Well, first you must throw away all your bomb-making and child poisoning accoutrements. Then you’re ready for a celebratory drink. But don’t get too comfortable! You must also scare the shit out of your wife, intimidate your criminal criminal lawyer, dispose of a ricin cigarette, continue to manipulate your surrogate son, and finally order around inanimate objects in the same way one does a misbehaving child. This is more or less a light day for Walt. The winner.
Life is an illusion filled with symbols of illusion: Is that what it is, or is it something like that?
Very well then, Last Things first: I’ve previously stated my non-participation in the Mad Men suicide sweepstakes and am happy to have been proved almost half right. Pete Campbell is still with us, but his proud, fragile doppelganger and sparring partner has joined the choir invisible. What Pryce would we pay?
This superfine hour of television had its claws out for me right off the bat. The opening scene in the Jaguar war room, a glass cage in which Don, Stan, Ginsberg, and some copywriter mercenaries wearily and warily surround the concept of car-as-mistress, scratched my itch for Mad Men’s workplace dramedy mode, and we get a hint of deeper emotional waters as Peggy’s exclusion from this mammoth-hunting expedition plays on her face: naked, almost childish envy, not necessarily of the catered lobster.
The “all hands on deck” campaign is one of my favorite Mad Men moods, so I finished this excellent episode with renewed hope for next week and beyond. I had some initial misgivings about the Lane and Kinsey segments but finally accepted both of them as consistent with previous character trends, and since it contains one scene that belongs in the all-time highlight reel, I can’t very well go lower than A minus.
The celebration from last week’s announcement that Community would return for a 13-episode fourth season had just begun when it was immediately brought down by two pieces of news: the show would be moving to Friday nights, and Dan Harmon may not be returning. There will be a whole summer to hash out precisely what either of those would mean to the show, but on the face of it both are not just bad, but catastrophic.
On the next episode of AMC’s Mad Men – Lane Pryce is a Soviet spy! Who had that one in the pool? Your bitcoin is in the mail. And when Megan’s actress friend accuses her of living at 73rd and Park, it reminds us that we are the kind of ultra-classy people who read the New York Times online until we exceed our free page views for the month, and thus we already know that the Drapers’ apartment building is in the white brick style that was popular after WWII (but was falling out of fashion by 1966).
So, hey, 30 Rock got picked up for a 13-episode final season. Pretty exciting, right? Oh, Liz Lemon, maybe you can finally have it all next year. I mean, I assume that’s why you’re reading this Community recap, right? What do you mean, other news? Hmm, let me check my Twitter feed…
Previously I’ve noted this show’s tendency to sound the trumpets when they want us to sit up and pay attention to one of its themes. What if the trumpet is a post-horn?
This episode begins and ends in the same confused state, hovering between sentiment and broad humor. As it opens, the group remembers the dearly departed — I’m sorry, did I say departed? I meant exploded — Starburns, who has apparently entrusted Abed with his video tribute and his earthly remains, an urn of ashes that he would like cremated, though he may not be clear on how that works.
I guess when Bobby Draper grew up, he became the drummer for Spinal Tap. This season, brave young Mason Vale Cotton is the fourth actor to play Bobby. But if you’re the boss’s kid, you’re always available to portray Glen Bishop whenever he’s needed, regardless of unsettling wardrobe requirements:
When an episode has me laughing from the moment its title is announced – just in case you don’t get it, it’s a wicked play on Dick Wolf, the creator of Law and Order, which the episode satirizes – that’s a pretty good sign that I’ll be down for all of it. Add Troy and Abed playing dress-up, and you’ve got me another step along the way. Throw in the return of Magnitude and we might as well slap an “A” on this thing and call it a day so I can get to bed before midnight.
First, we’ll imagine a hypothetical viewer who, in some drunken Netflix rampage, goes directly from the debut episode of Mad Men to this latest one. He or she will probably think that Peggy Olson, our earnest, innocent, and awkward proxy in The Land of The Panty Girdle, has been possessed by the ghost of Don Draper.
In the opening scene of this excellent episode, Pete Campbell is squeezed incongruously into a high school classroom chair, chuckling at a gruesome driver education film and trading glances with a pretty girl. This fades into Pete in bed at home late at night, wide awake due to a dripping faucet (on the loud side of plausibility).
There are two resident control freaks in the Greendale study group, Annie Edison and Abed Nadir, but we’ve never had a full episode that focuses on the dynamic between the two until tonight. Annie’s enthusiasm and Abed detachment make matching up the two alone an interesting challenge for both actors: Alison Brie can’t overplay Annie’s peppiness without seeming strident, and Danny Pudi can’t overplay Abed’s remoteness without becoming robotic.
This episode’s theme is nailed to the church door in its opening scene. Don Draper and his wife Megan enter the elevator to the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices; Don is coughing, and Megan moves to the opposite side of the elevator to avoid his germs. “Fine, if you think you’ll be safe over there by yourself,”Don croaks. Megan smirks, and is punished instantly by the appearance of Andrea, one of Don’s old flings.
Serial drama (even when we call it comedy) works in arcs. Some arcs are meant to form the entire structure of a series as a whole, some give shape to the current season of that series, and then there are mini-arcs which run for a few episodes. Last week’s epic pillow war episode drew an abrupt close to the mini-arc of Abed and Troy’s crumbling friendship, a storyline that had been working in subtle ways throughout the season but became more focused in the episodes since the return from hiatus.
I was a PBS nerd as a kid, and remain one to this day. I remember rushing home with my mother to watch each part of Ken Burns’s groundbreaking documentary The Civil War every night it was on, and being captivated by its delicacy and grandeur. So just by attempting a tribute to the Burns-style documentaries of the past twenty years this episode had me on its side.
I wish Betty really had cancer.
Not because I hate Betty; I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, if Betty were real, there would be no way I would hang out with her (not that she would want to, anyway), but as a character I find her quite fascinating and I’m glad she’s still part of the show and part of Don’s life. But the “Betty gets fat” storyline, inspired no doubt by January Jones’ real-life pregnancy is kinda weak, and her creepy fat-face makeup is off-putting.
Community is far from the first low-rated network show to utilize product placement to help justify its expenses. But it is now, I believe, the first show to ever have one of its main characters fornicate with that sponsor — unless there’s some outtake from the first few seasons of The Office in which Michael Scott mounts a Chili’s restaurant.