Nobody would ever mistake me for a rabid football fan, but I do watch a game from time to time when there’s nothing else on television and I’m looking for some background noise while I do other things. I watched the last quarter of an afternoon game yesterday, then tuned out for a while and picked up the Houston Texans game about halfway through. They were lagging badly at that point, so I pretty much wrote them off. Huh. Color me surprised when they staged a pretty awesome comeback that consisted of at least five crucial elements: 1) the blocked field goal attempt late in the game; 2) the impressive hail mary touchdown with less than a minute to go; 3) icing the field goal kicker in OT, which made him miss on his second attempt; 4) another impressive long pass that got them into range and finally 5) the field goal itself. Delete any of those events and the Texans would have lost. Football isn’t often a terribly exciting game, but I was on the edge of my seat for a while. They’re actually in first place, all by themselves, for the first time ever.
She goes by “Andy” and she’s been staring into Will’s apartment for several episodes. This week on Rubicon we finally get to meet the mystery lady who’s rich enough to afford a sizable apartment in NYC but not rich enough to afford curtains for her windows. Should we be suspicious of the way she welcomed Will into her place late at night bearing only a cheap bottle of wine and a tomato? She certainly didn’t hesitate to snoop through his stuff when he was out, but she didn’t bother to hide her tracks. Maybe that’s the best way to hide your tracks. Boy, that Truxton Spangler is a creepy dude. As some blogger wrote this morning, he even makes eating corn flakes sinister. My assessment is that he’s become the head of API for the sole purpose of funneling information to his cabal of friends so they can get filthy rich by investing in countries based on their insider knowledge. Kale Ingram isn’t in on the secret, I don’t think, but I believe he knows there is a secret. I’m glad I stuck with the series. It’s slow burning (0 to 60 mph in 540 minutes, according to one blogger) but it’s paying off.
Mad Men continues a run of excellent episodes. I was thinking it was going to be Ms Blankenship’s greatest hits of quips. She was firing them off one after another. “The hell it does,” she tells her former lover when he says that a crossword puzzle entry starts with the letter L. She seems half asleep most of the time, and then out comes this philosophical musing: “It’s a business of sadists and masochists—and you know which one you are.” We forget that she’s been around the business for a long, long time. And then, out of the blue she dies “like she lived, surrounded by people she answered phones for,” as Roger quips.
Which leads to one of the show’s great scenes. A sight gag going on in the background of a pitch meeting, like the Sergio Aragones cartoons in the margins of MAD magazine. While Don tries to get three men to agree on an advertising approach, the rest of the staff, in the background, throws an afghan over the recently deceased (“My mother made that,” Harry complains) and wheel her off out of frame. Don and his coworkers can see what’s happening, but only Don really knows what’s going on. It was knee-slapping hilarious, and worth watching two or three times to catch everything that was going on. And then Burt delivers her eulogy: She was born in a barn at the end of the last century and she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.
And then Don gets his quip of the night, when he asks his new girlfriend to sit with his daughter. “I would have had my secretary do it, but she’s dead.” I’m willing to bet there’s a blooper reel somewhere filled with takes with John Hamm cracking up over that line. He’s also impressed by the results when Sally mistakenly puts rum on his French toast instead of Mrs. Butterworths. “Read labels,” he tells her. “Is it bad?” He turns back to his breakfast and continues eating. “Not really.”
In the end, the episode was all about women. Those with power and those without. Peggy took umbrage over the fact that her new friend was willing to go to the wall to protect racial rights, but not the same rights for women. Faye is a strong woman who wants to live life on her own terms and not become a substitute mother when she made the choice to favor career over family. Joan, that former powerhouse, is trying to be strong in the face of her husband’s pending deployment and Roger’s incessant advances, but she has lost a lot of the power she once wielded.
The three women are framed in the elevator as a parting shot, but Megan was the real star of the night. The new rock star administrative assistant. She handled the Blankenship situation when everyone else was flustered, and she also handled the Sally situation as deftly as possible, though one or the other, or perhaps both, had her on the verge of tears. At least Don recognized her contribution and thanked her—sincerely. His new girlfriend is good for him, it seems. I was afraid the confrontation over the way Don threw Faye to the wolves (well, to his ferocious daughter, at least) might spell the end of them, but it didn’t.
