Everything falls apart.
It's been said that science fiction is never just about the future and historical fiction is never just about the past. They're also about the society that produced them—right here, right now. I remembered this maxim while watching the twelfth episode of "Mad Men," "Blowing Smoke." The current season is set in the mid-'60s, and the characters often seem far removed from twenty-first-century American norms. But the panic engulfing them is of the moment. There are no abstract principles at stake. It's all about paying the bills, keeping the lights on. This week's action-packed, penultimate episode didn't remind me of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Swimmer, The Graduate, or any of the other pop-culture touchstones evoked in previous episodes of Matthew Weiner's series. It reminded me of the front page of today's newspaper, the top of tonight's newscast. Or the cover of this week's New Yorker—a mother and father huddled at a kitchen counter, holding their heads in despair while surrounded by bills. On the floor near them is a little girl playing with a toy cash register and play money. It was grim stuff, and no one pretended it wasn't. "Look, we know there's a black spot on the X-ray," Roger Sterling said during a meeting, summing up the fatalistic mood. "You don't have to keep tapping your finger on it."
Tap, tap, tap. The episode started with the meeting that Faye helped set up between Don and the representative from Heinz, who told Don he would love to check back in six months "and see where we are." When Don pressed him, the Heinz rep said, "I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I don't know that your company will be here in six months." A subsequent scene between Don and Peggy fortified the sense that the known world was disintegrating. "We're going to keep typing while the walls fall down around us because we're creative," Don said, "the least important, most important thing there is." His imagery tied into to the show's opening credits image: the silhouette of a poised man plummeting into the abyss between skyscrapers, a manufactured landscape of commercialized bliss falling apart as he descends.
After the meeting with Heinz, it was almost all downhill. The partners were stood up by a prospective cigarette client. Anxious underlings tracked their progress through agency halls. The partners, we were told, had a clause in their contracts requiring them to cover basic operating expenses in such situations—sparking the first fight between Pete and Trudy Campbell in recent memory. "When you bet big and lose, you don't double down," she said. (Don secretly came through and paid Pete's share, a gesture that would seem extravagantly generous if Pete hadn't eaten entire football fields' worth of Don's dirt over the past few seasons. As it stood, Don probably should have gone over there offering to babysit, too.)
Faye walked around the agency with a box in her hands, informing everyone that her boss didn't take too kindly to the New York Times gambit and saying goodbye. Although she surely didn't intend her stop-off in Don's office as a farewell, that's how it came across. Don isn't invested in her long-term; you could tell by his warm but emotionally circumscribed manner that he has moved on already and has other things on his mind. Faye seemed to think their relationship could flower in the open now that she and Don were no longer working together. If only she could have looked through the cinematographer's viewfinder and seen that telling shot early in the episode, which placed Faye and Don in the foreground and Don's new secretary Megan in the background, compositionally coming between them. Faye stopped in to see Peggy, too, and when Peggy thanked her for providing such a positive female role model—though not in quite those words, thank goodness—Faye politely indicated that theirs was a work friendship and not to invest too much in it. But was it Peggy she was warning not to get too attached, or the viewer? Both, most likely. (The apparent disposal of Faye is plausible plot-wise, but it's also a classic example of writers tossing a love interest overboard when they're tired of writing for her and don't know how to fit her in next season.)