BACK ONCE AGAIN WITH THE RENEGADE MASTER
D4 DAMAGER POWER TO THE PEOPLE
BACK ONCE AGAIN WITH THE RENEGADE MASTER
D4 DAMAGER WITH THE ILL BEHAVIOUR
WITH THE ILL BEHAVIOUR

WITH THE ILL BEHAVIOUR
WITH THE ILL BEHAVIOUR
WITH THE ILL BEHAVIOUR

And they’re back. The internet’s favourite fancy boys are back from Lactus’ cosmic stag do, with at least an hour and a half of girdle-shattering comic chatter to shake the very firmament! So there! After the usual smart-alecky back and forth, the pericombombulating pair rip through the Silence! News like a couple of Tyrannosaurs on their way home to tea.

And then!

COOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMIIIIIIICCCCCCSSSSS!!!!!

So let’s get down to brass tacks. They talk about the following things in a highly animated fashion:

China Mieville’s (wait, the guy who wrote Moby Dick?) Dial H, Cindy & Biscuit no.2, David Lapham’s Dan the Unharmable from Avatar, Earth 2, Shiny Hake’s Bulletproof Coffin cut-up issue, Daredevil, FF, Andi Watson’s delightful Skeleton Key, GI Combat, Ennis’ Fury, Action Comics, Roger Langridge’s Popeye, Hulk Smash Avengers, and there’s a brief mention of Essential Black Panther (with more to come). But the best bit is when Lactus is forced, like a squirming bug under a magnifying glass, to wade through all the crossover filth he’s been luxuriating in in Crossover Classix with Gary Lactus. Covered are AVX, Wolverine and the X-Men, Spidey/Punny/Daredy’s Omega Dinner, and of course Owlfight in Gotham.

Then, in a special notcomics section those lovable rogues take some time to discuss their recent adventure to Portmeirion (setting of the Prisoner).

So grab your big boy pants, pull your ears out reaaaal far and chow down on this gourmet edition of SILENCE! Hoo HAH!

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The new production team of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes had a very different idea of what the show should be like from their predecessors — whereas Doctor Who in the Letts/Dicks/Pertwee era had been an ITC serial with comedy peasants, martial arts sequences and car chases, the Hinchcliffe/Holmes/Baker team wanted a show that was closer to a science-fictional version of the Hammer Horror films, but with the sexuality of Hammer almost entirely removed, and the black humour played up.

But for their first series, they were working with scripts that had originally been commissioned by the previous regime, who had decided that the best thing to do would be to commission a set of scripts featuring as many returning old monsters as they could, in order to keep the old fans happy while they got used to the new Doctor. So in Tom Baker’s first year, three of the five stories feature returning monsters — this, The Sontaran Experiment and Revenge Of The Cybermen. That doesn’t sound like many in today’s terms, where every second episode of the new series has the Daleks and the Cybermen teaming up to fight the Autons and the Silurians, but Tom Baker was in the role for seven years, and in total he did two Dalek stories, two Sontaran ones, and one Cybermen story, and had no other recurring monsters in his whole tenure on the show.

So the first Tom Baker series is a strange one, with the new team trying to make something different out of previously-commissioned scripts. The fact that it seems so inventive is testament to how well they achieved it.

Genesis Of The Daleks is, more than any of the other stories from that time, a combination of the best of both teams. It had originally been commissioned by the Letts/Dicks team, who essentially had to pull a new story out of Terry Nation, the Daleks’ creator, by force after he’d sent them a script that was essentially identical to the last two Dalek stories he’d given them. And were one to look at just the events that happen in this story, it looks very like a standard Terry Nation plot beefed up by Terrance Dicks — it’s all people being attacked by giant clams, falling from improbable heights at the end of one episode only in order to be safe in the next one, standing on landmines but then being able to defuse them, and all the other tedious Flash Gordonisms that made Terry Nation scripts so utterly dull.

But then the new production team got hold of it. Robert Holmes did a rewrite (and Holmes is still the best writer ever to have worked on the show by a long way), and apparently Tom Baker and Michael Wisher rewrote their own lines into Shakespearean blank verse in order to relieve the monotony. Quite what these other hands added has never been made clear, but there are two speeches that stand out as unlike the rest of the story, and give it a thematic coherence that turns the story from “Nazis are bad” to a sort of Dostoevsky for eight-year-olds.

