How do you solve a problem like Conrad Hilton? Or Lee Garner Jr.? Or Betty Draper? How do our characters - particularly Don Draper, whom we've grown accustomed to as master of his own universe - deal when they have to accommodate the whims of fickle men and women of power? How do you give the person you're beholden to what they want when even they don't know what that is? What do you do when you're trying to satisfy grown adults who are as changeable and demanding as baby Gene?Those are the big questions of "Wee Small Hours," as Don, Sal and Henry Francis all struggle to decipher mixed signals from, respectively, Connie, Lee and Betty. In the end, none of them manages to satisfy his demanding master or mistress, and the only one getting any personal satisfaction at all is Don, who finally gives into his attraction to Suzanne Farrell.
Having already given up the freedom to run from his life, Dick Whitman-style, thanks to the deal with Conrad Hilton, Don discovers that he has to give up his sleep as well. (Not that any new dad sleeps that peacefully, even in the '60s when Don wouldn't be expected to do much during the night.) In their late-night chats, we see why Connie so powerful, and also why he's a little nuts: he has a missionary's zeal to "bring America to the world, whether they like it or not." He wants his hotels everywhere, including the moon - a line that Don assumes is Connie using hyperbole to make a point, but which Connie is deadly serious about.
Yet for all the aggravation Connie has brought him, we see just how important this relationship is to Don - how much he admires Connie, a man from circumstances so much like his own, who didn't have to cheat to get where he is, and who seems to appreciate both the Dick Whitman and Don Draper parts of our hero's life and personality. When Connie likens Don to a son, Jon Hamm shows just how shaken and touched Don is by this. He's never had approval from a paternal figure before, but it matters to him - dearly. He can't get Archie Whitman to say he's proud of him, even in a delusion, but dammit, he can get Conrad Hilton to say it, and he's going to do whatever he can to stay in Connie's good graces.
The Don we see at the office throughout "Wee Small Hours" isn't the commanding figure we're accustomed to. He's tired, and he's desperate, and he's creatively blocked. You can see that Peggy (who wound up on the Hilton account, after all) isn't so much upset when Don belittles her work as she is worried about him. She understands Don so well that it's scary to see him this frayed; it's not quite as startling as when Don turned into Dick and asked Rachel Menken to run away from him, but this is not what Peggy expects or wants out of her boss.
In the end, Don comes up with a fine campaign, gives another vintage Don Draper pitch... and Connie couldn't care less, since Don neglected to include the moon in it. That it's an irrational request - even if Don were to do some sort of moon campaign, it would have to be its own thing, not part of a campaign for the terrestrial Hilton hotels - doesn't occur to Connie, nor does it matter when Don points it out. This is what he wants, and what Conrad Hilton wants, he gets. And so we see Don in the bizarre position of desperately defending his idea - "This is a great campaign!" - in a position where he would previously have acted as scornfully as he did when the Belle Jolie guys initially rejected Peggy's Mark Your Man campaign.
Much as Don doesn't want to hear it from Roger, he is in way over his head with Hilton, and with all the new responsibilities he's taken on in a post-PPL version of Sterling Cooper. He's in trouble, and we know that when he's in trouble, he runs. Between the baby and the contract, though, he can't run very far, and so finds himself giving into the attraction he's felt for months to the geographically-convenient Miss Farrell. This is not a mistake he would have made in an earlier era - even she can tell that he doesn't usually operate so close to home - and it's going to end horribly (Miss Farrell is a little too in touch with her emotions to go quietly when things inevitably get rocky), but Don needs someone right now, and we know that unfortunately that someone will never be Betty. He needs a Midge/Rachel type, and she's the only one within an easy driving distance. But he understands her only slightly more than he understands Connie, and I suspect she doesn't understand our two-faced protagonist any better.
As vulnerable and sympathetic as Don is in the "You're like a son" moment in Connie's suite at the Waldorf, he is as as cold and cruel as he's ever been when poor Sal comes into his office, hoping that Don his secret-keeper will save him from Lee Garner's petty wrath. And I, unfortunately, had the same expectation. Back in "Out of Town", I braced myself for the worst when Don and Sal were on the plane back to New York, and Don turned out to be mostly cool about Sal's double life. (Undoubtedly, he could relate.) And because of that, I assumed Don would be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat to rescue Sal. But this hasn't been a season of rabbits for Don. He couldn't avoid signing the contract, couldn't please Connie, and he sure can't fight Lucky Strike. And in his powerlessness, he unloads on Sal - who's already terrified for his livelihood, and for his public standing - and contemptuously suggests he should have whored himself to Garner to keep the client happy(*).
