Mad Men Episode 9: Is There a Cure For Don Draper’s Sex Addiction?

Joanna Schroeder recaps Episode 9 of Mad Men, and explains the ways in which great television is as much about our own hopes and dreams as it is about the storyline and characters. 

–

I always fall for it.

I’m devoted to the redemption story, and I can’t get away from my childish optimism—even when it comes to Don Draper.

Last week, as the elevator containing Don and his former mistress descended, I really believed that Don was done with the relentless infidelity that has scarred his relationships throughout the 6 year run of AMC’s landmark series.

Last week, Abigail Rine stepped through any sort of societal bullshit about how men always want sex, or how any boy would be lucky to have his virginity taken by a beautiful older woman, and she named the trauma that I believe has been fueling Don’s obsession with women:

As soon as Aimee’s sexual intentions are clear, Dick becomes clearly uncomfortable, avoiding eye contact and clutching the blanket close. “Stop it,” he says, but she doesn’t. If the sexes were reversed here, if an older man caring for a sick, teenaged girl proceeded to have sex with her against her protestations, that would be immediately recognizable as rape – but what happens to Dick is no less tragic, no less a violation.

We always knew that Don’s childhood was rough. He was an orphan, he lived in a whorehouse full of abuse and shame. It was a rough life with rough people who weren’t kind to him. He was shown almost no love. That alone was enough misery to help us understand his philandering, even if we didn’t agree with it.

But the big reveal last week that he had been raped as a kid brought it all together.

So when Don enters the elevator, after so much pining for Sylvia and begging her back and lurking outside her back door, he is finally shut off to her. Their affair is finally done.

I thought it was a breakthrough.

But I am naive about these things.

♦◊♦

My friend Sean Beaudoin told me that he thinks Episode 9 is about family. He makes a compelling argument. Think of Duck appearing out of nowhere to tell Pete that his power lay with his family. Or Peggy having to choose a tribe. Or Don and Betty singing “Father Abraham” with Bobby at camp.

Sean may be right. But to me, through my lens, Episode 9 is even more about infidelity.

♦◊♦

When I was 24, I met a boy in a loud bar in Silverlake. I call him a boy because looking back we seem like kids. He was 25, but calling him a man and me a woman at that stage seems ridiculous. He was wearing something absurd and almost making it work—a tee shirt, a necktie and a dress shirt. Except all in the wrong order. The tee shirt was over the dress shirt, and the necktie was loose over the tee shirt. It looked stupid and he seemed to know it and that almost seemed to be the point of it. He looked at me, I looked back at him. He looked away. I kept looking. When he looked back at me, I said, “What happened? You got dressed in the dark?”

We were inseparable for four months. In that time we fought like we hated each other and had sex like the other was about to be torn away. You know the kind, desperate and weepy and connected. Then a random beautiful girl walked into my workplace and told me that my boyfriend was actually her boyfriend and that there was a third. We were all round-eyed, square-jawed, loud-mouthed blondes—but we were also very different. One was an actress, the other was a professional athlete and the third was me. He’d been balancing all three of us the entire time. And more. Countless others, actually.

When he walked into my apartment that night, the three of us were seated on the couch together. He ran way. We stood out on my balcony and watched him leave. Then he turned back and said that he loved me, right in front of them. He chose me, right in front of them. I told him to get out.

But you know what I did? I took him back. I took him back because his mother came to town and told me that he loved me. She told me people have fights, but that shouldn’t keep us apart. I took him back because he seemed to be getting better.

Of course, he didn’t get better.

So eventually I cheated on him with someone else. A shoe salesman. That one didn’t stick either.

It’s not graceful, but it’s the truth of how people are in relation to one another.

Most of the time they reel about with their hands out, grasping at the something—the anything—that is going to give them the thing they don’t think they have.

♦◊♦

So who else cheated in Episode 9 of Season 6 of Mad Men?

1. Peggy. She cheated with Ted Chaough, who THANK GOD has stopped wearing turtlenecks. You can’t put a man who already looks like a turtle in a turtleneck and then attempt to make him believable in a position of power . . . but I guess that’s beside the point.

Now that Peggy’s cheated with him and he’s professed his love for her, she feels even more torn between the two agency heads. Don is her mentor, her father-figure, the man who made her who she was. He’s the one who made her redemption story possible. Going over to the other agency was, in some ways, cheating on her first love.

But Ted is the one who really values her. He was kind to her when Don often wasn’t. He put her in a position of power without her having to ask. He sees her talent and doesn’t question it.

“What an old tune,” he tells her. “A boss in love with his protégé.”

So when Ted and Don do battle over the margarine pitch, Peggy won’t take a side.

Don confronts her about her spinelessness in the meeting. She tells him, “You’re both demanding and you’re both pig-headed . . . The difference is that he’s interested in the idea, and you’re interested in your idea.”

“He’s interested in his idea. Don’t let him fool you.” Don snaps.

“Well, he never makes me feel this way.”

Don says, “He doesn’t know you.”