Near the beginning of the story, Davros, the creator of the Daleks and one of the greatest creations in Doctor Who, equal parts Hitler, Doctor Strangelove and the Mekon, is asked if he would, given the opportunity, unleash a virus that would destroy all forms of life other than itself. His response:

Yes. Yes. To hold in my hand a capsule that contained such power. to know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure of my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything. Yes. I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods. And through the Daleks, I shall have that power!

While near the end of the story, the Doctor has an opportunity to touch two wires together and destroy the whole Dalek species, and his own response is:

Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that’s it. The Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear… in peace, and never even know the word “Dalek”….But if I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.

The Doctor believes that the ends don’t justify the means when the means involves genocide, while Davros believes genocide to be an end in itself. The two characters are set up, by these two speeches, as moral opposites even as they are intellectual equals.

But those two speeches are really all the story itself needs. When broadcast on TV, this story was six episodes long, just under three hours, and the vast majority of it is vamping — capture/escape/capture nonsense. Just how much of the story is padding can be seen by the fact that the soundtrack of the story was cut down to an hour (with narration by Tom Baker) for release as an LP in 1979. I challenge anyone to listen to that soundtrack (now available on CD) and not find it a perfectly tight, reasonable story in itself. In fact, as a story, it works far better cut down to an hour — possibly the reason why the story is so popular among older fans, for most of whom this would have been the first time they could relisten to a story. The Daleks themselves barely appear in fifteen minutes of the story, giving an idea of how padded it actually is.

But the curious thing is that it doesn’t feel padded, and that’s because of four people. Three of them are actors — Tom Baker, Michael Wisher, and Peter Miles (who played Davros’ assistant Nyder), who all give utterly spellbinding performances — but the fourth is the director, David Maloney.

Maloney had directed many of the highlights of Troughton’s era — we’ve already looked at two of his stories — but had been oddly ignored during the Pertwee years, only directing one story, Planet Of The Daleks. Here we see his return, and between March 1975, when this story was transmitted, and April 1977′s Talons Of Weng-Chiang, he would direct four stories, at least three of which (this, Talons and The Deadly Assassin) are among the very best Doctor Who stories ever.

Maloney was one of the few directors on the series to actually have something of the auteur about him, and various motifs recur over and again in his work on Doctor Who — Victoriana, gas masks, imaginary worlds. He also had an actual visual sense, at a time when most of the directors working on the show were of the “point the camera and shout action” school.

Maloney’s is a televisual visual sense, though, albeit one that’s informed by cinema, unlike more modern directors who seem only to think in terms of scaled-down cinema to the detriment of their art. Maloney’s work is almost all recorded in the studio — here, other than the first and last scenes of the story, there’s no location work at all, everything, even the exteriors, is a set. This gives a theatrical look that works perfectly with the melodramatic dialogue.

As a perfect example of the difference Maloney made to the story, take a look at the opening scenes. In the script, this was written as a Time Lord walking with the Doctor through a perfumed garden. Maloney changed it so that the Time Lord would resemble the figure of Death from Bergman’s Seventh Seal, (a film he also references in the closing sequence of the story) and their conversation would take place on a battleground, after slow motion scenes of trench warfare.

Fundamentally, Genesis Of The Daleks is an example of just how collaborative a medium TV is. Doctor Who has always been a writer-driven show, but here when the writer can’t be bothered, two very different but expert script editors, a producer willing to take risks, three great actors and an inspired director can turn six episodes of padding into something that still stands up as great television.

For what you get when you have that star, director and producer working with a good script, by the better of the two script editors, we’ll have to wait until next time…

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Illogical Volume: There have been quite a few pointedly meaningful cross-fades in this season (80s Alan Moore would be proud!), but have any of them been as cruel as the one in this episode? Watching Don return Megan’s assurance that he was “all [she'd] hoped he’d be”, only to fade in to him standing there with Peggy, getting ready to taste the Cool Whip, was pretty much the visual equivalent of a cock slap. Only, you know, a little bit classier than that might imply.

