Mad Men–Season 3, Episode 6: Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency

I believe that it was Anton Chekhov who first said that if you park a lawnmower in an office in Act I, you need to run over an Englishman’s foot by the end of the play.

If reports are accurate, I watched this entire episode with my mouth agape. Agape, I say. I was made sufficiently uncomfortable last week by the baby, and the prison guard, and Sally’s teacher, and the rest of it that I was looking forward to an office drama. I believe it was Chekhov who also said that you should be careful what you wish for! I haven’t had the time (or energy) to write up everything I want to say from “The Fog” about Betty’s delivery or Pete’s career, but I found this latest episode much more painful–obvious jokes aside. Everything in it was stressful, and I’m not sure there was a single happy thing in the entire hour, with the possible exception of Joan hearing Peggy say nice things to her, and even those were cut short.

In all of three seasons, this is the first time that I’ve really experienced the characters being caught up in something out of control. Not all the characters, of course–Cooper and Campbell and Olson seem OK, and I’m sure there are others–but the image of Don tumbling from great heights is the perfect way to describe what was happening. I often miss the credits when I’m watching, choosing that time to run and get a soda or a blanket to help me watch, and I didn’t even see them this time at first. But I’d missed the first thirty seconds or so and stuck around at the end of the episode for the song and to pick them up again on the AMC rebroadcast that follows immediately. This meant I saw the episode end with Barbie cast out from an upper-story window to meet her doom below, and then I saw Don cast out of an upper-story window to an unknown future. We saw Pryce cast out of New York; we saw Guy cast out of his position, we saw Dr. Harris cast out of surgery, and we saw Don have his dreams dashed. Have we even seen Don with real dreams before? I don’t think he really expected to be moving to London, but it was a fun fantasy to have for a day, and because Don is so rarely shown indulging in fantasies or having fun or taking pride in his abilities at all, it was a delight to see him dream of a promotion–and it hurt even more when he was just reorganized.

But my god! What happened to Don–being reorganized by the parent company–is by no means a travesty on the scale of what they are going to do to poor Guy McKendricks, the wonderboy from Putnam, Powell, and Lowell, who can graduate with degrees from Cambridge and the London School of Economics and transform their branches with charm, efficiency, and a lavender suit, but lose the ability to play golf and he’s worth nothing. More than any cultural differences or power imbalances–like Hooker the secretary lording it over Joan and the pool, or the executives at PPL jerking Pryce from place to place, or different views about race relations–the handling of Guy underscores what kind of people these are. That Guy is named “guy” makes it clear that he’s a stand-in for any of them. They are all interchangeable. This is as close as we’ve seen rich, powerful people being portrayed as monsters in this program. You see how Don reacts not only to the crude reshuffling but also the news that Guy is expendable (seriously? what does a guy have to do?). You see how Roger bristles at being left out but doesn’t really care (he is numbered among the rich and powerful to a degree, despite his behavior). Cooper is willing to be a rich guy who sold a company for the perks of having his own office with a newspaper and refreshments. Don stands at the cusp–he is young enough to be lumped with the rest of the men at the office; he could join the ranks or he could spurn them. Pete is the one I really want to see a reaction to. He comes from the rich and powerful (his mother was a Dyckman, after all), but he’s precisely the young person/potential golden boy embodied by Guy. This is a pretty good indication of what PPL thinks about ability. He’s gotten an offer from Duck about greener pastures (let’s leave aside for the moment about the validity of that offer); will he still try to advance within Sterling Cooper?

I particularly like the reappearance of Connie in this episode, and not just because…

For purposes of full disclosure, I must reveal that I’ve taken a three-hour break. This means I have lost my original train of thought and that this post will go long. You have been warned.

…because Connie–Conrad Hilton–is as big a symbol to modern day viewers of America money and power as they are likely going to get. Don did not know he was talking to Conrad Hilton at the time, which is kinda funny, because Connie clearly thought that Don did know who he was. Don treated him so naturally at Roger’s party that Conrad Hilton made all kinds of assumptions about Don at the time, assumptions that carried over into their Waldorf meeting. I could write an entire essay on that meeting, but won’t, but can’t decided if it was obnoxious for Conrad Hilton to invite Don Draper over for a bit of free advice. I don’t think it was. They’d had a rapport; they both knew Don was in advertising; this seems like a perfectly ordinary thing to ask for. He just wanted Don’t opinion; he didn’t want a free campaign. Was he asking Don for a favor because he thought Don was “up there” with him? I don’t really think he was trying to take advantage of Don, or Don’s lower social position, or anything. Don’t reaction was very, very unexpected, I think. I was surprised that he quibbled the point about this being his profession and not giving away expertise for free. But honestly that’s not what was going on. I couldn’t name any specific interviews with Conrad Hilton that took place before July 3, 1963, but I’m pretty sure he’s on record in all kinds of places giving general advice and insight about why his hotels were so successful. He’s a professional/Don’s a professional–people share expertise. Don has baffled Connie, but the audience (and by the audience I mean me) has learned that Don is afraid/private/grew up with stingy people and doesn’t really know how to give and take, or how you don’t always lose by donating something. Set against the backdrop of big business movers and shakers–British and American–Don looks so alone and unskilled. I really have started to worry about what is going to happen to him.

Anyway… I don’t know what larger points can be made about the British way of doing things and the American way, and I don’t even know that the show was trying to make a statement about any of it, and I am not going to try to write a sentence, but here is what I’ve observed: England = Established, American = Upstart; Established = Conservative, American = Resourceful. Do you really think that Conrad Hilton is the kind of person who would discount someone’s business experience because he can’t golf anymore? Meanwhile, do you think that PPL is the kind of company that would consider a guy who used to park cars for rich people worth getting the opinion of? I think mostly PPL is supposed to represent an extreme version of the old way of doing things, and perhaps Conrad Hilton the new way of business. I see Don and Pete perched between two schools of thought, which makes me see them more as alike than I have to this point, even though I thought it was already obvious.

I have hit the TL;DR limit, so I am resorting to a numbered list:

1. Don all Madonna and Childy with Sally and Gene; what a beautiful image of his gentle loyalty and awareness of what his life really means, but also a fantastic symbol of a man who has the ability to bridge the old and the new if he takes a stand and chooses to do so.

2. These last two episodes have devillainized Pryce. I was startled last week to hear him speak up in defense of Pete’s Admiral television marketing idea (which was completely logical); I was very sad for him when the powers that be planned on moving him to India. The first thing he said was how it would hurt his wife and child, and I don’t think they were the kind of people you have to say things like that to. I think he was horrified about moving them to another country. He has officially become a new character for me to watch.

3. Joan’s inability/decision to not speak up for her old job even though it was pretty clear she could keep it. I am not surprised she is ashamed to do it (and I never expected her to do it in public), partly because it means she has lost the doctor gamble (so much for the summer mansion), but partly because she seems like the kind of person who honors her contracts. Plus how awesome was it to see her save a life the same episode her husband was pushed out of surgery! I know that was maybe too obvious, but I still liked it. Plus she so saw herself in Guy’s shoes. (hahahaha!) But the thing is, too, that she maybe wants her own fresh start. She’s already shown she’d like to try something new, but as long as she’s at Sterling Cooper, she is only Joan, Queen of the Office. It’s great to be Queen, but it’s the same old thing.

4. I keep thinking about that line in the bible that if your right eye/hand offends you to cut it off, because you’ll have no need for that eye or hand in heaven. I also keep thinking about how an animal in a trap will chew off its foot to escape (whether that actually happens in real life I don’t care; I am referring to the literary trope). And here we are, with Guy having his foot cut off. He has a chance, now, to use his talents for a company that isn’t playing chess with lives and for people who will appreciate him. I’m not saying he’s lucky, but I do think that PPL is a trap.

5. Peggy saying goodbye to Joan and thanking her for her advice through the years. I love how Joan took some of the credit (even if she doesn’t really think it), but I love how Peggy always says what needs to be said. I was sorry that the conversation was cut short.

