Something’s afoot at Sterling-Cooper.

In the 6th episode of Season 3 of Mad Men, “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency” and it doesn’t end well for him.  But it’s not only Guy McKendrick who ends up worse for wear (and tear) in this episode.  Several characters take their turn on the seesaw, having a moment of triumph or the expectation of same, only to feel the weight shift, the board come thudding down, and their butts hit the ground hard.

As the British overlords arrive at Sterling Cooper on the eve of 4th of July (“Subtle.” Roger dryly observes) for a supposedly friendly visit that is also an evaluation, everyone is atwitter (the old fashioned kind).  But the best laid plans of mice and men go astray as they always seem to do.  (More on the mice later.)

Bert Cooper lets Don know that the Brits have been making a study of his “particular American genius” for advertising and puts forth his theory that Don’s going to be promoted to a dual position in New York and London, treating us to the rare sight of Don looking as happily excited as a kid at Christmas.  But his hopes are dashed when it turns out that the, uh, dashing young Guy McKendrick, graduate of Cambridge and The London School of Economics, and a “pure Accounts man” (in Roger’s highest praise) has instead been brought in to take Lane Pryce’s job and become Don’s new boss.

Not that Lane has done a bad job – he’s done so well being the hatchet man cutting jobs and costs as well as bringing in business (or at least getting credit for it) that he’s being sent to Bombay, a move heralded by his bosses with a gift of a fake snake in a basket.  But snakes abound around here.  And some of them use overhead projectors to deliver their bite.

In a conference room presentation, the senior staff look eagerly for their names on the re-org chart that McKendrick projects, but seeing he’s merely stuck in the same old place, Don quickly starts doodling in bored disappointment, while Roger notices that he’s not even on chart.  After McKendrick assures him it’s a mere oversight, the obsequious Hooker pencils him in…below Bert Cooper, a clear demotion (and just as clearly not an oversight but an attempt to hide the truth.)

Having earlier pushed Roger into reconciling with Don over a close shave, manicure and a massage at his favorite barber’s, Bert now has to soothe Roger’s hurt ego as if he were a child (even first offering him some chocolate pudding).  Their exchange reveals just how little Roger knows about even his own business, much less about Business, while Bert serves his occasional role as Wise Old Man:

Roger:  I like to think I’m rich; they can’t hurt me.
Bert:  That’s a mistake.
Roger: I’m being punished for making my job look easy.  (pause) But that kid has a spark.  He’s a pure account man.
Bert:  And what is that job all about?
Roger:  I don’t know.  It’s about listening to people and never saying what’s really on your mind.
Bert:  No, it’s about letting things go so you can get what you want.  […]  We took their money; we have to do what they say.


Ironically, the one person who has gotten ahead as a result of the re-org is too dense to know he hasn’t lost his:

Harry:   I don’t get it.  What the hell just happened?
Roger:  They re-orged us and you’re the only one in this room who got a promotion.

Meanwhile, other people aren’t just stagnating in their positions, but feeling the seesaw drift slowly downward.  As the Glimmer Twins of Accounts sum up:

Cosgrove:  So what now? They keep adding people above us.

Pete:  One more promotion and we’re going to be answering the phones.

The Brits try to graciously make the after-meeting office party about Joan (one of the only people who seems to have something to celebrate) since it is also her last day of work after 10 years, but McKendrick’s toast to her, “I wish you caviar and children and all that is good in your new life, “ makes Joan weep, and that’s even before she sees that her Bon Voyage cake has a drawing of what looks like the Titanic on it.

We know that Joan weeps because she has had her seesaw moment the night before, waiting hours for hubby Greg to get home and confirm that he’s been made Chief Resident as they’ve planned on.  But that “if” Joan heard from another doctor’s wife in her kitchen has come home to roost, as Greg stumbles in hours late and very drunk, with the not surprising-to-us-viewers announcement that he’s been given the unkindest cut a surgeon can receive, the pronouncement by his mentor that he “has no brains in (his) fingers.”

His surgical career is over before it’s even begun, unless he moves “some place like Alabama,” a prospect that makes Joan literally recoil back into the sofa.  Channeling Harry Crane, she’s a bit confused as to what exactly has happened and seeking to understand as well as comfort Greg, she tries to get the truth out of him, even though he wishes she were unconscious (echoes of last episode’s theme):

Joan:  So what happens?  You’re still a doctor, right?
Greg:  Yes.  Just not a surgeon.  And I will never be a surgeon.
Joan:  Did they fire you?
Greg:  I don’t want to talk about it.  I was hoping you were asleep.  I still have another year of residency. You’re not going to be able to leave your job.
Joan:  That’s done.  
Greg:  Well, get another one.