Todd VanDerWerff had a neat take on the importance of Cool Whip over at the Onion AV Club:

Cool Whip’s a chemical imitation of the real thing, something that’s designed to taste good enough to surpass the original, so long as you just give in and “taste it.” But Cool Whip—like Miracle Whip or a maraschino cherry—is only good as a substitute so long as you’re not intimately acquainted with the real thing. Cool Whip tastes good, but mostly in isolation. It melts down into a miracle, maybe, but it can’t compete with the taste of real whipped cream, ideally done yourself in your own kitchen. The characters most central to tonight’s episode—Don, Peggy, Pete, and Megan—have all done their fair amount of looking for sustenance in a substitution, but the substitution will always start to taste a little empty if you give it too much thought. It’s why Don and Peggy’s attempt to replicate Don and Megan’s easy banter falls flat (in a scene that’s one of the most cringeworthy of the whole series). They’re trying to replicate something that can’t be replicated.

Megan and Don’s take on the Cool Whip routine was probably the best evidence yet that Don’s assertion that Megan is “good at all of it” (as echoed by Peggy in this episode) might not be too far off the mark. While she was going back and forth with Don, Megan was playing the good wife and the good ad Woman at the same time, with the fact that she’s also a good actress implicit in her performance. The fact that she might not want to be exactly the sort of good wife Don hoped she’d be seems like it could be pretty devastating for him – note the way the lift doors open up to reveal a gaping abyss for him to fall into after she leaves. No amount of verbal assurance can quite wash away the way this image (which was very Hitchcock, as Sean Collins has already pointed out) is written all over Don’s face for the back half of the episode.

Ad: I liked how the sink-chained wife was toyed with and rejected. Don comes home to find a newly liberated Megan in full-on Betty Draper mode, doing the washing up and cooking dinner, but never once do you get the impression that he would be any happier if she adopted that role full time. He knows that’s not what she wants, that she would be acting the part. More to the point he’s had that relationship and it didn’t work out well: Don to Roger later in the episode, “I don’t want her to end up like Betty”.

Don might be everything Megan “hoped he would be”, but Don has very little idea what Megan is, or more pointedly what his relationship with Megan could be. For him there’s nothing familiar, no ground at all. No wonder there’s been so many menacing references to outer-space this season.

amy: The amount of foreshadowing really was scary this season. Megan’s been a performer since day one and Don’s concern has always been that her play-acting at parties, in the bedroom and in ad pitches might one day segue into the real. We should have known what would happen the moment she transformed their lounge into a stage in A Little Kiss. It’s cool that what could have easily been dismissed as a bit of razzmatazz to get new viewers excited about the show has eventually emerged as one of this season’s key scenes. The stage has unspooled in more ways than one into the rest of the their lives and Megan’s return to the boards means the performance isn’t solely for Don anymore. Now she’s expected to seduce everyone.

My girlfriend felt that during the scenes between Don and Megan something was wrong, and I think it’s the same wrongness that’s informed of so many of their scenes this season – the feeling that the nicer, kinder Don Draper might be set to explode.

In the final analysis I don’t think the Peter Campbell story is about another, younger Don, a Don to be learned from, to be reflected upon, but rather just Don Don Don (as you say, Dave, the man’s shadow has got away with him). Peter is, in part, a way of constantly reminding us of the serial philanderer who won’t die but who’s just manifesting differently for a season – the ghost of texts gone by now possessing a less worthy vessel. The thing is, though, Pete’s shit at seduction – he’s already in love with Rory Gilmore, isn’t he? No, what we want, what the show’s making us want via Peter’s ineptitude and all this stuff about age, is the old Don back, the guy who’s never rejected. Like so many MM moments, when and if we finally get our wish it’ll be both awful and awesome at the same time. There’s a feeling of deep repression at the heart of this year’s story. The text wants to blow up in some hair-raising direction or other.

Illogical Volume: I had to laugh when I realised how big a part Pete Campbell was going to play in Lady Lazarus. I’ve commented on how focused Pete has seemed lately in our last two write-ups, but I always knew that as soon as he came back into focus we’d see that illusion for the lie that it was. And so while we’re told that Pete’s making a bit of a name for himself as an account man (confirming that it’s not just huffy Marxists that he knows how to charm), the site of him fumbling with the ski gear his rep had earned him worked as a jokey visualisation of his current state of mind. The man’s got it all, but in typical Mad Men style, he’s not handling it well.

No wonder Roger took the time to present Pete with that skiing equipment – Sterling might not be dazzling clients at the moment, but he’s definitely happier than his young usurper right now. Whether that’ll last for long is a question for another episode to answer. For now, Roger just got to have a brief laugh at Pete’s expense (“And I got to see that.”), and who can blame him?