6. Don wigging out on the baby’s name was his gut getting ahead of his heart, but it really isn’t about the baby’s name. It really is about poor Sally, and I’m glad he knew enough to say so. I was also touched by Betty’s attempts to warm Sally to baby Gene, even if she did it wrong. I also can’t wait to lie to children by saying that fairies help babies write. I assume those fairies also help cats sign birthday cards. It was the most delightful thing I’ve heard in a show!

7. So the show title is “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency.” My question, then, is who walks out?

Mad Men–Season 3, Episode 4: The Arrangements

OK. Tonight’s episode was about legacies, and parts of it almost made me cry (OK, just the Gene parts), but first I have to gush about some stuff.

Like Sal’s flirty bedroom dance.
Like Gene salting spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream right out of the carton. I have totally done that! It’s awesome.
Like Peggy’s new roommate–KAREN–wearing a yellow Mad Men dress. When I Madmenized myself, I wore a yellow Mad Men dress. It was meant to be:

Like Jai Alai! I am trying to figure out where we were living when I was a kid that had a jai alai fronton. We drove past it on a regular basis. I think it was Connecticut, but it could have been San Diego, maybe in National City off of the 5. But there was a very famous fronton in Tijuana, so I can’t believe that there would have been one in SD. I have learned tonight that there was a fronton in Bridgeport and in Milford, so that could have been it, except I am a little fuzzy on my Fairfield County geography (never having driven there).

Like peaches giving poor Bobby a rash! Peaches give me a rash! Well, a skin rash. If I can eat a peach without the juice touching my skin I’m fine, but I’m even sensitive to peach-scented lotions. TMI, but everything’s coming up Karen this week!

Exhortations and exaultations complete.

I think I could write a thousand words about any of the following characters, but I think the legacy theme has been very well established across the various storylines of this episode. I am going to cop out and make a list, in no particular order.

1. Legacies fathers leave to their sons. Gene is a war hero, trying to share the triumph of survival with Bobby, since William appears to be an unworthy beneficiary of his experience. Don, or Dick Whitman, is an actual war victim and maybe not a pacificist, but he does not like war trophies, and does not want his son to be caught up in us versus them. We also see Horace Sr. admitting his disappointment in HoHo Jr., although he does offer HoHo Jr the courtesy of letting him live his own life and make his own mistakes. We also learn that Bert Cooper has no children (perhaps I learned that before and forgot it), which makes you wonder what he thinks his mark upon the world will be and also makes you reflect on Roger Sterling Jr, who is not a wastrel exactly but is basically the end of the line–especially in the context of the company being bought by a foreign institution anyway.

2. Joan’s legacy as a hip young thing in the city. Peggy is not quite as good in real life as she managed to be on paper (after some copy help), but she found herself a roommate, even if it was just a Swedish travel agent who hates sailors.

3. Gene’s wife/Betty’s mother/Sally’s grandmother. We’ve heard such horrible things about her from Betty and I have had some very unforgiving thoughts about her, but now I don’t know what to think! Gene’s comment about his daughter and ice cream seem to corroborate every neurosis that Betty has developed, but the way he treats Sally as a girl bubbling with potential and how he cherishes the memory of the smart, professional woman he married, and how he regrets selling Betty short on her potential… it’s so sad, and amazing. Is this even a real memory? Gene has seemed mostly with it this episode–even the Sally driving scene could be excused–and my instincts tell me that these memories of his are true. How did Betty go so wrong? Has Sally had enough personal encouragement and grandfatherly love to carry his belief in her abilities through adulthood. Regardless, I am loving these glimpses of working women throughout the ages. Now we’ve got Grandma Gene, Bobbie Barrett, Joan Holloway, Peggy Olson, and hopefully Sally Draper to round things out in the future.

4. The legacy of war. I don’t really feel like analyzing war beyond what Don and Gene said about it, but we’ve got WWI in Gene, WWII with Horace Sr., the Korean War with Don, and Viet Nam looming on the horizon via the news broadcast.

5. The legacy of television as a social and cultural force. I don’t know a huge amount about broadcasting, or the history of the networks and media structure, and I am going to mangle this, but there was a lot of emphasis on what television is and isn’t, and what is fraudulent and what is futile, and when an imitation is good enough. Sal–the knowing fraud–is now a commercial director (advertising AND television, which is not the same as life even if it looks like it is)… jai alai never does replace baseball, even if Patxi is perfect for television close-ups and could make the ladies swoon… Peggy is not “That Girl,” even though she says she is to Anita right at the beginning of the episode and even though she apparently knows how to write copy for it, and even though “That TV Show” hasn’t aired yet to compare her to, even Karen the Swedish Travel Agent Who Hates Sailors can sort of tell (but wants to live in Manhattan and have a successful roommate so she can overlook the fact). Plus there’s that awful facsimile of Ann-Margret selling Patio, which is not authentic which nobody likes and which Peggy called two weeks ago.

ASIDE: On That Girl: In 1965, Marlo Thomas would star in a television show called “That Girl,” about a young single working woman who moves to the city. /ASIDE

6. Not really a legacy, but the sibling rivalry between Peggy and Anita was awesome. Anita is so supportive of Peggy against the legitimately petulant and whiny and melodramatic mother, but did you catch her expression after Peggy broke the news about the Manhattan move and went home? Anita is very, very happy to be the better daughter. Hooray for Peggy being snubbed by her mom! It’s what Anita always wanted.

7. Also not really a legacy, but did you see how many wheels were spinning in Mrs. Sal’s head as she watched him channel Ann-Margret? Just when she thought she had her troubles pinned on the decline of his illustration career, she gets a shoulder shimmy. I think I could watch that scene for days. If it shows up on YouTube, somebody send me the link.

8. Don smashing the ant farm open is too symbolic, too foreshadowy, too fraught with meaning for me to attempt to address. A younger, more earnest student of the literary/television arts with MLA database access and more time is going to have to tackle that one. But don’t you wonder just how far some of those ants got away before Joan sprayed the room?

Mad Men–Season 3, Episode 3: My Old Kentucky Home

Tonight’s episode of Mad Men was slow… but not in a bad way. It was not boring at all, but the scenes dragged out and dragged out and unwound and you just didn’t know where they were going to end up. It was an hour that seemed like much longer, and I can’t even say that so many things happened to the characters in it that I was tired out from watching them, because they didn’t. Maybe I was just holding my breath the whole time. Maybe it was that everyone was sort of in a haze during this episode that I got caught up in it, too.

There was the atmosphere of the garden party, the smoke from the joints, the increasing senility of Grandpa. The scenes just unspooled while you watched, with nothing and everything happening all at once. I think my favorite scenes were the ones at Sterling Cooper, and not really because of the joint. Peggy announcing she wanted to smoke marijuana was funny, but her line that set the tone for the scene was when she told Paul off for never, ever asking her anything about what she liked and so he had no business presuming he knew what she wouldn’t like (I’m paraphrasing). Her bluntness (ha! see what I did there?) startled him. Paul is pretentious, but I think he is pretty self-aware. He hadn’t noticed that he never bothered to ask Peggy anything outside of girly work stuff, but he was immediately embarrassed because he knew she was right. I like to believe that he fully sees her as a person and as a professional now, and that his behavior toward her in the office will undergo a major change–just by paying attention.

It was very interesting, too, to see how Paul is playing his own part in the pageant of hiding your roots and assuming the identity of someone you weren’t. The Princeton scholarship was a nice reveal. So was seeing him interact with his drug dealer friend. The drug dealer friend knows Paul’s history and blabs it, and they can fight over it, but Paul isn’t keeping secrets and thus can control the outcome of their spat. Drug Dealer Friend makes peace on Paul’s terms, which is a good contrast to the permanent anxiety Don carries around because he has to always hide his identity from everyone. Don so far has been able to control every situation, but now that Connie (Hilton?) from Roger’s party knows one detail about Don’s past, his secret is technically unsafe. If they meet again, it will be an interesting encounter.

