'Mad Men': 'Seven Twenty Three'

So, no one lost a foot this episode. Come on, you blood-thirsty animals, we can’t have a severed extremity every show. For those counting the violent acts, Don was clocked in the back of a head by a seemingly future Manson follower. Mr. Fancypants Adman should’ve seen it coming: Never trust anyone under 30 if you’re a square. Especially if they offer you Daddy’s reds.

The quality that was most interesting about these hitchhikers (carting around strangers so rarely works out well for our TV and film friends, will they ever learn?) is that they are the first true harbingers of the hippie movement that will soon sweep the nation’s youth. Sure, we’ve seen beatniks before: Don’s Season 1 girlfriend Midge and creative beardo Paul, who fancies himself as the kind of enlightened aesthete who can finger-pick some folk tunes and recite poetry (mainly to impress girls), but the Niagara Falls-bound hitchhikers were of a different import -- middle class, not particularly educated, with a volatility and paranoia right on the surface. Not that anyone can really blame them – their fears of the draft, after all, are justified. In 1967, the draft numbers escalated dramatically; the nightmarish lottery system started in 1969.

Still, did they have to whack him? Don looked stoned enough to be pushed over by a feather. Episode 7, “Seven Twenty Three” – perhaps a reference to the time of morning that Peggy and Don were both having their “what the hell did I do last night” moments – used as bookends the images of Don doing a faceplant in some cheap hotel carpet, Peggy awakening in her tryst bed with Duck (a lot more on that in a moment) and Betty caught in some housewife ennui on her new fainting couch. At first, the meaning of the poetic images weren’t clear but as the episode progressed, a story pooled around them.

The pacing of Sunday’s show was a return to some of the energy that imbued the first two episodes – not exactly pulse-quickening but elegant and dreamy in their own right. There was a crisp sensibility to some of the scenes – Pete pressing (teasing?) Peggy to return the Hermes scarf; Betty playing the concerned citizen with Henry Francis; Don’s awkward but charged interaction with Miss Farrell and the somewhat difficult Connie Hilton.

It was a relief to see Don denuded somewhat in this episode. Sometimes it’s tiring to see him so suave and imperturbable all the time. Around the rigid Hilton, who takes him to task for not having family pictures or a Bible on his desk, Don seems almost a teenager in comparison, able to respond only with a snap of his Zippo and rote cynicisms. He might be Sterling and Cooper’s Ogilvy, the author of “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” no doubt a seminal reference text for creator Matt Weiner, but his primitive sense of our pleasures and vices sometimes fails him in his own life.

Don so fears signing an easy, generous contract for three years of service that he causes both Sterling and Cooper to tie themselves in knots.  A panicked Sterling oversteps his boundaries so poorly that he stoops to calling Betty, who, predictably, hasn’t heard a word about it. In one of her best scenes of the season so far, an emboldened and direct Betty challenges Don, who tries to tell her it’s about business and nothing else. “What’s the matter?” she asks. “You don’t know where you’ll be in three years?” Score one for Betts, and dock points for Sterling, who guaranteed himself nothing more than a break-up with Don. This strife won’t be healed with a close shave.

Betty’s confrontation is the final straw that pushes Don out of the house and into the dangerous embrace of a few proto-hippies and their pills – not to mention a hallucination with his hard-scrabble Dad. It takes Cooper, who pads around the office in socks and speaks in symbols, Rothko paintings and Sacagawea metaphors, to point out to Don that his signature on a contract isn’t so binding anyway. Who is this Don Draper creation? If it all got dragged into a court of law, unraveling the Sterling-Cooper contract would be the least of Don Draper/Dick Whitman’s worries.

No one knows that intuitively better than Betty. When your husband is a perfectly kind but shadowy, secretive man fond of dalliances with every stripe of lady, it’s easy to wave aside your own flirtations over iced tea and apple pie in some upstate hamlet. Not that Betty overdid it so much but she’s the first to hint to a handsome, listening man that she’s been undervalued. She was an anthropology major at Bryn Mawr -- not just a beautiful face – and as Ossining’s own Rachel Carson, she’ll put a stop to that 3-million-gallon water tank by hook or by bat of the lashes. “Silent Spring”? More like “Sexy Summer”! (And yes, I did make that joke.)

Anyway, let’s talk about Peggy and Duck because I can’t stand to wait any longer. So…

What was that?

Horrifying, some would say. Implausible, others might say. Just right, some lone wolf might shout. Whatever the reaction, it was certainly a moment custom-made for using the TiVo buttons to liberally pause, rewind or fast-forward, depending on which motion would best soothe your shock and embarrassment at what can only be frankly labeled as Duck’s sex spiel. By far the episode’s most outrageous lines were spoken by our transfixed dog-deserting divorcé, who uttered something about taking Peggy’s clothes off “with my teeth” so that he could give her “a go-around” like she’s “never had.” (Actually, Duck… oh, nevermind.)

Now, it’s safe to say that Duck and Peggy don’t have a whole lot in common. This escapade did not come after the kind of foreplay that “(500) Days of Summer” and other indie movies have taught us to expect. Duck did not make Peggy a mixtape of Joy Division and Smith songs; Peggy did not winsomely dance for Duck to some not-cool-but-cool ‘80s song. They simply fell in with each other out of feverish loneliness, and Peggy’s painful need for validation and attention -- but it could go far.

