Fellow Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce shareholders, I welcome you to our weekly meeting of company matters, old and new; fix yourself a drink and let’s settle in. I’m your dutiful servant, Jesse Dorris. The months since we’ve last gathered have been turbulent; it seems the bullet industry has never been stronger. Yet, let us not forget those fateful words of our fearless leader, intoned almost a year ago: We have swum the English Channel and then drowned in Champagne. More to the point, we are, as the poet says, waving, not drowning, flagging down the waitress for yet another round. Let’s begin with Ongoing Business, shall we? Don Draper Our magnetic head of creative and his lovely wife Megan were on a working holiday in Hawaii, breaking a wristwatch and eating wallpaper paste (among other pursuits best left off the record). Their fellow guests were tragically denied the sight of Don hula dancing—too much Dante reading makes Don a dull boy—but, in happier news, a tourist with a third eye in the back of her beehive asked for Megan’s autograph. She’s a star now. She is be-Pucci’d in paradise, and Don’s a veteran of it. A soldier at a bar asks Don to give him away in marriage. There are fans crawling out of the woodwork for them both. It’s hot in Hawaii, but this seems like no hell at all. Back in snowy New York City, Don can talk of nothing but Eros, full of whiskey and hormones. He’s oddly avuncular, gifting cameras and praise. In a photo shoot, he learns posing as himself requires a cigarette. Pitching his campaign for the Hawaiian hotel, Don offers an occult fantasy of shedding skin and rebirth. The hotel execs want provocative, not poetic. Good ol’ Roger Sterling tells him that SCDP sold death for years via Lucky Strikes—but only through ignoring. Nobody can ignore death now, it’s looming like the New Year, 1968. Don’s horny and wheezing, proud of his wife’s success but exhausted by most everything else. Megan, in a … Continue reading Mad Men Watch: The Straight Pathway Is Lost