Also fantastic were the scenes between Peggy and her secretary. It’s weird that she came into work on the weekend even when Peggy didn’t ask her to (or pushy?), but it’s not like she really had anything else to do. Why not? And I don’t think it was particularly obnoxious or judgmental of her to scold Peggy for smoking dope at the office for a REALLY long time while she was just sitting around with no Internet waiting for her. And I think Peggy, in her addled state, appreciated whatever revelation she had about Olive’s fear for what was going to happen to Peggy, and found it touching and inspiring. Olive so far doesn’t seem like an idiot, and Peggy needs a good secretary… one that has been a working girl and a wife and mother and a working girl again probably has a nice bit of perspective, too.

This will be where I segue into my thing about mothers. I don’t think it’s anything shocking or original for me to comment about how few mothers there really are in fictional works (from fairy tales to television shows), much less supportive, helpful ones, but this episode of Mad Men was overflowing with them. There was Betty dolled up like the Madonna herself, in white bridal lace; she may not be a good mother to her children but she was certainly the beautiful image of Motherhood, and everyone noticed. There was Olive the secretary (a mother of a college kid), the pregnant woman at Joan’s party, the chief of medicine’s wife, Harry’s wife Jennifer, the First Lady, and–because being infertile calls attention to pregnancy matters as much as a belly does–Trudy. Then there were the cute young trophy wives, who were definitely not mothers, like Jane and the one at the side of that guy that touched Betty’s belly, and these young women were just not doing much more than looking good. Jane is insecure and inappropriate (although I don’t think she’s so terrible), and the other girl was nothing but a look in this scene, but they were in definite contrast to the matrons and the reproducing.

A lot of people online are reading the gesture of the strange man touching Betty’s belly as a flirtation, or a gross imposition, or a chance to cop a feel on a bulge on a beautiful woman’s body, but I didn’t read it that way at all. Rather, I saw it as a gesture of sincere respect and awe, not just for mothers and babies, but for continuity and the ways that mothers are wise. He’s got himself a nice little trophy on his arm at that party, but he probably suspects that what he feels for her is probably closer to–as Don puts it–foolishness than it is to love. This scene, ensconced in the middle of an episode in which mothers are so powerful and perceptive, seems like homage and not at all like lechery. ESPECIALLY after Betty had self-described as an open umbrella, which is certainly a very evocative image of protection and security (even if it is Betty we’re talking about).

What was incredible about mothers was the guidance they were imparting. Hearing Joan get a frank talking-to about how great she was and how tenuous her marital circumstances were was amazing. Joan has been self-sufficient the whole time we have seen her, but she really had no clue what was going on at the hospital. She has received very valuable information about her husband and her marriage, and it will be interesting to see what she does with it. The pregnant nurse hearing the advice and reacting to it–she received the same suggestion from the same person–while Joan was getting it was a nice contrast to Joan’s obliviousness. As an RN, that wife had much more prior knowledge about her own doctor husband than Joan had, and when she said she dismissed the advice you got the impression she did so thoughtfully. I am so relieved that Joan’s decisions will be informed beyond having vague suspicions about her husband’s status and unadmitted disappointments in his character.

So Olive the mother/subordinate. That is a relationship full of potential. Peggy is definitely in charge and she’s so arrogant (and maybe a little sociopathic–I haven’t really decided) that I’m sure she knows best about what she needs (and it’s worked so far!), and she really doesn’t need an older, conservative woman telling her how to behave in the office. But this woman is not without experience in life and with work; this is her second go-around with the career thing, and for all her talk about being loyal, she really would rather be at the office than accompanying her husband to the dump. It’s one thing if her son had actually come home from college that weekend, but because he didn’t, she’s there at Sterling Cooper. And isn’t that sort of what Peggy is doing? Her son didn’t come home to her at all, and here she is at Sterling Cooper on the weekend. We know so little of her, but she seems like a sensible, practical woman who has balanced career and family well enough. When Peggy, in her addled state (did I already say that upstream? sorry. I keep getting interrupted and don’t feel like rereading), catches on to the source of Olive’s concern about what Peggy is doing, she is touched and immediately reassuring. It’s a little grandiose to say that she’ll accomplish everything that Olive wants for her (and we have no reason to believe that Olive failed to accomplish everything she wanted for herself), but for the first time Peggy really seems to understand that people see her and understand what she’s doing. Compare that to last week, when no one listened to her at all and it made the two of us bonkers. Olive, unlike Paul and Peggy’s male co-workers, understands what Peggy is doing and why and can articulate it. She doesn’t like it and may not approve of it, but Peggy has been seen and heard without explicitly having to ask for it. And it absolutely is significant that Olive has a college-age child. Peggy is college age. She is not able to see herself from the outside. Olive has a perspective that Peggy cannot have, and when Peggy senses fear in Olive (whatever that actually is) she respects it. She brushes it off, but she acknowledges that it is not crazy for Olive to worry. Peggy is just confident that Olive doesn’t have to.

I feel like Peggy finally has allies in the office now. Don has always seen her, but only as well as he can see anyone, which isn’t very. Joan and Bobbie Barrett have seen themselves in Peggy and given advice to their Peggy selves, but it wasn’t very useful advice to her. But Paul and Olive have looked at Peggy and seen her, and they have communicated with her. It has to be a relief. No wonder she’s able to finally get some good work done. A burden has been lifted from her mind.

I guess I didn’t really finish all my thoughts about the power of benevolent mothers to do good and change lives. It was all planned out eloquently in my head but I didn’t get more than a few minutes in a row to write today. Retroactive thesis alert. Have at it, kids. Also, I need to track down a reliable source of screen captures. I hate making my own, and I really wish I had some good ones of these benevolent mothers to liven up the page a bit. The AMC official selection just isn’t doing it for me.

Mad Men–Season 3, Episode 2: Love among the Ruins

So I have probably improperly processed the episode, although I am allowing alliteration. “Love among the Ruins” was far more depressing to me than it seems to have been for other people online, and I think it’s because I am aligning myself too sympathetically with Peggy’s point of view in this one, what with my sexism ruckus blowout on the Skeptic’s forum a week or so ago. My frustration with that whole situation is not so much that people in the end didn’t agree with my point of view, it was that they seemed to deliberately misunderstand it, or dismiss it, or not even hear what I was trying to say–and yes, appearances to the contrary, I am done worrying about it now. It’s just that watching Peggy say, quite clearly, how she objected to the “playing up men’s fantasies” angle for the ad campaign for a diet soda aimed at women–even if she was wrong–and no one really listened to her. They really did not care what she had to say.

Also horrible: Harry Crane telling her that she shouldn’t care because she isn’t fat anymore, and the tight look on her face when all the implications of having a baby out of wedlock, and keeping it secret, and giving it away, and watching her sister raise a baby the same age got shoved down into silence, and she still managed a polite, “Thank you.”

Also horrible: Peggy dancing in the mirror a la Ann-Margaret, trying hard to see what men found appealing in a woman in her twenties acting like a teenager, and failing to reproduce it. You could read this two ways: Peggy wants to figure out how to get men to listen to her, or Peggy wants men to love her. What redeems this scene from being completely tragic (although you have to get through a few scenes) in the end is that she does not in fact go for the Ann-Margaret playing a teenager to score herself a man–she emulates Joan, who is a woman who behaves like an adult and gets men to love her and to listen to her. Joan is a much better role model for Peggy.

Peggy, always the student, uses Joan’s line to pick up a young fellow for her own–and it works. Furthermore, I am happy to say that she isn’t particularly girly around him, although she does excessively compliment the drink choice (I presume) she lets him order for her. I found it very gracious how she allowed him to believe she was a secretary, but still reinforced that she worked in Manhattan (which underscored that he was a student still turning to his mother for advice). She let him know by biting his proverbial sandwich–no, wait, his literal sandwich–just what direction their relationship was turning that evening (I think relieving him of the need to say it aloud to his friends). She brought up the matter of birth control (although I looked away at the wrong second to talk to Husband and missed if she went ahead without it), and it was she who was the sensible one about leaving at night because of work in the morning. Without belittling him or being rude, Peggy also got the message across that she really wasn’t interested in a follow-up.

