Reprinted with permission from www.hautetalk.com

Welcome to the premiere of the almost last final forever season of Mad Men, a show about people who are alternately wonderful and horrible and every adjective in-between, but always, without fail, impeccably-dressed. Because this was an extraordinarily long, two-hour episode, I used the buddy system and broke the recap up into easy-to-digest pairings, like a sommelier only with words instead of wine.

Megan and Don

Megan is lounging on the beach in a floral string bikini that would send Betty into binge of ice cream sundaes while Don is reading The Inferno. Don’s watch has stopped, which is probably a metaphor for something. They’re in Hawaii, doing all of the touristy things like going to a luau and smoking marijuana. The colors are so much brighter than past seasons, like the 1970s exploded on the screen. Also, Megan gets asked for her first autograph, and it sounds like it’s from a part on a soap opera. So, I guess that whole acting thing has finally worked out for her.

Don does his Don thing, which involves sitting alone at a bar wearing a sports coat over his Hawaiian shirt.

After returning to New York, Don and Megan celebrate New Year’s Eve by inviting some neighbors over for a fondue party who may or may not be swingers, including a doctor and his vixen-like wife. Megan suggests they all take a trip to Hawaii, which apparently means turning the lights out and watching a slide show of Megan in a bathing suit. Blah blah blah, and Don’s in bed with the doctor’s wife. “What do you want for this year?” she asks. ”I want to stop doing this,” he replies. Then, like he has probably done hundreds of times, he sneaks back into his own bed, next to his stupid but lovely wife.

Betty and Sally

Betty takes Sally to see the nutcracker, and…who’s that? Sally has a friend? Afterwards, Betty gets pulled over for “driving like a maniac.” Back at the house, Sally tells Henry about the speeding ticket, but nicely. The whole family sitting around, laughing about a speeding ticket. What a nice tableau. Oh right, I almost forgot. Betty’s crazy. After the kids are presumably asleep, she’s talking about spicing things up in the bedroom by jokingly suggesting that she hold Sally’s friend downwhile Henry rapes her? Did I hear that right?!?

Later that night, Betty runs into Sally’s friend, Sandy, in the kitchen. Sandy’s mother recently passed away, and Betty understands. It’s the nicest that Betty has ever been, yet it’s not towards one of her own children.  Sandy lets Betty know that all she wants to do is go to New York and live in a squat on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, and she wants to do it right away because “my feet are already in wet cement.”

An indeterminate amount of time later, Sally tells Betty that Sandy won’t be coming over anymore because she got into Julliard early. Betty knows what this means, and goes after her. With her tweed coat and scarf around her head, Betty enters the building on St. Mark’s Place that Sandy described. She looks downright matronly in this new environment.  She finds her violin, but the girl never returns. After telling a few youngins that they have bad manners and wishing that they contract tetanus or crabs, Betty returns to her fancy house and her unusually cozy family. The next day, she dyes her hair jet black, eliciting an Elizabeth Taylor compliment from Henry.

Is this brunette the kinder, gentler Betty? Because I kind of liked the dysfunctional version better.

Roger and His Mother

Roger is in therapy. He has figured out that everyone is headed in a straight line towards death. So for Roger, nothing matters, including the death of his mother, which he learns about from his secretary. Rather than handle the arrangements himself, he tells her to “talk to Joan, she’ll know what to do.” Poor Joan. She graduated from secretary to office manager to non-silent partner, yet she’s still the one burying the bodies.

At Roger’s mother’s funeral, Jane shows up all sorts of gorgeous in a black dress the likes of which I have never seen. The collar is…sculptural, and the hat is the perfect balance between fez-like, and distinguished. Don somehow finds himself a drink, and oh good! Roger’s first wife arrives and Don vomits in the middle of the eulogy. And, a heart-to-heart with his daughter ends with her hitting Roger up for cash.

When he explains all of this to his therapist, he is upset that since his mother is now dead, it’s downhill from here on out. “Life will end, and somebody else will get the bill.” But his loss doesn’t really hit him until he gets word of the death of Georgio, the shoeshine guy. He left Roger his shoeshine kit because nobody else ever asked about him. This brings Roger to tears.

Peggy and Her Career

Peggy comes home wearing white knee-socks and a strange beanie because fashion always eludes her, and receives a panicked phone call from an account man. “We’re screwed, Peggy.” After explaining the different defcons to him, she learns that the client wants to pull their Super Bowl commercial because of a joke that was made on Carson about cutting off Vietcong ears. This now renders their “lend me your ears” tagline for a headphones commercial in poor taste. Oops?

The account guy tells Peggy to call Jack (her new Don). But Jack is on vacation and unreachable, so Peggy is left to salvage the account with the help of bumbling creatives who try to recycle the same idea three times. She says that she knows what they’re doing because she’s done it herself—tossing words around, hoping it’ll spark something and get them off the hook. It doesn’t, but Peggy’s boyfriend rocking out to music on the headphones does. You can see the moment the lightbulb goes off, and it’s a very Don-like moment.

When Ted finally arrives, she runs the idea past him and, after chastising her for having people work on New Year’s Eve when she had the idea all along, he tells her that she’s good in a crisis. That was always Don’s thing, turning crap into a stroke of genius, and now the torch has been passed. Now if only she would stop wearing so much brown. Seriously, this woman is clad head-to-toe in various shades of dirt. That is not a confident color scheme on anyone, let alone Peggy Olsen.

Don and SCDP

Don’s back at work in the full suit and slicked back hair, as if he’s daring the 1970s to catch up to him. He takes a look at his creative team and his old-fashioned presence makes them instinctively snuff out their joints. Like most of the office, they’ve really hippied out (I think Harry Crane and Pete Campbell may be competing in a Longest Sideburns Contest), and Don looks totally out of place in his suit and tie.

We get our first shot of a miniskirt in SCDP, but unfortunately it’s not on Joan. She looks like she’s in Technicolor as she poses for an executive photo with a purple, awkwardly-ruffled dress and flaming red hair. When it’s Don’s turn to have his photo taken, he’s stiff. The stylist rolls up his sleeves and powders his face, but he’s still Old Don. To loosen him up, the photographer tells him, “I want you to be yourself.” Yeah. Unlikely.

It turns out that the Hawaiian vacation was to the client’s property, as research. And now Don is expected to come up with brilliance. As he attempts to put the feeling of being in Hawaii into words, he talks about intangible, sensory notions and shows the client a sketch of a suit and tie strewn along the edge of the shore. “The jumping off point.” It’s about taking a deep breath, shedding your skin, and jumping into the water. But all the client sees is James Mason walking into the sea to kill himself in A Star is Born.  Don doesn’t get the reference, but quickly realizes that the client wants to see their hotel and Diamondhead and the tropical Hawaiian beach in their ad. For the first time, we see Don compromise his creativity by suggesting they can tilt the camera up a bit and show the hotel in the background. The client still sees this as morbid, but Don salvaged the meeting just enough to buy the agency some time.

After the meeting, Roger chimes in on death and the morbid ad because he’s in that sullen of a mood. “You know, we sold actual death for twenty-five years with Lucky Strike. You know how we did it? We ignored it.”

Next week!: A little more Pete, a splash of Roger, a dash of Joan, some Cosgrove, a pinch of Peggy, and we shake it all up with a bit of Don.