<p>I assumed it was the Stingray Corvette too. I see references to the Vega or Nova but those make no sense to me. (And I know I’m wrong, but still.) The Stingray was radical: aggressive, fast looking, looked like a Jaguar bred with a muscle car. </p>
<p>What stood out for me about this episode was, believe it or not, the direction. This one was directed by Jennifer Getzinger and I think she’s simply better at directing than most of the other Mad Men directors. The movement, transitions and shots have an elegance and emotional intimacy. I thought the way she shot Pete with his father-in-law and then Pete with Trudy perfectly brought out the subtleties in the situations and in the latter scene she really gave each actor the needed space while making it feel intimate. The way she blended Peggy’s fantasy with reality was dead on, with a feminine dreaminess to it.</p>
<p>I don’t have a lot to say about the content of the episode; it wasn’t that much about the inner lives as about how you deal with life as it hits you. </p>
<p>As for the merger stuff, I dealt with a major company who was approached to be bought and over the weekend ended up buying the potential acquirer. It happens. With these guys, we see 4 of the partners at the GM Building - an interior that looked a lot like the old GM building, btw - and for all we know the art director who is going to die of pancreatic cancer is the other CGC partner. They may have had the votes there. </p>
<p>The subtleties were interesting. We know CGC is going to have a big problem: they need to buy out a partner who likely has a few months to live. (In those days, pancreatic cancer was a pretty short death sentence. Still mostly is.) We saw that SCDP lost a big client - $9M in billings - after losing Heinz and dumping Jaguar before that went really bad. We’ve seen the company doing well, with business from Dow, but they’re not large enough to be stable. But Roger knows about Vicks leaving and we see him not tell Don. That means we assume Don doesn’t know about Vicks when he partners with Ted. Interesting. The implication is he’s driven by desire, not by need - which matches what we’ve seen from Don every season. Even back when they lost Lucky Strike, he became happy when he wrote off the entire tobacco industry as a client. That sort of turned it into his choice. He has to feel he is seizing the opportunities. </p>
<p>I was very surprised by the tone of the meeting in Ted’s office. Don is extremely nice to Peggy. I’m not saying it means anything for the future. I’m saying it reflected a sense of accomplishment: one of the 25 largest agencies in the US! That Don chose to ask Peggy to come with was interesting because it reflected how much he values what she’s been doing creatively. That meeting, with Ted saying she’s not yet 30, was a weird sort of benediction.</p>
<p>My favorite part of the episode was Megan realizing her mother has good advice: don’t be his wife, be his lover. I love Julia Ormond. Does anyone realize watching her that she’s English? She embodies Frenchness as Marie. Her comments at dinner were wonderful. I love that she shows a brief flicker when she hears her daughter having sex as she opens a bottle of wine. And then she hangs up on Roger perfectly, with just the right amount of lifting the handset and dropping it so the person on the other end knows.</p>
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