And we know Don is right. And if we don’t know it then, we know it at the end, when Peggy believes Ted is going to sweep her into his arms at the news that Abe dumped her…and he doesn’t. She’s available, and now he’s uninterested. Because what did Ted really want from his infidelity with Peggy? He wanted the unattainable. The unavailable. The off-limits.

Peggy cheated with Ted because he’s everything Abe’s not. We can sense, but we don’t know for sure until the end of the episode (when she accidentally stabs him with an amazing home-made spear), that Abe hates everything about what Peggy does: the capitalism, the establishment, the white men in suits who ignore the realities of the world just a few blocks away. But he stays with her because he’s loyal. Except he’s more loyal to his ideals than to Peggy herself. Loyal to the idea of being loyal to a powerful woman. Same reason he won’t tell the cops the ethnicity or race of the guy who stabbed him on the train. Loyalty to the cause of equality.

When Ted loves her, Peggy gets the affirmation that she is one of them. High-class. Executive. Upwardly-mobile. Also, talented, lovely and irresistible. But none of that can last, because the identity you suck off of another person is nothing more than vapor in the end.

♦◊♦

2. Roger spends the episode trying to clean up all his messes from all his cheating. He wants to hang out with his grandson, but his daughter is suspicious of him because he’s been like a child himself his whole life. He picks and chooses his women with no concept of consequence. He only wants his daughter on random whims. He divorced his first wife because he wanted to be with his young and adoring mistress, whom he was using in order to get his vitality back.

And so he cheated on the one used to be his mistress with Joan because he wants to feel her power. That’s how they got baby Kevin, whom Joan pretends is her husband’s. In his back-alley union with Joan, Roger was trying to win back his adult life and leave behind the adolescent one he’d built with his second wife.

For Roger, this episode is about making reparations for decades of infidelity. And it goes terribly. Because there are certain things you simply cannot walk back, and it’s childish to believe you can.

♦◊♦

3. Betty. First, praise be to God that Betty is out of the fat suit! Not because I think Betty needs to be rail thin to be gorgeous, but because that fat suit was a mockery of what actual curvy and fat women look like. They don’t have stiff, plasticky necks and padded upper arms. A real-life size 18 January Jones would probably be just as sexy and the gorgeous as skinny January Jones, without all the ridiculous costuming.

But now that Betty is thin again, she’s got her spark back. Some creepy powerful guy at a fundraiser wants to be “alone with her all night long” and while she’s faithful to Henry in that moment, we can tell from her flirting that she’s looking for trouble.

We know she loves Henry, but in the woods without her husband, she knows Don is, at his core, a cheater and she can’t resist the opportunity to take the power back from him—the power he took from her with his many years of relentless infidelity.

While they lay in that sweaty bed, smoking a menthol, Betty says to Don, “I love way you look at me when you’re like this…But then I watch it decay.”

Betty can only hold Don’s attention for so long. Because, as an addict, Don can only be happy in that short time after he’s had his fix. And then he returns to his only real love—the quest for the next high. This entire desperate season has been about exploring Don’s sex addiction, and we see it here right in front of us in a cabin in the woods while he gazes peacefully at the only woman who ever really knew him. And we know it can’t last.

Don is like a vampire. We all are, sometimes, especially when we’re being unfaithful. We suck the life out of someone in order to make ourselves stronger. But this time it isn’t Don who has sucked the life out of Betty. He wakes in the morning alone in her bed and when he goes to find her, she’s at a table for two with the man she loves.

♦◊♦

My first thought upon seeing Don alone in that diner, watching Betty in her happy life, was that maybe this would do it. His loneliness and Betty’s honest talk across the pillows, when they were finally equals, would change him. Both of them cheaters, both of them used, dismissed, and both powerful. Maybe this, I think, will be Don’s rock-bottom.

This hope is buoyed even more when Megan appeals to Don upon his return home. He tells her he’s going to make it better. He’s going to see her and be there for her. He’s going to be a better husband.

But then I remember what Betty told Don about Megan when they were in bed together:

“She doesn’t know that loving you is the worst way to get to you.”

And I’m reminded of myself, as the viewer, and of my endless hope and devotion to everyone’s redemption story. All while I’m living out my own, and trying to be better, and believing that everyone around me is doing the same.

And I know it’s dumb to believe that a guy like Don Draper, and a show like Mad Men, and even a network like AMC is going to offer me the redemption story I’m looking for. After all, what happens in the opening titles? Our hero falls endlessly—presumably from a window, presumably on Madison Avenue, presumably to his death.

But I like my hope. And I like Don Draper, even when he’s at his worst. I don’t know what will make him happy, but I want him to find it. And in the end of the series, if my hopes are dashed and Don winds up a corpse on the sidewalk in front of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce, and Whatever-They-End-Up-Calling-It, I will have been glad I went along for the ride.

Read more Mad Men Season 6 episode recaps from outstanding authors such as Sean Beaudoin, Greg Olear, Matt Norman and Abigail Rine.