Ad: A moment that resonates with Pete’s inability to fix the plumbing in Signal 30, his “awful” (in his own words) driving, his failure as a pugilist, his failure, in this very episode, to successfully conduct an affair. In the words of Footnotes of Mad Men‘s Natasha Vargas-Cooper “it just doesn’t come naturally to him — the language of men”.

Illogical Volume: Unlike the audience, Roger isn’t there to see quite how thoroughly Pete’s unravelling right now.  Last time we watched Pete go off the rails, he slept with a prostitute after bombing out with a far younger woman. Here, he upped the stakes by getting tangled up with, then refusing to untangle himself from, the wife of a guy he meets on the train every day (Howard).

This plot wasn’t played for laughs, and I’m glad for that.  Watching Pete make his lovelorn little puppy eyes at Beth while the lay on the floor together was cute and amusing, but seeing him express rage at the fact that  “they” (i.e. women) get to decide when something is going to happen brought memories of the time Pete pressured the au pair into having sex with him fresh to mind, and the way he used an invitation from Howard to try to arrange a hotel rendezvous with his wife wasn’t exactly reassuring either.

Thinking about it, the presentation of Pete’s arc in this episode was pretty sneaky. Watching the first few scenes you might have thought that it was going to be a funny episode, that you were going to get to laugh along with Roger as Pete fumbles through his life, but that’s not what you got in the end and if that makes you reflect on the joy you were going to take in light cruelty, all the better.

amy: What was I saying about tomorrow never knowing last time?

I’ve always said Tomorrow Never Knows represents the Beatles at their best. Don never knows what’s going on? Well, Don, this is what’s going on. It’s a message from the future, a place your wife and children and all these kids you work with have already made their home. The conversations in the office, even the work itself, all these things have progressed to the point that Don can’t always understand them. It began six years ago with the Volkswagen ads and later the Beatles concerts and now it’s exploded into Zombies, Hermans and Hermits and wives not just leading successful careers, but successful careers they chose themselves. The montage at the end (a bit of a MM staple that, but not a device used so regularly it loses its power) worked well, I thought. Everyone washed away on a tidal wave of new freedoms and pleasures. Stan and Peggy sharing a joint like it’s no big deal, just an everyday thing you do when you’re working, Pete, lovesick, chasing a woman he knows wants him, and finally Megan embodying the song and the (no) time, turning off her mind, relaxing and floating downstream – and, hey, even Roger’s done that! Then there’s Ginsberg – what the hell is he? Where did he come from? Did his namesake trip him into being, is he a tulpa? A martian beamed into existence on a flourescing sax tone? This is the kind of guy who in a few years will be buying Bowie records. Of course Don doesn’t understand the music he likes, he can’t even understand why anyone would like music enough to curse about it.

So off goes the record, basically.

(Did anyone else think that, during the song’s opening bars, the funny puppet noises sounded like they were mocking him? No? I guarantee Don would if he took LSD.)

Illogical Volume: I think that even without the LSD those noises probably sounded like mocking laughter to Don. In fact, the whole song probably sounded like that to him!

One of the amazing things about this scene, for me, was that it almost succeeded in making me hear the song through Don’s ears, as something terrifying and irritating and new. You’d almost need a flux capacitor to navigate the mess involved in the way the show made something from the past seem like something from the future as heard from the time of its creation, but unlike Don I was glad when the song kicked back in during the credits. One of the advantages of being a spaceman, that.

amy: I’ve always liked Weiner’s take on the present, that it’s largely comprised of what’s past. My grandmother’s house was stuck in the fifties, for instance. Even in 1988 – by which point Tomorrow Never knows had exploded into a million bastard children comprised of repetitive beats and looped samples, songs without beginning or end, to which laying down all thoughts and surrendering to the void was the appropriate response – she still occasionally wheeled out her deserts, homemade or not, on a trolley. It’s the same with ’66, which isn’t just about Megan Draper, but Freddy Rumsden, a lot of Freddy Rumsden – mostly Freddy Rumsden even. The equation works the other way around too. There’s an echo that goes both ways. Like the song, Ginsberg foreshadows the future, his machine gun patter and fizzing idea-bursts would look even more at home in the cokehead eighties, where cool had long since given way to hot. Ginsberg’s a new type of consumer who asserts his individuality via consumption, a third generation capitalist to whom this is only natural. He knows about bands. Some music stabs him in the fucking heart because it’s not the music he buys, doesn’t carry the message he wants, etc. If Peggy’s Don’s creation, his Galatea, his replacement, then Ginsberg’s something else, something for a world that no longer needs Dons, or any ad men who appeal to universal concerns as opposed to personal.

