Mad Men, "The Arrangements": Teach your children well

Spoilers for "Mad Men" season three, episode four coming up just as soon as I get a prescription for unguents and salves...

"If you'd even known what was possible..." -Gene

There's a question most parents will ask themselves a thousand times before the baby is born, and a thousand thousand times after: How am I going to get this kid ready to live out in the world when I'm not around to take care of everything?

Parenthood is one of the dominant themes of "Mad Men," and in "The Arrangements," we see how several parents have answered that question - and how several of them realize they may have answered incorrectly.

Gene knows his days on this Earth are coming to an end sooner rather than later, and so he wants to make arrangements not only for his own funeral, but for his family's future. Realizing that he didn't do right by his daughter by sheltering her from most of life's problems - turning her into an arrested development case who neglects her own children's needs and views Gene's impending death only as a burden for herself - he decides it's not too late for something to be done with Sally and Bobby. You could read his decision to let Sally drive his beloved Lincoln as a sign of Gene's dementia, but he was more on than off this season, as if he'd been mustering his mental strength to pass some wisdom (like how to drive a car, and also the bravery to try it) to his grandkids while he still could.

Peggy decides it's time to move into Manhattan and discovers that her mother only wants Peggy to go so far in the world and no farther, and the demarcation point is roughly the East River. Mrs. Olson lays a vicious guilt trip on her daughter, and when that doesn't work, she warns her, "You'll get raped, you know that?" And she turns away from Peggy's attempt to kiss her goodbye; if the Olsons were Jewish instead of Catholic, she might have rended her garments, "Jazz Singer"-style, and declared "I have no daughter!"

At work, Pete (whose own father's idea of child-rearing seemed to revolve around belittlement) introduces Don to Horace "Ho-Ho" Cook Jr., an old college buddy with money to burn and a pathological need for someone to loan him a match. For all of Don's misdeeds, he has more of a moral center than most of his colleagues and feels uncomfortable about taking a million dollars of Horace's money for his misguided quest to turn jai alai into our new national pasttime. But a meeting with Horace Sr. doesn't go how anyone expects. Horace Sr., like Gene, realizes he sheltered his child too much - "We didn't know what kind of person we were making" - and has decided the best thing for the boy is to have his bubble burst, over and over, until Ho-Ho recognizes how the world really works, as opposed to how he wants it to work.

Flanked by Gene at home and the jai alai situation at Sterling Cooper, Don has cause to think back on his own upbringing - by a set of parents who didn't want him at all, and certainly didn't want him to do better in life than them - and to ponder what kind of father he is to his kids. He's automatically a better dad than Archie by virtue of not hitting Bobby and Sally, and he's good with them on those rare occasions when he's home and willing to engage with them. But he's also afraid to take the lead in terms of discipline and moral instruction - probably because he thinks it would make him a hypocrite and/or an awful role model - and therefore hangs back too long even when he sees other people treating his children differently than he would like. You can see that he's uncomfortable with Gene showing Bobby his WWI souvenirs, but it takes him a while to work up the nerve to vocally disagree with his father-in-law. And when Sally is upset to hear the adults laughing after Gene's death, you can see Don wants to comfort her, but he can't bring himself to undermine Betty when she scolds her. At episode's end, Don is caught in the middle, standing between the bed of the man who just died and the crib of the baby about to be born, not sure what kind of father he's going to be to this new addition.

And Sally? After having a month and a half or so to live and bond with her grandfather, she's again being ignored by parents who don't know what to do with her or how to respond to her needs. At the start of the episode, she's beaming as Grandpa Gene lets her drive the Lincoln and showers her with attention; at the end, she's left crying on the living room floor, with the TV as her only companion (and even the TV is showing grown-up things).

My one issue with the episode was Sally's outburst in the kitchen. I think the emotion of it was fine, but the presentation wasn't. Her rant seemed too articulate and/or on the nose, or maybe it's just that Kiernan Shipka is good with expressions but still learning how to handle a lot of dialogue (particularly dialogue that has to be delivered through angry tears).

And speaking of Shipka, I wonder how the show will deal with her in the coming seasons. They've already recast Bobby twice, but Shipka has been much more prominent as Sally. Matt Weiner has talked about how Sally is representative of the kids who are going to plunge into the counter-culture to rebel against neglectful parents. But to get to that point -- and to get to the 1970 endpoint Weiner has said he'd like to hit if he can -- we're going to have to start taking bigger jumps forward in time soon, and Shipka doesn't age that fast. Unless she has a major growth spurt between seasons, is she going to be left behind just like Sally?

