Editor’s note: This post contains spoilers for the mid-season premiere of Mad Men.
Good TV begets “Oh” moments. Like when an episode title suddenly comes to life through a line of dialogue or the conclusion of an act.
Mad Men’s mid-season premiere seemingly gets that moment when Ken Cosgrove sits in Roger Sterling’s office and gets the news that he’s being fired. Halfway through “Severance,” that’s exactly what he’s being offered by Sterling Cooper & Partners.
But that’s not tonight’s “Oh” moment. Not by a long shot.
The idea of a parting, whether amicable or hostile, is woven throughout the episode. Starting from Cosgrove’s firing to Don Draper’s admission that he’s going through a divorce.
The episode opens with what’s seemingly an intimate moment between Don and a fur coat model. They talk playfully until we get a shot of the room at large, full of other men who join Don as a committee to hire a model for an ad campaign.
The minute Don gets home from work, he checks for messages. And the result there is his affair with someone who, for all we care, isn’t Megan. There’s the resolution to last season’s biggest question: Will Don make it work with his second wife or will his hedonistic impulses win out?
The answer isn’t as simple as it would have been if this were the Don we met at the beginning of the series. Sure, he’s back to his old ways, but this time it isn’t on his terms.
The world around him is changing. Bertram Cooper is gone. Roger Sterling and Ted Chaoug are sporting decidedly ‘70s ‘staches. And now his wife doesn’t need him (she tells him just that in the previous episode, “Waterloo.”)
Now he’s womanizing not as a means of escape, but because it’s the only way he can regain some semblence of control.
It’s something he had throughout most of “Waterloo.” When his secretary gives him the news that he’s in danger of getting fired after breaching his contract, she moves in for the kiss. What we get is a direct analogue to his relationship with Allison.
And even when we revisit a familiar scene — one in which he has a sexual encounter with a waitress in an alley after some brief flirting — what follows isn’t something we’re used to. When Don Draper returns to the diner, the woman wants nothing to do with him.
Of course, the fact that this encounter is Don’s way of dealing with the death of Rachel Menken, the woman who played a major role in his life in the first half of the series, plays to the episode’s theme.
Mad Men has always been about change. We’ve fully gone through the ‘60s, the civil rights movement, the moon landing. And on the surface, time has run parallel to Don’s development.
The episode’s B-story focuses on Peggy and her return to the dating pool. After a successful night out, she declines to sleep with John Mathis’ brother-in-law, Stevie. It’s because she sees promise in the relationship, at least that’s what she admits after the date.
Instead, she proposes the two run off to Paris, a prospect that’s impossible when she realizes her passport is missing. It’s fittingly hidden in one of her desk drawers at work — once again, the job is what keeps Peggy grounded albeit constrained.
The rest of the episode touches on the rest of the Sterling, Cooper & Partners staff and gets us up to speed on most everyone. By the end of the episode, instead of accepting a severance package, we find that Ken Cosgrove is taking a job as one of the firm’s top clients.
That’ll make things interesting in the next few weeks.
The severance promised in the episode title exists throughout its many storylines. But it all comes back to the same premise: This is the beginning of the end. Things are changing.
In six weeks, Mad Men will be done. Finished. Regardless of where we’re headed in the next month and a half, it looks promising.
Stray observations:
“It’s chinchilla and it costs $15,000.” That’s more than $95,000 today. Say what?
Roger Sterling’s moustache makes him look like the Marlboro man. Or at the very least, a silver Yosemite Sam.
“I’d never recommend imitation as a strategy. You’d be second, which isn’t first.”
3rd Rock from the Sun finally came back to Netflix. It’s a trip to watch Larissa Oleynik, who plays Ken Cosgrove’s wife on both shows. Now if only Nickelodeon would hop on the train and bring The Secret World of Alex Mack online.
Ted walks into Don’s office with a literal binder full of women. Mitt Romney would be proud.
Follow Eder Campuzano on Twitter: @edercampuzano.