I read somewhere online, in someone’s comments I think at the “What’s Alan Watching?” blog for this episode, that what Peggy is doing is pulling a Don Draper with this hook-up (who absolutely looks like Pete Campbell, totally obvious, thank you very much), but I don’t think that’s anything more than assertiveness and self-assuredness. This is a very good lesson to take from Joan. I think before this happens, Don has told Peggy to stick with what tools she has in her tool box (a line I don’t fully understand the meaning of even if the intention is clear), and she is aware of the tools in her box. She’s very good at her job, and she did hold a man for a long time with the delectable Trudy as an unwitting rival. Her steady hand and her cool detachment facing Don in his office the next morning was not a result of her finally “getting some” and “releasing tension.” Sure, she had some fun, but mostly she remembered which tools were hers.

I certainly prefer this Peggy to the one that got all glammed up and played Ann-Margaret for her coworkers at the stripper club or wherever it was all the other copywriters went without her because they were entertaining clients from out of town (yeah, it would probably behoove me to look it up) last season. Peggy knows how to be Ann-Margaret. She just doesn’t like to be Ann-Margaret, and she wants to appeal to men for different reasons in a different way. And besides basically borrowing a line from Joan to get the ball rolling at happy hour (and then later), she is a success. Somehow, for a while, she’s made her peace that the guys want her to listen to what Ann-Margaret is saying. She’s heard them, and she’s got the patience to wait for them to hear her.

Counterpoint to all of this is Betty and William, and the senile father. It’s hard for me to figure out Betty’s relationship to her family. During the episode where Betty went home (and the estranged Don accompanied her) after her father’s stroke, I got the impression that no one ever really listened to Betty, either, except for the housekeeper/nanny/Mammy figure, who treated her like an adult by telling her honest, adult things. We only hear from Betty the kinds of things that her mother told her, and I’m really not sure how much of that is true, but her brother is a real weasel who may or may not be clearheaded about their father’s illness (and may or may not be just greedy), and their dynamic is strange. William’s Wife Whose Name I Forget seems sensible enough, but does not seem like a partner to him–particularly the way she volunteered that she “didn’t get a vote” and how William immediately followed with “Don doesn’t get a vote, either.” It’s hard for me to tell if he is exactly as impatient with Betty as he ought to be, or if he dismisses her out of hand, too. I don’t know that putting Granddad in a home was such a horrible idea, considering how ill-prepared any of them really are to take care of a man without reliable faculties but a set of car keys. I know Don is sort of power-tripping on sending back the horrid house guests in a misplaced fit of pique about Madison Square Garden (because power-tripping by putting them in bunkbeds wasn’t emphatic enough, I guess), and I suppose he feels like he owes Betty’s and maybe he feels like he is trying to help his mother in her hour of need vicariously through Betty’s father, or maybe he really does have a strong sense of family, or whatever, but clearly no one is anticipating how BAD AN IDEA THIS IS with a NEW BABY IN THE HOUSE. I know something awful is going to happen. It has to. I’m not saying that the baby is going to die or anything, but there has to be an incident with senile grandfather and newborn when no one is looking that brings up the issue of what to do with him, and how Betty responds to it is going to be her big character development moment of the season, except that–of course–all my predictions are wrong.

I’m not getting into Roger Sterling or the Brits, even though they are all respectively awful, except to say that Don is having done to him with a short-sighted parent company EXACTLY WHAT he’s been doing to the forward-thinking, brusque Pete. I keep waiting for Don to chill out already about Pete and really see what Pete has to offer, and for Pete to chill out already and stop looking for reasons to be a victim.

PEGGY AND PETE REVELATION: They are both talented people who think a little askew about the job they are asked to do. They aren’t really pioneers, but they’d be promoted a lot faster even a few years later. Their problem is–besides maybe being sociopaths–that no one can actually hear what they are trying to say, and that they lack the finesse to sell them on it anyway. /REVELATION

Don and Pete really ought to branch off on their own, but even within Sterling Cooper they could get a lot of good, impressive work done if Don would just look at Pete’s brain instead of his manners. Pete’s not totally without fault, but he has already expressed a willingness to work with and learn from Don, and really respects him. In my LaLa Land fantasy, Sol would be their artist and Joan would find something amazing to do. Peggy I might leave behind, because there will be more for her to do within a large company.

Roger is just unbelievable, but congrats to the ex-Mrs. Sterling who is fabulous, and to the young Miss Sterling, who has maybe been a brat but has also been able to clearly state her points, with barbs, instead of just crying or yelling.

I’ve gone on too long (this always happens when I start to write and get interrupted), but I have to say one last thing about Sol. Sol really seemed understated on the Flaming Hetero persona that he’s spent two seasons building. Sure, he made one weird quip about Ann-Margaret being twenty-five and acting fourteen, but that was it. No talk about models, or getting them alone, or any of that. It’s noteworthy, I think, and I accredit it entirely to his near-tryst with the bellboy on his business trip… that and the conversation he had with Don about it, which sounded uncannily like a conversation about raincoats (which is even funnier when you consider, well, raincoats and condoms), but was not a conversation about raincoats at all. It depressed the hell out of me when he presented a storyboard last week without faces, and then he did it again on this Patio thing, but I’ve found a way to admire it instead of crying over it (I’ve done my crying for Peggy this week, and it’s enough).

THESIS ALERT:
Sol has made some kind of peace or overt admission to himself, and he’s basically out to one person, and he’s done with the artifice. He can’t (or won’t) just step out into the world as a gay man, but he won’t play with fake faces anymore, and he won’t draw them. Compare these sketches to that beautiful portrait of his shirtless neighbor in a hammock from the series premiere. I get that the work he’s doing has changed, from magazine spots to storyboards, and you just don’t draw the same kinds of pictures, but these faceless people are the ones the show producers are showing us since Sol’s encounter, and it means something. I mean, he’s still doing the static ads, too–you know they haven’t just dropped print–but they have not come up.

These blanks, too, are hopeful in a way, because they could be anybody. Sol is not pigeonholing people anymore. I think this is a big move for him. Someone could get a good thesis out of that, especially if they actually know about commercial art. Which I don’t. But I do know that Sol’s darling young wife who he clearly really loves is in for a world of hurt. I wonder if she’ll be angry or relieved.

Babylon 5–Season 2, Episode 19: Divided Loyalties

I really, really liked this one. I always take breaks from watching right before the weaker episodes, I guess, and then start to wonder about the series, and then when I stick with it, I end up with awesome. The psychological drama embedded in this episode was potent. That it reminded me of the whole Battlestar Galactica Redux “who’s a Cylon” game made it even better, because I got to relive the tensions from watching that series, too, so it packed twice the punch!

Since watching the episode, however, I’ve been quite sick, and my memories of the past few days are fuzzy. I apologize if I get details wrong.

The Episode
So this is the one about the Psychic from the pilot movie (Lyta) who sneaks back onto Babylon 5 in order to warn the captain that there’s a traitor in his midst–a traitor who doesn’t even know he or she is a traitor! Some person has been programmed to collect information and hide beneath an invented personality until the code word is psychically transmitted to him or her, and the PsiCorps can bring the station, or its personnel, down for its nefarious purposes. It’s not a lot of plot on the surface to pull through a whole hour, but what I loved about this episode’s treatment of it was that instead of pulling in a real side plot, we got lots and lots of character development. Missing from the episode were my favorite non-humans (G’Kar specifically), but they weren’t likely candidates for the subterfuge anyway.

A long time ago I got some information in an unexpected place (well, in a discussion thread online about the show) where I learned things about Susan Ivanova and Talia Winters that were unexpected. I’ve seen them since then having pajama parties and all-night talking sessions, so although I was surprised to basically see them having breakfast together this early in the show (true, we’re basically half-way through the series), it was very exciting.

Talia: It’s hard to believe it’s taken us so long to get to this point. Two years!
Susan: Well, you didn’t exactly make it easy.

