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MAD MEN: "The Other Woman"

Everyone is dazzled by "The Other Woman," just as everyone is dazzled by "The Suitcase," and here's why.

-The sequel. It seems to me that "The Other Woman" can be viewed as a reprise of "The Suitcase," even though the two episodes are separated by an entire season. "The Suitcase" is a mid-series check-in on Peggy and Don; as others have noted, Peggy is halfway through her climb, and Don is halfway through his ignominious "slide." Throughout "The Suitcase," we see Peggy standing, or in a maternal position, while Don crumbles to the floor or curls up like a small child. "The Other Woman" gives us a bit more of that. Here, Don, sitting, kisses--and kisses, and kisses, and kisses--Peggy's hand, while Peggy remains standing.

It's a nice gesture but--as we all know--it's also too little, too late. Peggy will continue to soar. She will leave Don in the dust.

-The misunderstandings. Peggy believes her stunning salary--$19,000 per year!--is a major triumph, but what she hasn't registered is that Joan has just found a way to make herself a partner in SCDP.

Similarly, Don thinks he is being valiant by stopping at Joan's house to warn her against the prostitution move. But what Don doesn't get is that the prostitution has already occurred. Joan is forced to do what she does over and over in this series--to treat a grown heterosexual man as if he were a little boy. "You're one of the good ones," she says, in an empty way, and then she strokes Don's cheek--a teacher who has just received an apple from an earnest first-grader.

Another great misunderstanding, a throwaway line: "Tell your friend I said goodnight," says Don, still playing the A-plus student. But of course the friend is Joan's mother. Don is in his own world, casually making assumptions. Delightful.

An additional fabulous misunderstanding: Pete lets Joan believe that the partners have unanimously agreed to present her with the prostitution option, but of course it's not true. Don isn't on-board. Pete has a sleazy, legalistic explanation for the (calculated) "misunderstanding." Another moment where a male character inflicts a kind of violence on a female character.

-Don't Stop Believin'....The AV Club compares "The Other Woman" to "Employee of the Month," from "The Sopranos." I get it. "Employee of the Month" did back-flips to make a big moral statement about the universe it was depicting. It threw a great deal of ugliness in the face of the viewer--just to make sure it could make the point that Dr. Melfi is more scrupulous than the patient she is treating. (The episode has power, despite the fact that its calculations may occasionally seem over-the-top.) In a similar way, "The Other Woman" uses a somewhat forced set-up to make a point about the moral standing of the men in "Mad Men." (It's not enough to say, "Look, this event in my short story can't feel implausible--because it really happened, in actual life." An event's occurring in the real world does not mean that your act of mentioning it, in a story, carries, automatically, the weight of plausibility. A story is a whole different can of worms. The setup for "The Other Woman" doesn't feel entirely organic; it has a shoehorned quality, whether this kind of thing really did happen in the actual world, and I have no doubt that it really did.)

Anyway, the "Sopranos" episode *I* tend to think of, when I think of "The Other Woman," is "Long-Term Parking." That's because Matthew Weiner borrows an editing trick from David Chase. When Chase filmed "Long-Term Parking," he had footage of Christopher and Tony debating the necessity of killing off Adriana. But then he cut that footage, because he realized the episode was so much more powerful if we, the viewers, watched Tony's duplicitous phone call to Adriana, then discovered the fact of Tony's duplicitousness in real time, just as Adriana was discovering it. Harrowing--and brilliant.

Weiner does the same thing. Don has his "heroic" trip to Joan, then we see Joan sleeping with the thuggish businessman, and the sex footage is spliced in between bits of Don's pitch to Jaguar. In a shattering twist, we realize that the sex actually occurred *before* Don's visit to Joan. Joan committed a sin of omission; she left out the facts, because she wanted to help preserve Don's childlike naivety, just a little bit longer. (We see Peggy doing something similar with Don. "We really don't have to have this conversation right now....")

-Saint Joan. Another thing this episode does well: It makes the (alleged) prostitute into the heroine. We easily understand why Joan does what she does--we might feel that she doesn't really have a choice--and so, if we're in a right-wing moral universe, we might briefly sense that our fixed notions about the world have been upended.

Too schematic? Less than organic? I don't really care. "Mad Men" doesn't have characters committing murder; there aren't terrorist acts; no one is in a fight to prevent anyone else from blowing up the world. But there's great drama in people struggling with change--quotidian change and big social change. Which other TV writers have recognized and so skillfully exploited this fact?

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