Ad: Might be good to illustrate how Don is about appealing to universal concerns.

Illogical Volume: Well, we’ve mentioned the episode ‘The Wheel’ before and it seems to me that contains the archetypal Don Draper pitch, the sort of positioning of product as a bridge between past, present and future that Peggy has been trying to sell to Heinz all season Megan came up with in the previous episode.

amy: Don Draper likes music, but he isn’t *composed* of music like Ginsberg is. There’s a big difference between not just the style but the whole approach to advertising this new sort of ad man takes. It’s a tiny, tiny exchange in a 47 minute long drama, but right there you’ve got the difference between the man who buys commodities and the modern man outlined in Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self who commodifies himself.

Ad: Contrast Ginsberg’s reaction to the Chevalier song, “Turn it off, it’s stabbing me in the heart.”, with Don’s bafflement at how anyone could possibly be that deeply affected. That’s the difference between the two men right there. It penetrates one man to his core, the other it zings off. I’m tempted to make woolly superhero comparisons here – Dr Strange vs Superman?

What struck me was how that exchange feeds into Megan giving Don Revolver at the end of the episode. Megan understands this new music, and by implication the world that is coming, and in that way she’s a lot like Ginsberg: from Don’s point of view something of a Martian.

amy: If masochism is about wrestling with our fears in a safe environment and sublimating them, then, having reviewed the sex game at the end of A Little Kiss again, I think it’s fair to say most of Don’s Megan related fears have come true. He’s lost the control over his wife that he was so happy to play at losing before, and she really has rejected him in a way, or at least rejected his world. Suddenly, as we knew would be the case, the ‘old man’ jibes aren’t funny, or sexy, they’re just true. Megan actually recommends TNK to Don, remember? Not the straightforward pop of Got to Get You into My Life, or the relatively gimmick free Eleanor Rigby, but bloody Tomorrow Never Knows! This is a conscious decision by Weiner to position Megan’s taste as far out there from Don’s as possible. They speak completely different languages.

And this is the thing about his turning off the record before it’s done: Don Draper might not be prepared to put in the legwork to keep pace with his wife, and we know that’s not going to mean he won’t stress about the distance he’s unprepared to bridge – it’s a recipe for total disaster. The edit at the end was very clever. It was exciting and energetic, but more than that it was like the show was winking at the audience: ‘That old square doesn’t get it…. BAM! But we do, don’t we?’ The song’s reprise positioned us in the secret club Megan belongs to, The Future, and in that instant Don was made pathetic, a man who couldn’t begin to grasp what we now find so easy and familiar it’s a music cue at the end of a hit TV show. Don looked so small out on his tiny, shrinking promontory, a man whose time has been and gone. Yeah, it was a very clever trick, not just a bit of flash. You almost feel guilty, cruel, don’t you, leaving Don behind like that? Until you realise it’s happening to you too.

Illogical Volume: I seem to be playing the part of Captain Quotes in these discussions, but Deborah Lipp spotted an echo of an earlier conversation in Don and Megan’s late night chat:

In the Season 2 episode of Mad Men called A Night to Remember, Betty needs, finally, to confront Don. She wakes him in the middle of the night. It’s a stark moment of deep revelation (discussed in our video essay for Season 2), made more so by Betty’s pale, unmade-up face. It’s the beginning of the end of Don and Betty’s marriage.

At the halfway point of last night’s Mad Men, Lady Lazarus, Megan wakes Don in the middle of the night. Her vulnerability is accentuated by her unmade-up face. It’s a conversation that will change their marriage.

And yet, as Deborah points out, Megan’s confronting Don about one of her lies, rather than one of his.

It’s interesting to compare the way those two scenes play out, but more than that, I honestly wasn’t sure how Don was going to react to Megan here.

Ad: Megan’s almost day-glo nightie was another example of the ominous orange motif, brought to my attention by Sean Collins, that has haunted this season.

amy: The Don related tension’s been skillfully orchestrated, actually. Think of all those scenes this season where you expected the facade to crack but it didn’t and how they’re shot through with a couple of moments of nuclear level rage. I mean, this is the season where Don, dreamself or not, actually murders someone. The thing is, we never know how this character’s going to react, and that’s a scary place to be. Don’s not a safe place at all this season.

