It’s impossible to pick out the best Mad Men episode, but “The Suitcase” has to rank somewhere in the top ten. Nerve-wracking in the beginning and gracefully moving towards the end, the episode centered on Don and Peggy, two characters whose relationship has been heading towards something major since the start of the season, and Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss delivered some of the most emotional performances of the series.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Peggy, but due to the large cast, she usually only has a few scenes here and there and had even less in the third season than previous two, so I always feel that she’s being left out. Likewise, the scenes with her and Don are even rarer–and brief. But in “The Suitcase,” they have a degree of closeness never before seen, the two of them, and no one else, together for about half the episode, an enormous sustained period of time between them.
At first, the episode seems to be head toward and all-out metaphorical slugfest between Peggy and Don, the culmination of Peggy’s dissatisfaction and Don’s snark. When the guys discuss the Ali Liston fight, Danny says Liston is old while Ken counters, saying that he’s experienced. In essence, Don is Liston, the older, wiser guy, and Peggy is Ali, the young go-getter. The catch is that Peggy is a woman competing in a man’s world where her expectations are elevated. Unlike Ali, Peggy is not a proven contender and doesn’t have the title, and she’s self-conscious of her position. Mentally, Peggy she’ll have to fight harder than anyone to reach the top.
Trouble begins immediately once Peggy and her Samsonite team presents their ad–a hokey commercial featuring Joe Namath–which Don strikes down. He talks to Peggy privately and chides her for not showing him something good. Later in the day, Don asks her what she has. The tension builds and builds and builds, as Don continually shuts down Peggy’s ideas. To make matters worse, it’s Peggy birthday and her boyfriend Mark is waiting at a restaurant–with her family who she hates. He calls her twice, asking where she is, and each time, Peggy says she’ll be there, until the situation blows up, ending with the long-coming breakup. And that isn’t the end of it. With her relationship over, she’s ready to work, informing Don that it was her birthday, a small jab at Don which he instantly recognizes.
The following few minutes are indescribable, and worthy of about 50 rewatches. Peggy gets out every grievance against Don she has from the taking of Danny’s idea to him ignoring her considerable contribution on Glo-Coat, and Don fires right back, absolutely digging into her with relentless force, telling her that all her ideas are his and that money is equivalent to thank you. He goes further with the most scathing line, “And you should be thanking me every morning when you wake up, along with Jesus, for giving you another day,” sending Peggy into tears. If Jon Hamm doesn’t get the Emmy next year for the episode, I’ll be very surprised.
But, like the Ali Liston fight, the confrontation ends quickly, barely halfway through the episode. Peggy cries in the bathroom and stews by herself while Don stumbles upon Roger’s personal recordings, a hilarious collection of self-aggrandizing quotes, which he shares with Peggy. Almost instantly, the tension is gone between them and they have a few laughs, then go out for dinner and a drink.
This is a critical turning point, not only in the episode, but also their relationship. Don regularly eats and drinks with Roger and on occasion, some of the other guys, but not Peggy. Here, he views Peggy as a friend, one who he can hang out with just like with anyone else. It’s not awkward between them, and the scenes felt very organic, more so than the laughfest when Don and Lane hung out.
Even though the episode was beyond good in nearly every aspect, Duck coming to SCDP to defecate on Don’s stuff seemed wholly out of place, garish, and left a very sore spot in my mind. I can see how Duck fits in, through his pathetic drunken behavior rivaling that of Don and giving an opportunity for Don to fight for Peggy, but his scene cuts in right after Don and Peggy get back to the office and disrupts the flow.
The morning after is a thing of beauty, perfectly directed and acted. During the night, Don spots the ghost of Anna, presumably in a dream, before she slowly fades away, prompting him to make the fateful call. The inevitable truth that Anna is dead comes out, and Don completely breaks down. The one who knew him is dead, and now no one, not even himself, has any clue about Dick Whitman and his personality. Peggy is there is console him, however, and in a manner of speaking, she fills the role of Anna, telling Don that it’s not true that Anna was the only one who knew him.
After the office clowns wake her up, Peggy goes to Don’s office to see how things are. He has a Samsonite ad, a play on Ali’s knockout punch and at least something to show for the entire night. Then, standing side-by-side with Peggy as equals, Don places his hand on hers, a sign of mutual respect and affection–mirroring the scene in the pilot where Peggy places her hand on Don’s. However, that was a message of sexual initiation to keep her job whereas this hand hold is the culmination of three and a half seasons–and one great episode–of development.
Peggy and Don’s interactions, the final scene in particular, will probably spring up discussions about whether their relationship will turn sexual. I think Matthew Weiner knows better than to turn this into a romance predicated on sex, and as the example of Anna serves, it’s better for Don to keep things strictly platonic and he should hang on dearly to the one thing that means anything to him. His track record with women hasn’t been good lately.
The wondrous change-up in “The Suitcase” sits right in the middle of the season, where, if the first episode was any indication, Don would slide into nothing. With six episodes to go, Don still has time to fall, and we don’t know yet how Peggy will factor in to him getting better, but it seems like she’ll help him down the road.
- Trudy and Peggy. Awkward…
- No Betty this week. Just imagine what would happen if she knew Don had been with Peggy the whole night.
- On the subject of Ali, Liston, and the controversy, regardless of Mafia debts, Liston got rocked by Ali, and seemed eager to keep fight, but was already down too long. Any reader think the fix was in?
The TV Obsessed reviews over 40 shows on his blog The TV Obsessed