So Talia drops a heavy hint that she needs a place to stay that night, Susan makes her room available, we see Talia–fully made up–emerge from Susan’s shower… it’s a classic story of star-crossed lovers, what with Talia working for PsiCorps and Susan having been traumatized by PsiCorps as a child. Oh, and because of the lesbian. It’s a shame, really, that this episode also represents the last of Talia Winters the love interest. Poor Ivanova! Clearly being gay just isn’t that common in the future, or in the future military, and there are not a lot of women who are her professional equals, and she’s always on call–her opportunities to have romance are pretty limited. I mean, we’ve seen all the men meet someone and do the flirty to the one-night-stand to the marriage thing, and the doctor and the captain and Garibaldi are as busy as Ivanova are. It’s sad to see her alone. Plus, why introduce the lesbian stuff at all if you’re just going to undermine it by taking one of the women away?

So now I have to wonder about representations of lesbians on network TV in the mid-1990s. Ellen is running concurrently, although the main character is not officially lesbian until the last season (and then the show is canceled). Northern Exposure is set in a town founded by two lesbians, although neither are characters on the show. Ross of Friends was abandoned by his wife when she came out as lesbian, although that occurred before the show starts (I think); she ended up marrying a woman on television later in the episode. I didn’t watch Ellen (for no particular reason), but I doubt that her character was treated like a joke in the same way the Northern Exposure or Friends lesbians were (as novelty characters that made possible events for other people to react to–not that they were openly mocked or caricatured, even though that monkey on Friends was troubling). Was having a high-ranking military officer be lesbianish a radical act for science fiction network television? It’s hard to say. Ivanova is often infantalized as a high-ranking military officer and frequently put into positions of needing a mentor or getting advice in ways that Garibaldi is never seen in–and I think she (a Lieutenant Commander) even outranks him (Chief Warrant Officer). I know, I know… she’s young, but still. (And my knowledge about the relative rankings of fictional future military is spotty, but still.) It’s part of a general trend that I’ve commented on before, so I’ll let it rest. But she’s technically high-ranking military, and this is sort of on the heels of President Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and it’s interesting. Because, for the very few moments of Susan and Talia we see together on this show, their personal relationship is never trivialized, even if it is cut short before fulfillment. Real-Talia (after the code word was invoked) is actually quite cruel to Susan in her parting speech, which to me sends the message that Susan’s feelings were deep and genuine, and understood, and taken seriously by Fake-Talia (before the code word). On the other hand, it’s science fiction, and we get acts of love between species a lot in this genre, and there’s certainly nothing more unnatural than that. If Fred Phelps knew that was going on, I’m pretty sure he’d be dropping fags from his list of people God hates.

So it’s all the more romantic for the truncation, I’m sure, and very interesting in hindsight, but Susan Ivanova has other revelations for us that are just as interesting. This “I’m sort of a psychic” thing is fascinating, beyond the fact that it explains her fear and loathing for the PsiCorps. She is the only person, really, who refuses to participate in the code word screening, and even though it seems innocuous enough–hell, I’d have said yes–and the matter important enough, she holds her ground. It tells a lot about what kind of person she is, and what kind of people the others are. She does not want her privacy sacrificed to her loyalty oath to serve or anything like that. No one else takes a stand (and for good reason–it is better to know who a traitor is than to not know), but to me this matter strikes at an important question: Do thoughts matter? You could have traitorous, murderous thoughts, but if you never act on them, are you a traitor or murderer? I’m not really going to get into that thesis right now (my thoughts are too vague and the topic is beyond the scope of this discussion), but you can see why the PsiCorps is sort of dangerous. It’s an iffy situation, having them organized as a body like that and controlling all people with psychic ability. If thoughts don’t matter, who cares? Are thoughts more important than actions? If someone ends up inspired to write more at length on this, don’t forget to take The Minority Report into consideration… short story, movie, doesn’t matter.

And that’s a lot of words to get to this observation: Susan Ivanova–Second in Command–never actually is screened. She never is exposed to the code word. We don’t know what would have happened if Lyta had transmitted the code word to her brain. I cannot believe that this oversight will not come back in some way. It has to, don’t you think? Maybe we’ll find out later that Susan and Talia have always been lovers, and were brainwashed together, and that’s why their attraction to each other has been so strong, in an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sort of way. (We’re all over the sci-fi references today–some themes just need constant revisiting, I guess.) Details like this are what will keep me watching the show.

Skepticism, Sexism, and the Party Line

On the Skeptical Movement
Last week I stepped out of character and got involved in an Internet drama, or ruckus, or brouhaha, or morass, or cluster, or whatever word you want to use to describe it. On an episode I haven’t heard (#211, from August 4, link opens a Quicktime page/file) of a podcast I listen to (The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe), the panel of Skeptical Rogues (which includes one woman, Rebecca Watson) interviewed a woman, Carrie Iwan, who is a co-author of a blog I don’t read (Skepchick)–for no particular reason; I just don’t really read blogs as a rule–about her impressions of a skeptical event I didn’t attend: The Amazing Meeting #7, presented by the James Randi Educational Foundation. A rough transcript of the interview (with commentary and editorializing), should you not want to listen to the whole podcast or even download it, can be found here.

On Sexism in the Skeptical Movement
So this interview happens that I don’t even know about for a while, because I didn’t go to The Amazing Meeting and thanks to still having a lost iPod I am behind on my podcasts. But I’ve been a faithful and reliable participant in the SGU forums, and eventually a conversation that started in the thread about Episode #211 was splintered off to address the more general topic of Sexism in the Skeptical Movement. You can read those links at your peril; I’m not really going to refer to them, but wanted to link to them for context. They are very long, and a mess of topics on which different people stay focused to varying degrees.

Long story short, the average listener/participant/TAM attendee is shocked and outraged that anyone–particularly a woman–would suggest that the skeptical community is sexist to any degree, and then they turn around and say that women who suggest it are looking for problems and are fracturing the community and distracting it from its larger purposes. When there is so much “real skeptical work” to be done (my quotes for emphasis, not anyone’s phrase in particular), how dare they bring up nonimportant points that waste people’s time, and besides, men are just sexual creatures who can’t help to sexually objectify women and should be excused for it. So yeah, that’s basically my version of events, so read into it what you will. It’s possible that I am completely wrong. It’s pretty obvious to me that the sexual objectification of women 1) is happening and a lot of people in the skeptical movement and elsewhere don’t notice it, and 2) that it’s not a nice thing to be happening and people should try to stop doing it, but you know what we modern, university-educated women are like today, especially the ones with those crazy liberal degrees: Our brains are full of poorly researched, feminazi claptrap. Our perceptions shouldn’t be trusted.

I bring up sexism and the skeptical movement and all these links not to rekindle the debate–if you are coming to this post from outside the “skeptical movement” then you don’t really care or even know, and if you are coming to this post from inside the “skeptical movement” then you’ve probably already read many sides of this conversation and have made up your mind, but because it’s an example, non-scientific for once, of what happens within the tiny, online-only piece of the skeptical movement that I have been involved with when you stray from the party line.

On the Party Line
I’ve been posting in the SGU forums for at least a year and a half, although less so lately. I’ve become somewhat disengaged with the “skeptical movement,” whatever that refers to, and I just haven’t had a lot to contribute beyond the chatty, socializing threads or the ones about television (and sometimes books). I’m not the only person with that problem; you listen or read or participate in these forums (the SGU discussion is not the only one out there) and you see a common thread of how to increase attendance at events or why discussion board membership is dropping. A long time ago I used to attend monthly skeptical meetings in San Diego, and they were talking about the same thing. You listen to people debunk the claims of [dowsing, anti-vaccines, aliens, cold fusion, alternative medicine, fad diets] over and over again, and discuss the logical fallacies employed by the proponents of said belief system, and you start to catch on. You learn what to do. I’ve long since learned how to spot garbage in print and in commercials, and I know when I am reading lies, wishful thinking, or flat-out ignorance. I get it already. After a certain point, listening to skeptical speeches or reading skeptical magazines is an exercise in reaffirmation–reaffirming how smart you are, how stupid that other person is, how important it is not to codify these beliefs within the legal system.

