown-up messes to react to them the way the viewers often do. She can call something what it is. She can say she was able to be fooled by a con woman in her father’s apartment because she doesn’t know anything about him. And she can say his hook-up with Sylvia, even as he resolves Mitchell’s deployment as a favor to Megan and the Rosens, “makes her sick.”
And she witnesses this hook-up as a result of Julie leaving a letter for Mitchell on Sally’s behalf. After meeting Mitchell, Sally and Julie, a little obsessive themselves, had spent the night compiling a list of “things we like about Mitchell,” which for Julie had consisted of “the way he smiled” or “his red shirt,” and for Sally had consisted of “his ass” and “shoulders.” Sally skews physical, sexual, with her feelings as we’ve seen her do in the past (remember the time she was sent home from the neighbors’ house for “playing with herself”?), and perhaps this is due in part to those few times Sally has been privy to the most adult of the adult world by complete accident. Stumbling upon Roger and Megan’s mother, for example. And it happens again when she borrows the doorman’s keys to retrieve the letter before Mitchell can find it. She presses her ear to the same door Don had during his Sylvia stalking phase, and then lets herself in. She finds the letter – and Don and Sylvia. And if Linda Cardellini doesn’t win an Emmy for so brilliantly finding two completely distinct ways to utter “oh God” within two second’s time, what a travesty!
When Don addresses the issue with Sally later that evening, it’s on opposite sides of Sally’s door and with excuses Sally’s now old enough to see through. Don was just “comforting” Mrs. Rosen, he says. She was very upset. It’s complicated. Sally’s only answer is, “Okay.” It’s not forgiveness. It’s not an acquittal. It’s merely acknowledgement that she’s listened to what little Don’s willing to offer. Connecting without really connecting. Mad Men often ends with a montage of separate characters in separate locations the way the camera cuts from Pete running out of Raisin Bran to Peggy smoking a cigarette on the sofa with her new cat to Ted carrying his child to bed on his back with that pilot of Hawaii Five-O flickering in the background, but “Favors” tucks that in just before Don’s confrontation with Sally so the closing shot lingers instead on the empty hallway in Don’s apartment.
Favors. Plural.
Though Pete’s mom and Mitchell instigate the two main chains of interrelated small moments in this episode, it is, in the end, the various favors doled out (or refused) that really forge the connecting points here. Peggy offers to make it worth Stan’s while if he can take care of the rat struggling in the trap in her apartment. Don asks for Pete’s help, then hints for assistance from the GM people, then finally has some luck when he gives up Sunkist for Ocean Spray if Ted will make the arrangements for Mitchell. Mrs. Campbell lobbies to keep Manolo. Pete asks for Bob to fire him anyway. Sally negotiates with the doorman for the building keys. Twice. Which leads to the unspoken favor that Sally refrain from mentioning the Sylvia-comforting she’d witnessed after she’d let herself in.
Most of these favors necessitate some deft secret keeping, which is in line with Mad Men’s larger story arc of Don’s secret identity. And it’s Mad Men’s knack for sewing secrets that drives the sort of obsessive scrutinizing and imaginative theories usually reserved for a series like Lost. Thus Bob Benson, who might on any other show be dismissed as an insignificant peripheral character, becomes on Mad Men, by virtue of all that we don’t know about him, a key player. And a sixties television episode running in the background, that might on any other show be dismissed as a mere detail to add to the authenticity of the setting, becomes very meaningful indeed … if I could just isolate what Jack Lord is saying about a whistle-blower ….