(*) Fun with hypotheticals time: put Peggy in Sal's position in this story, as Sal more or less tries to do. How does Don react when he finds out a client ordered her firing because she wouldn't have sex with him? Go.
"You people," he tells him, and it's a testament to Hamm's bravery as an actor that he doesn't in any way try to protect his alter ego's image in that moment. This is Don as complete and utter bastard, destroying Salvatore with two words, and not really caring. Even if his larger point is sadly correct - that the firm can't afford to lose by far its biggest client, and Sal therefore has to go - his presentation is beyond wrong.
And my god... Bryan Batt... what can you say about the guy after an episode like this? Salvatore episodes tend to be rare, and therefore a treat when they come up. Here's a character who started out as obvious (some would say too obvious) comic relief and has become one of the show's great tragic figures. Everyone on "Mad Men" suffers in some way (except maybe Ken Cosgrove), but Sal's burden is especially great, and Batt rises to the occasion every time he's called to show that burden with almost no dialogue. Sal dare not speak his problem's name, so Batt has to internalize most of it, play it with the eyes and body language, and the look on his face when Don turns out to be another villain, not a savior, is just devastating.
And that encounter in the editing suite was nearly as brutal. In the past, when Sal has been identified by a fellow traveler, it's in a personal situation, and Sal has a choice. He walks away from the Belle Jolie guy, and he lets the bellboy ravage him, but in both cases, it's up to Sal. Not here. Lee Garner Jr. wants what he wants when he wants it, and he's gonna take it personally when Sal isn't into it, even as he acknowledges that Sal may not want to do anything where he works. If this isn't Sal's worst-case scenario - that would be complete public exposure - this is pretty close, and he winds up out on the street, literally. He can't tell Kitty the truth, or even a fraction of it - How does he explain the firing otherwise? And wouldn't any version of this story finally give Kitty her Eureka moment, if she didn't already have it in "The Arrangements"? - so he has to pretend to still be employed, all while doing tawdry things with men in the park.
Betty's standards for assignation are higher than that - or, at least, they've gotten higher since the time she and Captain Awesome had sex in that bar's back office - and so she won't sleep with Henry in his office, or even at a motel. In the end, she won't sleep with him at all, to his - and, a little, to my - frustration and confusion.
Roman interludes aside, I've felt far more engaged by the show this season when it's at Sterling Cooper than when we're following Betty on her attempt to find fulfillment. And though an argument could be made that Henry is the powerful, confounding figure in this particular story, I think it's Betty who has all the power. Like he says, she's the married woman, so she has to choose to come to him, and she gets to choose to walk away from him. She's the one who decides to be his pen pal, the one who insists on going through with the fundraiser idea, and the one who throws the lockbox full of letters campaign contributions at him. Henry's all-in, and unlike Lee Garner, he's not going to force himself on the one he wants, so Betty holds all the power.
And because of that, Betty's story was the least compelling part of "Wee Small Hours." It's one thing to watch a character we know and care about like Don struggle to satisfy a bewildering master; it's quite another for the bewildering master to be someone we know and care about, and for the confused one to be the guest star. As written, and as played by January Jones, Betty is designed to be a frustrating, and frustrated, character. She's trapped in a life that should make sense but doesn't, with a man who professes to love her but only occasionally acts like it, with mixed signals coming from family and friends from childhood on. Of course she wouldn't know quite what she wants - might drop the idea of Henry in one episode and then decide to pursue him again in the next - but dramatically, it's not always that interesting, particularly when Betty's directionless quality is pitted against a relatively minor guest character.
Maybe that story is eventually going somewhere, I don't know. With only four episodes left in this season, I'm damn curious to see where all of this is going, particularly now that Sterling Cooper has said goodbye to both Joan and Sal, at the same time that Don is tied to the firm for another three years. I sure don't want to say goodbye to Christina Hendricks or Bryan Batt, but if Don isn't going to set up his own shop, how realistic is it to keep them as part of the narrative? Or will "Mad Men" increasingly spread its world beyond the walls of Sterling Cooper, as we see where the '60s take all of these characters, even if it's not together?
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Recap courtesy of What's Alan Watching at http://sepinwall.blogspot.com
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