It’s not that I’m so interesting, or have so much to say of my own, but I can only listen to so many stories about how ghost hunters do anomaly hunting and make explanations after the fact, or that photographs of UFOs are very easy to fake. I get it already. I’m tapped out. I’m ready to move on, and yet, the tiny sliver of online-only piece of the skeptical movement that I’ve been involved with doesn’t move on. The people participating in it–who create the content that drives the SGU discussion forum and who make the responses that keep it going–enjoy these topics. It’s fun for them. And why wouldn’t it be? Everyone’s got their passion/hobby/interests. It’s just that these topics are so narrow. This is not “Skepticism,” it’s “Scientific Skepticism.” In fact, it’s “Scientific Skepticism on Topics that Particularly Interest the People Who Make the Podcast.” Great. I mean that. It’s a great podcast, and the hosts make every episode entertaining.

But I’m not on the podcast; I’m in the discussion forum. And it is in this discussion forum that the existence (and ensuing problems) with the party line become obvious. If it’s not on the podcast, it’s not really part of the Skeptical Movement, although the application of skeptical thought is so much broader and necessary than to scientific topics. People with science or technical interests have been drawn to the SGU for its science and technical topics, and have not necessarily done a lot of reading or studying outside of these fields. That’s fine. I’m no scholar, either. But I am interested in other things. I am open to the possibility that there is critical thinking to be done in fields outside of science. That, in fact, sometimes people who criticize some aspect of science or technology might have something important to say. Education, for example, and economics are fields rife with good and bad practices, and there are weird conspiracy theories in every discipline (like whether Shakespeare the Man is the same person as Shakespeare the Author). But everyone is so quick to criticize teachers and economists based on news reporting and personal anecdote. Who actually wants to read Derrida? Not me, and I have an advanced literature degree. But people are dismissing him as a charlatan before they’ve even opened a book to read a line he’s written–even in translation. The Problem of the Party Line, therefore, is twofold: First, something not on the assumed List of Skeptical Topics (even though it’s only a list of scientific skeptical topics, which is insufficiently acknowledged), is not worthy of consideration. Second, for controversies not on the List of Skeptical Topics, it’s OK to repeat generalizations, validate second-hand assertions, and ignore bodies of work that might present a different point of view. It’s the same kind of sloppy thinking skeptics are quick to point out (and rightly so) in people who promote “the woo.”

And Back on the Topic of Sexism
So the question of whether or not sexism exists falls into this category of subjects that do not fit the Party Line. Is the skeptical movement sexist? For that matter, is the skeptical movement racist? Is unintentional exclusion still a thing to be avoided? It’s hard to tell from the SGU discussion board, and the conversations on the topics at other places (like at the Skepchick blog). As soon as someone made an argument about an unpleasant topic a lot of people hadn’t considered–something outside of the party line–the dismissals began. The logical fallacies kicked in. The hysterical personalization of the criticism blinded folks. The gleeful reaffirmations of the party lines–There’s no sexism in skepticism because I AM NOT sexist; feminazis are looking for trouble; women like being objectified or they wouldn’t try to attract male attention–filled page after page of discussion. It makes no sense. No real thought is given at all to whether the women speaking up about an observation they’ve made might be reasonable, or if the observation could be accurate, or if blind spots could exist, or if their arguments might be valid. Nope. Claims of unnoticed sexism are just written off and then, which is classic, turned around so that the men who are yelling the loudest are suddenly the biggest victim in the conspiracy of women to feminize men and deny and vilify natural masculinity.

I don’t know what to think. Obviously, the topic is too touchy to broach again, unless you agree with the statement that sexism doesn’t exist and some women just like to complain, in which case you can continue posting sarcastic, joyful comments about male/female relationships and the (non)presence of sexism in the community. This is a sore-winner scenario, and it’s off-putting. Seriously off-putting. Furthermore, for stuff like this to be going on days and days later is really disappointing, especially when people have been wondering as a group what to do to increase membership. The demographics of the skeptical movement skew mostly male (apparently, mostly white male, but that’s a conversation for someone else to have), but it’s some kind of complete mystery why.

I am still unsure what group of people/social and political behaviors constitutes the “Skeptical Movement” in the first place, so I don’t know how big of a tempest in a teapot a flurry of hostility toward the topic of sexism in online boards and blogs represents. Maybe this is nothing. Maybe I should know by now that the gathering places on the Internet attract the most cantankerous and stubborn people interested in anything, and that the in-person events and exchanges are perfectly civil and polite. I could be the silly one who’s gotten herself into a right state over what everyone agrees is an inconsequential, insignificant conversation in the Grand Skeptical Scheme of Things. OK. But I’m not that enthusiastic anymore about the idea that mingling with people in the Skeptical Movement means I’m mingling with advanced critical thinkers with open minds. Now I know that there are some people I know online now, who listen to the same podcast as I do, and they’ve chosen to believe in some things and not others, and they can’t always say why. They are not, as a group, skeptical about their own biases and prejudices. They feel, as a group, that they are as victimized as the next person. But we all like the SGU. That’s nice. It’s a nice podcast. I learn interesting things about current events there, or at least they’d have been current if I’d been caught up.

But I’ve learned for myself the lesson every skeptic learns eventually, that no matter how hard you fight, or argue, or explain some new ideas, you really aren’t going to change a single person’s mind. And if it’s a hot enough topic, someone might even call you a cunt before you are done.

And that, Gentle Reader, is kind of a drag.

Mad Men–Season 3, Episode 1: Out of Town

Well, it’s been a long time coming and I am SO HAPPY that Mad Men has started that I CAN’T WAIT to blog about it, even though I am probably a little too tipsy to make any sense and the episode just ended a few minutes ago so I haven’t fully processed it. Nonetheless, here I go roughly into that good night of impressions, stream of consciousness, and full-on unfiltered reaction.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of this episode at first, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out when the episode was set. I had heard a long time ago that it was going to be in 1964, but I also was expecting Don and Betty’s baby to be born already. I was expecting Joan to be married or not married, but not still engaged, and I was worried that I was going to hear about Peggy’s little baby ripped out of his home–wherever his home ended up being–and placed into Trudy and Pete’s care. I am dying to know if Pete has said a word to Trudy; I am surprised, for some reason, that Sal is still married. Of course, babies were much on my mind, considering the opening. Had we ever wondered before about the exact circumstances of Don’s birth (I had not), we had all our questions answered.

I don’t think I cared very much for this interlude with Don and his memories (although the Dick joke was hilarious). It was very interestingly done (I’d say more, but I know nothing about cinema), but it established a strange tone I had a hard time recovering from. After seeing how it bookended with Sally and Betty and the story of Sally’s birth I get why we had it, but I don’t know that I agree with it. It felt indulgent. It’s been a long time since we heard that Don’s mother was a prostitute, so I suppose there was no other graceful way of reminding us, but I had kind of hoped that Don’s issues with his past identity–the personal ones, since it looks like the lovely First Mrs. Draper has made her peace with the practical ones and poses no threat–had been settled to the point where we would get to see what Don was going to do with the rest of his life. It’s my dear hope that we saw this beautiful memory made life to put it, finally, to rest. Nothing really could be further from his story than Betty bringing a toy Eeyore to the hospital to present to a cherished first child, or Don up late at night making her warm milk to help her sleep, or the daughter in his room begging him never to leave home again. The disparity between his old life and his current one has been made perfectly clear to me, thank you very much. I get it. I would like to get past it, so far as the details are concerned.

ASIDE: The little lesbian with the hammer line? Too jarring. It was as in your face as the dry-cleaning bag over the face joke from the first season. The Ooh, Daddy, are these stewardess’s insignia that got into your suitcase by mistake while you were attempting to bang the blond who looked like the pregnant wife you left at home for me discovery was priceless! Loved it! (Even if it was only a pretense, really, to put Sally on the bed between her parents so they could tell her their story and finish the episode.)

