Last night's episode of Mad Men, the third episode of Season 3, "Wee Small Hours" was pretty much unrelentingly bleak. Every moment was fought with peril for the characters. Don is being hustled by Conrad Hilton, Peggy continues to drift, and poor Sal gets the worst of it all. All of this did however make for another exceptionally engaging television episode. (Even if it was Pete lite, that is a guy I love to hate!)
Don and Hilton are the focus for the vast majority of the episode, which is probably to expected since, no matter how much we may love Peggy, Pete, and Joan, the show is still about him. John Hamm continues to delve into deeper darknesses in the character too. Chelsie Ross plays Hilton in every way that would bring out the worst in Don. At first, he has felt so friendly and inviting, allowing Don to feel at ease, and then his prickly, disastrous, real personality comes rushing to the front. When a classic Don Draper pitch can't even win the guy over we see that Conrad Hilton is definitely not to be trifled with.
Then there is Sal. As Sal continues to come to grips with his identity, something that early in the show's run seemed set up to be a joke, we learn more of the ways it torments him. Here he and Lee Gardner have an obvious connection. Sal throws caution to the wind and decides to go for it. And he winds up destroyed. Gardner becomes a villain not just like Hilton, but a far more destructive one. We can see the way that being gay in the 1960s could be a death sentence even without being fully outted.
Between Sal's fall and Don's failure, we seem poised to go into the end of the season even lower than ever before. But with Mad Men as a show firing on all of its creative cylinders.
Don and Hilton are the focus for the vast majority of the episode, which is probably to expected since, no matter how much we may love Peggy, Pete, and Joan, the show is still about him. John Hamm continues to delve into deeper darknesses in the character too. Chelsie Ross plays Hilton in every way that would bring out the worst in Don. At first, he has felt so friendly and inviting, allowing Don to feel at ease, and then his prickly, disastrous, real personality comes rushing to the front. When a classic Don Draper pitch can't even win the guy over we see that Conrad Hilton is definitely not to be trifled with.
Then there is Sal. As Sal continues to come to grips with his identity, something that early in the show's run seemed set up to be a joke, we learn more of the ways it torments him. Here he and Lee Gardner have an obvious connection. Sal throws caution to the wind and decides to go for it. And he winds up destroyed. Gardner becomes a villain not just like Hilton, but a far more destructive one. We can see the way that being gay in the 1960s could be a death sentence even without being fully outted.
Between Sal's fall and Don's failure, we seem poised to go into the end of the season even lower than ever before. But with Mad Men as a show firing on all of its creative cylinders.
Here were some were a few of the other highlights:
- Peggy's smiles at Don even as he kept giving the whole creative team exceptional grief over every little idea they came up with. (Also "Peggy, Smith, and Smith" seems like a much more effective team than any that has been on the show before.)
- Conrad Hilton going from a tear-inducing father figure to a total nut job in the course of two scenes.
- John Hamm playing the most lost and unsettled Draper yet and then going all out on his most depraved act of selling out a friend.
- Just everything to do with Sal... just a fantastic job by Bryan Batt, so much pathos, and his face at his betrayal was too much.
- Oh... Betty...
- Carla seems to be on the edge of moving into her own as a fully realized character, hooray!
- The march of history moves on, the march on Washington, MLKJ on the radio, Dallas mentioned, talk of voting a second time for JFK, the 1960s are churning. And looming...
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