Phil Abraham, the director, pulled off some really fun trickery this time as well. The scene where Don and Megan meet up in their apartment before she heads off to her acting workshop and the way it transitions into the Cool Whip pitch is hilarious. Don’s expression starts sad and confused and winds up positively gormless with terror. Obviously Don hasn’t spent the whole of the ellipted time staring into space, although the suggestion that he has is the source of the comedy. We know he’s had a sleepless night and that Ken and Pegs have probably been wondering why he keeps staring vacantly into space. Abraham’s little dissolve was such an elegant way of conveying all of that.

Also, what about that supercool edit where Rory and and Pete’s passionate embrace suddenly cuts to Peggy, positioned exactly where they were, peeling a coffee mug from her mouth? Proper MM humour that, the sublime always tempered by the banal. Really witty.

I imagine We haven’t really discussed the title, Lady Lazarus, because none of us are that familiar with Plath’s poem, but It’s fairly easy to see how its themes map across those of the episode. To describe Megan’s career change as a resurrection is hardly a leap. She’s spent the last seven episodes trapped in Don’s Tomorrowland, a fantasy of the future pinned to the past, a perfect day at the beginning of things that her husband can’t seem to move on from. She’s been suffocated by their perfect life together and this episode was all about her coming up for air. Rory’s story echoes the poem too. I mean, it’s obvious her affair with Pete represents the first time Rory’s felt anything since her husband abandoned her to their house in the country. But what about Peggy? Peggy’s Mad Men’s original Lady Lazarus, isn’t she?

The other day I watched the episode in the second season where she calls Don by his name for the first time, and: wow. It’s an amazing piece of acting, made even more amazing in retrospect. The way she holds this man’s gaze who by this point is so much more than a boss to her, the quiet steeliness in her voice: ‘Thank you, Don.’ In this one simple exchange you can see the woman she’ll become, the woman she is now. It’s all in there, right up to this episode’s triumphant ‘So just shut up!’ And it’s interesting because the woman becomes a phoenix at the end of the poem, which, according to the wiki, some critics consider a demonic transformation. I guess all self possessed women look that way to the patriarchy, don’t they? Peggy’s so tough now, she was so tough in Lady Lazarus with Megan and with Don.

A proper demoness. Good on her.

And let’s not forget about Joan here either.

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Fear not though, we’ll be back next week for a bumper episode of chat, covering all the lovely comics we’ve not talked about including Bulletproof Coffin, Earth 2, Dial H, Daredevil, AVX, Owlfight, Skeleton Key, 2000ad, Fury, Frontline Combat, and much, much more.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of Gary Lactus dressed as No.6 on the beach at Portmeirion to keep you happy:

See you next week!

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All is not well at the Wenley Moor underground atomic research station: there are unaccountable losses of power-output; nervous breakdowns amongst the staff;
and then—a death!

UNIT is called in and the Brigadier is soon joined by DOCTOR WHO and Liz Shaw in a tense and exciting adventure with subterranean reptile men—SILURIANS— and a 40 ft. high Tyrannosaurus rex, the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth!

Terrance Dicks is possibly responsible for the literacy of more 30-to-50-year olds in the UK than any other individual alive.

I’m using this essay to talk about Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke, but really it’s standing in for a whole range of books — over a hundred of them — which changed my life and that of many of my friends.

From the very start, Doctor Who has not been solely a TV show, and for a large part of its history — sixteen years of it, to date — it’s not been on TV at all. From 1964 on, Doctor Who has been what we would now call a ‘multimedia franchise’, expanding to feature comics, films, records, toys, and most importantly for our purposes books. Even now, in terms of number of stories produced, the thirteen on TV every year come a distant third after about forty audio dramas and thirty books annually, although the comic strip still lags behind the TV. But those are new stories, and here we want to talk about the Target novels.

Until relatively late in what is now referred to by most people as the ‘classic series’, television was unrepeatable. Home video only became available in the 80s, and even then it was only an option for the relatively affluent, and unlikely to be under the control of the children who were still ostensibly the show’s audience. As a child growing up in the 80s, I only managed to ever tape one Doctor Who story to watch again — Revelation Of The Daleks — which I managed to watch three times on our Betamax recorder before my parents taped over it with The Rocky Horror Picture Show (a wound that still hurts, decades later). Commercial videotapes of the show only started to be issued in the mid-80s, and only really started with any frequency in the 90s.