Some other thoughts on "The Arrangements":

• I can't let the talk of parents trying (or not trying) to advance their children's fortune go without noting our latest Kennedy reference, when Ho-Ho explains that his father hates JFK because he used to deal with old Joe Kennedy, and Don in turn points out that John wound up with a better job than his old man. More often than not, both Don and "Mad Men" come down hard on the Kennedy clan and the realities of Camelot, but in that one moment, at least, Don acknowledged that family didn't do everything wrong.

• Sal's subplot wasn't related to the parenting theme - unless you want to blame his decision to stay in the closet and in a sham marriage on his fear of/respect for his very Catholic mother - but it was another great showcase for Bryan Batt. Kitty's line about something being wrong the past few months would date the start of the problem back to Sal's coitus interruptus with the Baltimore bellhop, and whether or not Sal has acted on his needs since then, he's sure been thinking about them more than he has in a long time. Kitty knows something's wrong, and is clearly disturbed to watch her husband so expertly ape Ann-Margret's "Bye Bye Birdie" performance, but she can't fathom the true nature of the problem. Like Joan's marriage, this will not end well.

• So what do you reckon so unnerved the Patio people about Sal's commercial? Was it, as Roger suggests (in his only line of the episode), that the number only works because Ann-Margret is so naturally sexy? Was it, as Peggy's smirk to Don suggests, that they realized (as she had argued in "Love Among the Ruins") you need to sell a woman's fantasy to women? Or do you think they could recognize, on some subconscious level, that the actress here had been directed by a man whose appreciation for the original had nothing to do with an attraction to Ann-Margret?

• Whatever issues the Patio men had about the ad, Don liked it enough to give Sal entree into a new, more promising career. But in the same episode, we get a reminder of just how much Joan is being wasted as office manager. Her spiel to Peggy about how to write a better roommate ad was a classic Don Draper-style pitch. She nailed the emotion behind the product (adventure) and described it so eloquently that you could tell Peggy was racing to jot down Joan's exact phrasing before she could forget it. Television department, copywriting, filling in as Don's secretary... every job you ask Joan to do, she nails. If she could think outside the box society has placed her in the way Peggy can, Joan would be running Sterling Cooper within five years.

• It's interesting to see the role reversal between Peggy's sister and her mother. Last season, Anita resented how Peggy got to skate away from the consequences of her actions, while their mother indulged her because she was worried about her mental health. Now (after taking Father Gill's advice to heart), Anita has made peace with the idea that Peggy is going to be one of "those girls" -- Peggy, her confidence rising every episode, points out, "I am one of those girls" -- while their mom now understands that Peggy isn't crazy and therefore resents her push for a different, geographically distant, and presumably promiscuous lifestyle. (Of course, we saw a few weeks ago that Peggy has no problem being promiscuous in an outer borough.)

• Peggy's prospective "fun" new roommate Karen was played by Carla Gallo, best known to me as the girl across the dorm hall in Fox's short-lived "Undeclared" (and for getting Jonah Hill's leg bloody in "Superbad"), but she's done a lot of other TV work, including "Bones" and "Carnivale."

• Bert Cooper's ant farm returns (as does Pryce's unctuous assistant, Mr. Hooker), only for the thing to be destroyed by Don's attempt to master jai alai. (Hooker, alas, survives.)

• I've read some complaints this season about the commercial breaks popping up seemingly at random. Watching the episodes on screeners, I have to admit that there often doesn't seem an obvious "act-out" moment to lead into an ad, but this episode had a hilarious one: After Don takes away the Prussian helmet, Gene shows Bobby a woman's fan, smiles, and says, "There was this girl..." Cut to black.

• The episode ends on June 11, 1963, made clear by the news report (on at both Anita's apartment and the Draper house) featuring snippets from President Kennedy's address on civil rights in the wake of sending the National Guard in to help integrate the University of Alabama (click the link to read/watch the whole thing), and then featuring a report on the death of The Burning Monk.

• A few secretarial matters this week: Lois has gone from switchboard to Don's desk, back to the switchboard and now to Paul's desk. (And was happy to participate in the Paul-scripted prank call to Peggy after Peggy made her cry in the season two premiere.) Meanwhile, Don's new secretary gets a name (Allison), and a bit of a personality, as she confesses to the chipmunks that she still hasn't learned to read Don's moods.

• Salt on ice cream? Is that just to make it melt in your mouth faster, or is the combination of salty and sweet appealing to some tastebuds?

• Finally, in case you somehow missed the news from earlier this week, AMC has renewed "Mad Men" for a fourth season. That's not really a surprise, but it's still nice to know that we'll definitely get to see it, whenever it happens to be set.

As the number of comments is now starting to surpass what I used to get even for the likes of "Lost" and "Battlestar," I want to again remind you about the commenting rules, specifically about not posting spoilers for upcoming episodes (and that includes talking about the previews for next week) and about making an effort to at least skim previous comments so you're not asking questions that were asked and answered earlier. But with that in mind...

What did everybody else think?