Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising agency.
It's a tale of two Chevys.
The first is driven by Ted Chaough, Don Draper's old nemesis. It's young, exciting, adventurous, designed to glide you away from an uncertain future into an eternal now. "Throw the map out the window and hit the road, Jack." It's road movies and Ray Charles.
The second is driven by Don Draper, once again on a road to nowhere. His strategy is to sell the car without showing it. Awestruck faces gaze in wonder at a car that isn't there, that's "impossible to imagine." "The future is something you haven't even thought of yet," another way of saying you don't need to think at all. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.
By the time Don concludes his pitch to an equally bummed-out Ted during their boozy rendezvous at the hotel bar, we know it's Royal Hawaiian and Heinz all over again. Clearly Don's going to keep throwing "the ad that wasn't there" at the wall until it sticks. His proposed partnership with Ted is a tacit acknowledgement, at long last, that it may never do so – not without an equally headstrong voice of uplift and optimism to counterbalance his melancholy.
Meanwhile, melancholy's exactly what Ted's in the market for. For one thing, the position is open: Ted lists his dying partner Frank Gleason's negativity right alongside his paintbrush atop his list of qualifications, and he soon won't have the man to be kicked around by anymore. For another, Ted seems plenty melancholy himself – struggling to make an unhappy marriage work, struggling with the firm's small size, struggling to get a damn TV to work. Peggy's admiration offers a temporary respite, but Ted needs a shadow self to interact with – someone far more mercurial than Peggy to play off his innate kindness. (That's been a revelation, by the way: Ted may have been merciless to Don over the years, but he's genuinely kind to his friends and colleagues.)
So the world of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce gets its biggest shake-up since the Season Three finale, a miniature heist movie in which Don, Joan, Pete, Peggy, Bert, Roger, Harry, and Lane were Draper's Eleven and the loot they were out to liberate from its previous owners was their own talent. People who complain that the show's lost its touch because nothing ever changes for Don…well, I'm sure they'll find something new to complain about, but in the meantime he's blasted off for uncharted territory.
Which doesn't sit well with everyone. Certainly not with Peggy, for whom hearing and seeing Don Draper in Ted Chaough's office is presented like Shelly Duvall seeing that guy in the tux fellating the guy in the dog costume in the supposedly empty hotel room in The Shining. For all her protestations to her boyfriend Abe that she doesn't want anything to change, that didn't used to be true: She sure wanted to change out from under Don to a place where she'd be more independent and appreciated, rather than simply loved and relied upon. But having changed that far, she wants to go no farther. "I just bought an apartment," she stammers, her sense of security in herself and her position up in smoke. I don't doubt she'll sell the shit out of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Cutler Gleason Chaough or whatever she'll end up calling it, because she does great work, but there's no doubt that's what it will feel like for her: work.
Joan and Pete have little love for Don's maverick attitude either, though for different reasons. Joan had just discovered that her sacrifices will be worth it: Her partnership in SDCP will make her not just someone her childhood friends can look up to even as her colleagues treat her like a secretary, but someone rich. With money of her own, there's a lot she won't have to put up with anymore. That's all vaporized in the face of Don's temper and ego; the fact that Roger, who cares about literally nothing, saves their collective bacon is irrelevant. When Don goes adventuring, Joan is forced to go along for the ride, and she's had quite enough adventuring of her own, thanks.
Pete, meanwhile, feels like a failed Don. It's not that Pete's bad at his job, or that he can't be charming, or that he doesn't have a weird reptilian magnetism. It's just that he has to work at it, while Don makes it look easy. Who wants to watch a relationship it took him years to build destroyed by someone else in under two minutes? "Don't act like you had a plan," he spits at Don during their conference-room confrontation, because nothing's more infuriating to Pete than someone who doesn't have a plan succeeding anyway. That Don gets away with deliberately destroying a client relationship while Pete himself stumbles into doing the same completely by accident just adds insult to injury. (And metaphorical stumble to literal stumble.)
No, Don's dark daring is not for everyone, nor is Ted's willingness to throw the map away. The tale of two Chevys begins in Ted's office, as his unctuous partner Cutler tells him he leaked an idea about using astronauts to sell their new car. Gleason freaks out – he no longer has any interest in voyaging to the final frontier, given that he's headed beyond it soon enough. "I'm tired of rockets, that's all," he moans. Eventually Ted turns him around, assuring him that he shouldn't worry about money, or his talent, or even his cancer. Such is Ted's optimism that Gleason is momentarily convinced. "Everybody loves astronauts!" he says, beaming. Then the smile vanishes: "I gotta go lie down."