Joan is horrified at the thought of rescinding her resignation, since in that era, a woman “graduated” from her job by marrying a man who could support her so she didn’t have to work, and Joan thought she had bagged “a mastodon” (to use a junior exec’s term about Cosgrove’s landing of John Deere).  Turns out a mastodon is precisely what Joan has bagged -- big game, but long extinct, his dreams over before they’d really begun, and taking hers down as well.

Despite her reassurance (as much to herself as to him) that, “You are still a doctor.  And I married you for your heart, not your hands,” we know that Greg has little in the way of heart, and his hands have done violence to Joan.  If he can’t provide for her with them, what good is he to her?  In the shadows of her disappointment, she turns once again to her role as mother-protector of all, even as her own hopes are extinguished:  Go lay down.  I’ll undress you.  Just let me douse the light.

Joan has too much pride to tell anyone at work what has happened, not even when she and Don have a lovely soft exchange at the hospital in which he tells her how much she’ll be missed.  Instead she conjures up the way Jackie Kennedy will look in just a few months, standing with her blood-stained dress but dignity intact, head held high despite what she’s suffered, and the grace she’s shown under fire.  I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of Joan and not just because we’ve witnessed yet another of her seemingly limitless talents, that of amateur emergency doctor who indeed has a brain in her fingers, as well as in her head.

It’s Joan who steps in to take charge like a general when disaster strikes at the party.  While she and Peggy try to make some peace before parting but end up talking at cross-purposes as always (Peggy saying that “we can’t all be you” while also claiming to be glad Joan’s gotten what she wanted, and Joan saying she “takes some credit for (Peggy’s) success” even though she has belittled and scorned it), a drunken Smitty drives into the party on the John Deere riding lawn mower that Cosgrove had proudly parked in the office earlier as his big game trophy.

It’s all good drunken fun until Smitty makes the fateful mistake of turning the machine over to the ever-hapless Lois, who proceeds to commit a DWI (Deere-ing While Idiotic) running over and slicing up Guy McKendrick’s foot, and in the process treating us to a Tarantino-esque scene of blood spattered faces, walls and carpet.  And having lost his foot just as he got it in the door (as the irrepressible Roger notes), he is summarily dismissed by his British bosses, who simply can’t imagine an ad man who can’t play golf with clients.

The turn of events leaves Lane Pryce pondering his future, reflecting to Don that he’s been reading American literature and feels like Tom Sawyer, who witnessed his own funeral, and didn’t like the eulogy.  I think the eulogy may be premature, as I suspect we haven’t seen the last of Pryce, either.  The quintessential ax man's seesaw may bounce back up again as a result of this particular staffing cut.

Don’s own seesaw, having scraped bottom (which is what the status quo feels like when you’ve had visions of London dancing in your head, and your wife has anticipated life with a pram and a real nanny) quickly starts to tip upward again as he’s summoned to the Waldorf-Astoria’s Presidential Suite to meet with Conrad “Connie” Hilton, who he finds out is the man he met at the bar in “My Old Kentucky Home.”  

Hilton shows he won’t be anonymous for long, as he’s about to be on the cover of TIME magazine, but meanwhile he wants a “freebie” from Don – advice on a campaign he’s cooked up showing country mice staying at the Hilton.  Don’s reaction is the same as mine was – “I don’t think anyone wants to think about a mouse in a hotel” (although he doesn’t say what I wondered, which is how a man who could think that was a good idea could have also made himself into one of the richest men in the country at that time). 

When Hilton acknowledges this with a laugh and asks Don what he wants, he requests a shot at Hilton’s ad business, and Connie returns the “freebie” advice by pointing out Don’s mistake, “OK, but the next time somebody like me asks you a question like that you need to think bigger.”  What follows is a virtual parody of the Don Draper mystical moment, as Don solemnly intones an aphorism about a snake that is so hungry it wolfs down its meal and chokes to death, before concluding that he prefers “one opportunity at a time.”  (Funny, he never says that about women.)  Hey, Don, relax, have a drink.  You’re getting too serious.