The ramifications, if it does continue, could really shake up things between Don and Peggy. When she comes in to ask him about the Hilton account, right after Roger’s obnoxious berating, Don does not play nice. Instead, he tells her to quit digging in his pockets, quit asking him for things. “You were my secretary,” he reminds her. Peggy openly flinches to his rebuff; it’s like her generous Daddy has finally said the trust fund has run dry. She barely manages to keep in her sobs. When one Daddy rejects you, does that only send you running faster into the arms of another, especially if they’re enemies?

--Margaret Wappler

Photo: Carin Baer

Comments

[TV Obsessed]

I think the flashforward starting the episode was promising, but ultimately it proved to be a little disappointing. They could have done without it and I doubt anyone would have a different opinion of the episode. When Don got clobbered, I had a “haha” pop into my brain. There was something shocking, yet satisfying about Don getting smacked after running away again. Full review of the episode.

http://th3tvobsessed.blogspot.com/2009/09/review-mad-men-season-3-episode-7.html

[SusanS]

7-23 is the date of the contract.

[evie]

Seven thirty seven? Where did that come from? The episode is clearly Seven Twenty Three, as your own headline states. And it's the date Don signed the contract.

[Erica]

The episode title is written incorrectly in the article as "Seven Thirty Seven," even though it's actually "Seven Twenty Three" - which is presumably to mark the day that Don signed away his power to Sterling Cooper.

[S.]

The episode is called "Seven Twenty Three," not "Seven Thirty Seven" as you say in the text.

[dan]

I freaked out when he signed that contract and I saw 7-23-1963...Thats the day I was born..Who knew so much was going on...I always assumed that day was all about me. I think the season will end with JFK getting killed. I hope Don stays way clear of the crazy teacher.

[christina]

who is rachel carson? i think you meant juanita carson, her old roommate...

[Margaret Wappler]

Oops, sorry about the title error in the post. I fixed it. You're all right about it being the date of the contract. I guess I was too in love with my idea of it being the time of the morning. Christina, Rachel Carson is the author of "Silent Spring," a breakthrough work widely considered to have sparked the modern-day environmental movement. One of the Junior League ladies referenced the book title.

[SanFrann]

Rachel Carson is the author of Silent Spring, christina. and yes, apparently everyone except this blog author realized that 7-23 was the date Don signed the contract.

[jjaahh]

What did the note say that the hitchhikers left behind?

[Lee]

The note said something like:

"Mister - thanks for all the help...we left you your car"

[anonymous]

I felt like this was the first episode this season where I felt some of the frisson that much of the first season contained. I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative structure this episode took on. Finally, we're going somewhere in season two!

[Annie]

Here's something I didn't get. If the date when this episode takes place was at the end of July, why was Sally still in school?

[cinnamon barks]

No one noticed that Sally has a crush on her teacher?

[kimela]

Good write up, Carin. I am a hugh fan. I am so proud of Betty, standing up for herself, talking smack! Go Betts! I was quite surprised by Don's response to Peggy's digging! Maybe she really did need it. I just wish they would let her have a relationship with some one. They're making herss turn into her into a slut. I love this show, I love the fashions, the whole era is fasinating to me. I am missing Joanie. Do you think she'll return? Keep it coming AMC.

[Lesa Griffith]

Nice write-up Margaret. I like your interpretation of the title—seems much better than the contract signing date. Also the morning hour when Don groggily awakes from his noggin' knockout. A key number like "37.2 le matin." Also agree with your "what the hell did we do" interpretation of Peggy and Don—I think the writers are taking cues from the recent Helen Gurley Brown bio. The Peggy character, however naive she can be about certain things (such as the Hermès scarf, awkwardly demanding career advancement), is making steely-eyed strategic moves. Not falling for bodice-ripping promises.
Jon Hamm's use of eyebrows was amazing. "You stare at the sun?" followed by tiny eyebrow raise. I had to rewind for that one. The way the writers capture the ambivalent morés of the time is priceless. And they jerk us viewers around like so many marionettes. I haven't tread on such fertile, symbol-mining TV terrain since "Twin Peaks." Which, while not specifically of the 60s, had a dreamy retro feel.

[Jim R]

Best episode this season.. I think Peggy is going to make a big mistake with tryst with Duck, in the end he will embrass her... Is there no more a compelling character on TV then Don, since Tony Soprano

[Christov]

If there is anything we have learned from MM it is that there are multiple meanings to things. I think the title refers to both the date and the time in the morning when the moment of recognition and reckoning comes. It also be a biblical reference to Romans 7:23 --"but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members." Or Genesis 7:23, which refers to God blotting out everything on the face of the earth. Sounds like an eclipse. And what does the eclipse represent? Seems to me to be the desire that burns in all of us, the message being, don't look too closely or too long at what you want, or you will be hurt. Don's desires are slowly being eclipsed by the demands of the firm, putting him in irons with a contract, leaving him a prisoner like his neighbors in Sing-Sing.

[MLA17]

@ Annie: If I'm not mistaken, I think the day of the eclipse was a Saturday and that's why the dad's were there. In Don's case he took the kids to see the eclipse while Betty met up with Henry Francis. Don and Sally's teacher were talking about how her summer was going so far.

I totally think that Duck is using Peggy to get back at Don.

I totally loved the 'fainting' couch that Betty got, it's gorgeous!

[Richie]

The only disappointment I had with the episode is that the hitchhikers were way too far ahead of their times. As you point out, the draft, the lottery and the buildup in Vietnam were a few years in the future. Vietnam was hardly a blip on the radar screen in July 1963.