So if you wanted to experience a story again, or a story that you’d missed on TV, the only way to do it was to read a novelisation. Almost every Doctor Who story from 1963 through 1989 was issued in a series of books by Target publishing (rebranded as Virgin books towards the end of the run), coming out roughly monthly from 1974 onwards, with the stories in a semi-random order.

The bulk of these books were by Terrance Dicks, who at his peak was turning out a novel a month, and his books were serviceable, in a way that Enid Blyton or other super-prolific children’s authors are. His books were ruthlessly hacked together, the scripts cut down to their most basic plot and the dialogue held together with a series of stock phrases (“a wheezing, groaning sound”, “The man was that mysterious traveller in time and space known as the Doctor”), for exactly 126 pages of quite large type, in three-page chapters titled things like “Escape…To Danger!” or “The Final Battle”.

That’s not to say that Dicks’ books were bad — they were exactly what children needed. A rollicking boys-own adventure with lots of small, easily-understood words, and a light touch. They work. Gideon Defoe, the author of the successful The Pirates! In An Adventure With series of children’s books, has said “the pirate books are really one long homage to Terrance Dicks”, and the books bear that out (the Pirate Captain, for example, is described as having “a pleasant, open face, all teeth and curls” — a combination of Dicks’ phrases for the fifth and fourth Doctors). Dicks’ formula worked.

The other people writing for the Target range (mostly other Doctor Who scriptwriters, but occasionally members of the production team or even actors) tended to keep to that formula, and it was a wonderful one for very young children. My friend Alex Wilcock tells the story of how he learned to read — his mother bought him Doctor Who And The Cybermen by Gerry Davies, and started to read it to him, but got bored and told him to finish it himself. And so he did. The combination of a constantly-moving plot and bare-bones monosyllabic descriptions meant that tens of thousands of children grew up on these books.

But some of the other writers for the Target range wanted to do more. Some of them even went over 126 pages — even with quite small type! And one who went further than most was Malcolm Hulke.

Hulke had been Dicks’ mentor, and had had a long career in TV before Dicks brought him in as one of the regular writers of the TV series during Jon Pertwee’s era. Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters is Hulke’s novelisation of his own script, Doctor Who And The Silurians, which itself was a major advance in the series’ ambition, when it was broadcast during Pertwee’s first series.

The story was based on an idea by Dicks, originally. The two men had been discussing the then-new status quo of the series, with the Doctor stuck on Earth, and Hulke had said “You do realise that leaves you with only two stories? You can only do mad scientist or alien invasion stories now.”

Dicks had thought for a while and then responded “The aliens were here first, and they want their planet back.”

Hulke took this idea, along with his own obsessions (dinosaurs, humanoid reptiles, and extreme left-wing politics), and created one of the finest stories the series had seen to that point (and one of the finest it’s ever done) — a seven-part story in which a race of intelligent reptiles from the era of the dinosaurs (stated as the Silurian era in the TV show, one of several major scientific blunders which still didn’t manage to make the story any less compelling) who have been in suspended animation are revived by a big scientific project going on above them.

What made the story work wasn’t Dicks’ original concept, but the way the story managed to be an actual tragedy — right from the beginning, the ending of the story (with the Silurians destroyed, in an act of genocide which has unfortunate effects for the series — it’s clearly portrayed as the Brigadier doing something unforgivable, but he has to be forgiven by the next episode) is inevitable, as the result of the intransigence of leaders on both sides. Hulke portrays the military and political minds as incapable of seeing the obvious, even when it will lead to thousands or millions of deaths. In a particularly nice touch, he has the Silurians, the aboriginal peoples whose land has been colonised, try to kill the humans using germ warfare, much as white settlers supposedly tried to wipe out Native American populations using smallpox.

But where the TV story is merely a very good Doctor Who story, Hulke aims for greatness in the novel, and given the parameters in which he was working (the book had to be comprehensible to very young children) he succeeded. It’s not great literature — the writing style is too workmanlike for that, and the plot too simplistic — but within the confines of writing under 150 pages of melodrama, he manages to make the book have some genuine moral complexity, and have believable characters, something that is much, much harder than it sounds.