Salvatore is my next favorite thing to talk about, and so I will admire the beauty of him getting his own young lovely uniform into his hotel room while Don was doing the same thing. I feel just terrible for him–terrible!–even if the Balzac quotation too obviously explained what any self-respecting audience member should have discerned for him- or herself. The anticipation of discovery (and of gratification; has he actually acted on these desires?) is the bane of his existence. What I wish he realized was that Don knows. Don doesn’t care. Don was surprised that Sal had the boy in his room (because Sal is so timid about such things) but mostly wanted to make sure he got out of a burning building.

THESIS ALERT: Someone could analyze Sal’s behavior and desire against the context of the burning building, especially his remark back at the office that there were “no casualties” and Cosgrove’s lamentation that it was a pity. Surely there’s going to be some pop-culture/television/gay studies course that assigns a paper topic on these lines. Use the topic with my blessing, but leave a comment!

Interesting, too, that Sal does not answer “yes” when asked if he has a family. I know a lot of people think of children as family, but he has a wife. He wasn’t thinking of her. He had to clarify. She is so not on his mind. I would like to see one more glimpse of Mrs. Sal this season; she isn’t stupid. Maybe she’ll leave him with some noble exhortation to find himself someone who makes him happy. He was almost pitiful in that scene of the storyboards of the London Fog advertisement, when the man gazing at the women with the open raincoat had no face, and Sal had no description for his looks. Sal never doesn’t put faces on his drawings. Never.

The bulk of the rest of it (I am already almost at 900 words and don’t want to stay up all night) is about office politics, and Pete, who I absolutely adore for being 100 percent honest all of the time, even if he is a little crazy, and Joan and Peggy (Are they equals? Is Peggy having herself some airs over Joan?), and the poor Mr. John Hooker, who is a secretary in the Grand 19th Century European Tour tradition (like John Q. Adams, before he became president), but has no place in the pool. I know Joan was only trying to get him out of the girls’ way so they could get their work done, but it was a kindness for her to find him an office, too. I know she was ragging on him, and it was time for him to get used to the idea that he was not management, but it was obvious she understood how he felt about being the only male, and an Englishman abroad, and clearly shit upon by his compatriots/employers. He has a very lonely position, but so does she. They are not equals, no, but behind her scathing, no-nonsense personality she is not cruel. I felt just awful when Mr. Hooker’s superior kicked him out of the office–even though I know why he did that, too.

I am snickering only privately about poor John Hooker’s name.

I do not really want to talk about the way Joan looked. Not really. But there was that specific line of dialogue that Peggy said to her about water retention, and bridedom, and I don’t know what. I am not sure if I am seeing a pregnant Joan who is only getting married now because she “has to” and has given up the luxury of kicking a rapist fiance to the curb. I don’t think I am. I do recognize, however, tempting the fates when Joan says something along the lines of “my time here is short enough,” which means of course that she thinks she’ll be quitting her job when she gets married but that the laws of foreshadowing indicate that some part of that plan will not come to pass. I just can’t imagine her leaving the office. I may suffer, however, from a lack of imagination. Certainly nothing I ever predict for any show has ever come true.

ASIDE: I am really, really hoping that the last season of LOST starts with them at the airport, but with the memory of all the stuff that happened. Wouldn’t that be interesting? It would undermine the concepts of Fate and Free Will at the same time!

All the excitement for the next few episodes will be coming from the office, I think, and I am looking forward to it. I watched the “next week on” scenes but on mute, so I’m not going to bother to talk about it. I’m sure that I’ll find in the morning a million things of significance that escape me now, and that I’ll be distracted until at least 11:00 AM reading all the blogs tomorrow. I am so happy to have this show back on the air, and I’m not even sure I can say why! I must not be reading enough. But boy it’s good to be back!

Tonight’s Drink: R. L. Buller & Son Premium Fine Tawny Port (a mix of vintages from Costco). It gets you drunk.

Tonight’s Snack: An Apricot Wensleydale cheese, also from Costco, with jumbo Wheat Thins that really have no business being so large. It’s cheeeeese, Grommit!

Babylon 5–Season 2, Episode 18: Confessions and Lamentations

Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve watched this show! I got distracted by Buffy and Angel (although I am definitely lukewarm about Buffy right now… Season 5 wasn’t that good), and caught up in other stuff, like a party we had at the house yesterday, but because I was too tired to work last night I decided to hit the series again. I know too well how easy it is to let things drop, and this is a show that has a lot of momentum that can get lost if you take breaks that are too long.

That said, I’m just not thrilled about this episode. I watched partway through the first time while I was too busy wrapping presents to pay attention to it, and then started from the beginning another day. There’s just not that much in it. If a show has been so carefully scripted across multiple seasons as this one has been (or so it is said), then there’s probably not a lot of fluff in it. If I take as a given that everything comes back as important in future episodes, then fine–it’s chock full of stuff. But I’m not seeing much beyond the beginning of the Delenn/Sheridan romance, some glimpses into Minbari culture, some generalized comments about society during a plague, and a hint at how the population at large views the events happening at Babylon 5 (a la the remarks about Vorlon poisoning from the bartender at the end of the episode).

We got to see the stock scenes of a child in distress, of incomprehensible grief at incomprehensible loss, panicky people waving travel tickets in a crowd behind a locked gate, thugs acting out in fear by attacking a lone representative of a despised group, noble sacrifice, help coming too late, crazy foreign rituals that make the natives look funny, and crossing artificial boundaries to help a guy in need. Sometimes, in a show that has a lot of mythology, you need an episode to just have a story, and I think this one was it.

I thought it was interesting that the doctor brought up Black Death and AIDS in the story. I stumbled on something about the original airing of the show (while I was confirming the episode number a Wiki page came up) that said people thought that this episode was supposed to be a statement about the AIDS epidemic. I am watching this fifteen years later, and the way AIDS is perceived by people has changed, I’m sure. It’s more or less a heterosexual disease now, and the bane of poor nations. You don’t get a lot of the rhetoric anymore about God’s vengeance on gay people, but I don’t really remember enough about the specific cultural context of AIDS from the 1990s to comment on if the episode seemed to be a direct response to it. I don’t think so. For one thing, the show was more about Delenn and the doctor than it was about the actual people dying from the disease (the Markab). We get some observations from a scientifically minded Markab doctor about the cultural taboos surrounding the disease, and a few lines of dialogue from a preacher type who corrals all the Markab people and dooms them (though they would have died in one place or the other), but really they were a backdrop for other things. We saw how the doctor responded to the disease, and to his staff when they balked at entering the room for the autopsy and we saw how Delenn and Lennier bravely decided to go minister to those people.

Probably the most interesting moment to me in the show was when the doctor asked his team–before they’d really figured out the disease–to go into the room with the body and perform an autopsy, and the balked. They didn’t say a word of refusal… they all just sort of looked around and couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. It was very awful. I don’t know what I would do. Sure, everyone trusts the scientific method and believes in the sanctity of the biohazard suit on Earth, but the hazards of a cross-species alien infection is scary. Plus the guy was already dead… it would be hard to be noble. What stuck with me even more was how the doctor accepted their failure to help. He seemed impatient when he said he’d do it, but he was impatient to get started. He wasn’t angry; he didn’t shame them. I think he empathized completely, even though he personally wasn’t afraid to do it, or was less afraid than he was compelled to solve the problem, or was too stimulated to tap into his human emotions. I wish we would have seen him go in there and put the airlock to the test, but I know why the Markab doctor guy showed up to do the work–they were friends, and he had some dramatic atoning to do for keeping the plague a secret from the B5 doctor in the first place.

The only other thing that really excited me was the makeup on the Markabs. I couldn’t take my eyes off of whatever it was they did to the backs of their heads. It was truly alien and totally cool. Plus the bits with the noses was seamless, too. The Narn have very good makeup, but we haven’t seen them in a while (which is that I haven’t seen the show in a while) and we’re used to it. But this came out of nowhere for me. I loved watching the slight jiggle in the seams of those patches over their skulls.

This picture, sadly, doesn’t really do it justice, but the chances of me finding a publicity still of the back of an actor’s head are low and I don’t feel like going back into the episode to make a screen shop. Like the Borg, Gentle Reader, you will have to adapt.

