Mad Men S5E9 Dark Shadows

It seems mighty convenient that this weeks Mad Men titled “Dark Shadows” aired the same week that a movie with the same name was released in theatres. But, it is a fairly harmless product tie in and it works with the time period, so good for Mad Men. This week lets start with Roger. After being asked to help bring in a Jewish customer for the company by Bert, he turns to Michael since he is Jewish, but it isn’t enough and he also has to bring in his former wife Jan. Both of them he is forced to pay off to convince them to work with him. Which says something about his relationship with people; everyone knows him as the money. Even though the dinner goes great, he does manage to upset Jan by sleeping with her at her new apartment, which ruins the new place for her. I think this really upsets Roger as he sees himself as a changed man after his LSD trip. If he hasn’t changed as people are suggesting will he take another trip to try and change again?



We also finally got to see what Betty has been up to, and we find out that she has grown a little and is now in Weight Watchers. I’m a little disappointed here, because last we saw her she was eating Sally’s ice cream. What changed and drove her to diet? Where is that story? Anyways, she is using the Weight Watchers meeting as her own personal psychiatry session. She expresses to them about her difficult time when she had to pick up the kids from Don and saw they’re great apartment with the great view, and got a view of Don’s young, thin wife and then watches her kiss her kid’s goodbye. Betty tries to extract her revenge by telling Sally about Anna Draper. This at first drives a wedge between Megan, Sally and Don. But Megan acts as the adult and explains to Don what Betty is trying to do. Sally overhears this, and once Don explains who Anna was is okay. But not before exacting her revenge on Betty by telling her how Don and Megan told her all about Anna. It seems Sally has some claws to match her mother’s and may be more like Betty than she realizes.



Finally let’s check in on Don, after realizing that Michael has been producing a lot of work and has a funny pitch for his next idea, he finally returns to trying to write a tagline. Try as he might it was Michael’s pitch that everyone agrees to go with. That doesn’t work with Don though and he sells the client on his Devil idea after leaving Michael’s pitch in the cab. This makes Michael upset and when he tries to confront Don about it; Don just puts him in his place by letting him know how little Michael means to him. After all he’s Don Draper, he doesn’t need Michael Ginsberg, Michael Ginsberg needs him. There has been a lot of talk about people wanting to leave SDCP this season, I think Michael is pretty high on the list of soon to be former SDCP employees.