The Mothership Tomato Salad

I am always a big fan of motherships. My first apartment was down the road from the mothership of Thrifty’s drugstores, which took up an entire city block (it was a small city block) and was always open. That first summer after graduating college, when I’d managed to hold on to my little student job at the information booth and my BFF from out of state had finally come to live with me, was like a dream. We’d walk to the mothership at all hours of the night, purchase Thrifty’s ice cream, and browse the hair products. My favorite was two scoops in a cup, usually chocolate brownie and cookie dough, or mint chip and cookie dough.

The ice cream came in these cylindrical scoops, all neatly stacked like blocks. You could get two scoops for $1.19 or something (yeah, yeah–all the old people remember when it was a dime in the 1980s, but I was living in Connecticut in the 1980s and missed out) and they took your ATM card, which meant that I didn’t actually need to have any cash or go get any from a creepy ATM machine in the middle of the night, BFF bodyguard or not. (We lived very, very close to the mothership, on a very nice little street in a good enough neighborhood, but there were some unsavory shadows along our path, strewn with roaches of the Blattarian and Primate varieties.) There were four of us crammed that summer into our little apartment, and just leaving it–even as a foursome–was such a relief. Plus, you know, the heat. The mothership beckoned to us in our dreams, and we’d gather around the ice cream counter waiting sometimes ten minutes in line for our treats. Even after Rite Aid bought the whole franchise and turned the store into something even shinier, they kept the ice cream counter open.

It was a charmed life.

Clumsy segue.

Although it hasn’t been quite the summer of home-grown tomato splendor that I had dreamed it would be, it’s been enjoyable having tomato plants around. If I let things hang on the vine long enough, sometimes I even have enough tomatoes at one time to add to a salad. And–more important–because I am openly growing tomatoes of my own, other people are more willing to give me their own homegrown, larger, and tastier versions! This is how I found myself a few weeks ago with plenty of tomatoes on hand but no lettuce for salad and no onion for that salad thing. Where does one turn when one finds herself in this predicament? Why, to Google! And when I run into a recipe that calls itself a mothership, you know I’m going to make it.

The Mothership Tomato Salad

This is a recipe from a book by Jamie Oliver, Jamie at Home, and it is posted on the Food Network website. It required only ingredients that I already had on hand (including two pounds of tomatoes if I supplemented with the Campari tomatoes from Costco), and it took only as long to prepare as I could cut tomatoes, plus fifteen minutes of letting the tomatoes drain.

Ingredients:

* 2 1/4 pounds mixed ripe tomatoes, different shapes and colors
* Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
* A good pinch dried oregano
* Red wine or balsamic vinegar
* Extra-virgin olive oil
* 1 clove garlic, peeled and grated
* 1 fresh red chile, seeded and chopped

Directions (copied directly from the website):

Depending on the size of your tomatoes, slice some in half, some into quarters and others into uneven chunks. Straightaway this will give you the beginnings of a tomato salad that’s really brave and exciting to look at and eat. Put the tomatoes into a colander and season with a good pinch of sea salt.

Give them a toss, season again and give a couple more tosses. The salt won’t be drawn into the tomatoes; instead it will draw any excess moisture out, concentrating all the lovely flavors. Leave the tomatoes in the colander on top of a bowl to stand for around 15 minutes, then discard any juice that has come out of them.

Transfer the tomatoes to a large bowl and sprinkle over the oregano. Make a dressing using 1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil, the garlic and the chile. Drizzle the tomatoes with enough dressing to coat everything nicely.

Notes (entirely my own):

This was the easiest thing in the world to make.

I have now made this variously with cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, red currant tomatoes (the teeny tiny ones), and one big giant home-grown tomato of an unknown variety (plus the camparis, as mentioned above). I have not made this recipe with a fresh red chili pepper, but I added cayenne to the dressing (maybe too little, but I didn’t miss it).

I am starting to think that all my previous mediocre experiences with tomato salads has been the improper draining of the tomatoes; I have never, ever sprinkled them with salt first. It makes no sense in retrospect, because I’ve loved salting tomatoes for as long as I’ve eaten tomatoes, even to the point where I stop the deli sandwich makers at the tomato stage so they can salt my sandwich there (and again at the avocado, but I digress). The first time I made this salad I had some sea salt that I used instead of kosher salt, but it worked great. The problem came last night when I had no sea salt. It was obvious that table salt was going to lack the oomph to pull the liquid out of the tomatoes because it was too small, so I went with my second option, which was rock salt. That was a mistake. It was too big. It drew the liquid out, sure, but it didn’t flow through the colander with the liquid down the drain. There were bits of rock salt everywhere, which meant that I had to rinse the tomatoes with water before I could advance, and it added time and I am choosing to believe that it affected the flavor, because dinner was ready. I had to toss and serve immediately, and the wettish tomatoes meant that the dressing didn’t stick perfectly. It was a little disappointing, but the first taste of a tomato with pieces of rock salt on it was a little awful, so I think I did the right thing.

The first time I made this salad I used way too much oil and vinegar. I think I did a mix of 6 Tbsp/2 Tbsp, and had scads left over. I saved the remainder and still had enough to toss two more batches. I beefed up the garlic a lot, which is my thing, but because I wasn’t sure about the best ratio of red pepper to cayenne powder, I probably added way too little. I think it was undetectable. I didn’t fret too much about it, because I didn’t want to spice up the salad beyond the tolerance of the toddler, but that’s something I’d take bigger risks with if I was going to serve it to adults. Of course, if I was going to serve it to adults, I’d probably be at the grocery store buying the right ingredients in the first place, so I wouldn’t have to guess!

One recommendation Oliver makes on the website is to use dried flowering oregano instead of regular dried oregano. I had never heard of that and sort of missed the recommendation the first time, so that is a spice I will keep my eyes peeled for. He calls regular oregano sawdusty, and maybe it is, but it smells really good anyway.

This is me getting up to go smell the oregano jar. It’s real oregano folks–I’m not making a toke joke.

The picture of the salad provided shows it with all kinds of beautiful fresh herbs and tiny balls of mozzarella. They show it drizzled with a lot more dressing than I put on, too, so perhaps I made just enough. Even in my plain old glass bowls, with my boring tomatoes all of the same size and mostly the same color, it was pretty. I think I am definitely going to keep this recipe around and serve it when I need to impress people. I have white dishes. I could slice tomatoes to use as a foundation. I could buy tiny balls of mozzarella. I could scatter small pieces of fancy lettuce about. These steps are absolutely within my skill set.

I read once, perhaps in my Italian cookbook, that the secret to gourmet French food is the complicated preparation and the secret to gourmet Italian food is the wonderfulness of fresh ingredients. I know this is sort of a dig at the French, but it’s encouraging for another reason, too: Recipes like this really make me believe that I can make and present beautiful gourmet meals. I will be giving this recipe the honor of being handwritten on a recipe card, just in case a solar flare knocks out our satellites and we lose everything that we love online. It’s my own little form of cantankerous survivalist rebellion.

Postscript:

You learn all sorts of interesting things when you are blogging. For example, while looking stuff up for this entry today, I encountered something I’d never heard of before: Brutalist Architecture. Awesome. What’s next? Cruel shoes?

Things I Have Learned Today

1. Under-cabinet lighting is hot enough to melt butter on the shelf above it.

2. Resolidified butter is kinda gritty and gross.

3. It is possible to get in and out of Costco in less than an hour.

4. Hostess Cupcakes are inferior to Ding Dongs.

FTW!

5. Following the instructions for Comet sink cleaner drastically improves results.

6. You really do need to add the salt in the meatloaf recipe.

7. Children’s toys are sexist! Shocking, I know. (I’m looking at you, Super Readers. Action Figures versus Style and Pose Dolls? Really? Really? Come on.)

"Action Figure"

"Style and Pose Doll"

8. Online Mafia games are confusing.

9. Cats’ front nails are significantly sharper than their back nails, given the same amount of time between trimming.

10. Red currant tomatoes should not be grown upside down.

I learned all these things just today, Gentle Readers. Just today! Can you imagine?