The simple technique he uses is to have every scene seen from the perspective of a minor character, where one is present — often a character who is on the ‘villainous’ side. The Doctor, the central figure in the TV series, is of course still present in the novel, and still the centre of the plot, but he’s never the centre of our attention — he’s just an annoying, arrogant prick who even more annoyingly happens to be right, swanning about like he owns the place. And the other characters sparkle as a result.

Instead of the “Young Silurian” and “Old Silurian” of the TV credits, we have Okdel, who has a strange compassion for the little furry creatures they left behind when they went into hibernation, Morka, who loathes them for their unreptilian emotions like fondness, and K’to the scientist who isn’t particularly interested either way, except in a scientific sense.

Major Barker, a character who in the TV series is just a blimpish fool, is here behaving that way because he’s been driven almost mad by his own actions in shooting a captured IRA prisoner when on duty in Northern Ireland.

And perhaps most impressively, Miss Dawson, a character whose role in the TV series is mostly to listen as one of the human villains explains the plot to her, and then die, gets this description:

Miss Dawson had been the one left at home to look after their ailing mother. True, she had had some interesting research jobs in London, but whenever she saw an advertisement for an electronic scientist needed abroad, or even in another part of Britain, her mother’s health had mysteriously taken a turn for the worse. The years rolled by, and people stopped calling her a ‘young woman’ and said instead ‘such a faithful daughter’. Sometimes she met men who seemed to want to marry her; but her mother always knew somehow, and promptly became ill again so that Miss Dawson even had to stay away from work to look after the old lady. In her heart Miss Dawson feared the moment when people would stop asking, ‘Why don’t you get married?’ and replace it with the dread, ‘Why didn’t you get married?’

For a children’s book, based on a TV show where none of that was even hinted at, that’s a remarkably subtle and moving bit of characterisation.

The TV version of this story was popular enough that they essentially remade it three times — two years later, with Hulke scripting again, as The Sea Devils, then in 1983 as Warriors Of The Deep and in 2010 as The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. While the first of these is watchable enough, all the latter two do is detract from the power of the original. The book, on the other hand, improves on it immensely.

Most of the Target novels are out of print now — you don’t need to read the books now that you can get all the stories on special edition DVDs with added CGI and commentary tracks and a humorous comedy sketch by some people who used to work on Doctor Who Magazine — but six of them came back into print in 2011. Most of them are fun enough as pulpy adventure, or for nostalgic fans who want to remember spending all lunchtime in the school library reading about Cybermen while the rest of the school was playing outside, but Doctor Who And The Cave Monsters still genuinely works as a book.

For the whole of the 1990s, the only new Doctor Who being created was in a series of novels from Virgin publishing (which we will be dealing with in due course) and were it not for this book, and the other ones Hulke wrote, that series, and thus the revived TV show, may never have happened.

But when it came out, Doctor Who was first and foremost a TV show, and it was about to become very different, as we’ll see next week…

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Amy: It was a classic yoof versus age episode this time around, wasn’t it? A very sixties theme if ever there was one, but, as is usual with MM, even when it was crying out for them it didn’t include any hippies – as one would expect, the intergenerational clashing was subtler than that. So, let’s see: SCDP vs Mr and Mrs Heinz, The Drapers vs the Calvets, Peggy and Abe vs Peggy’s mum, Don vs the anti-tobacco awards people and Sally and Greg vs Bluto, Betty and everyone over twenty. It was clever the way Sally and Glen’s phonecall bookended the hour, like this was the ultimate conspiracy, one that could only take place in darkened rooms outwith the adult world, *outwith the main plot*, in the narrative sink around it. This is where the real secrets are hatched, the real war formented, where adults are brought low by telephone wires and the culprits never caught – where teenage girls learn how to “spread their legs and fly away”.

Illogical Volume: There was a definite youth vs. age theme running through this episode, but what was interesting to me was how performative both sides of this divide were. It was all about people playing at being adults, playing at being children, cutting themselves to fit the cloth, Manhattan as a giant Wendy house with your gorgeous new granny going down on uncle Roger out back.

(Shades of Bluebeard – what’s behind the secret doors in the land of faerie adulthood?)

Sally Draper’s debut appearance as a young adult, complete with make-up and go-go boots, is the cracked mirror reflection of Megan’s Heinz pitch – you’ve got youth and adulthood, past and future, and two competing fantasies of childhood and adulthood all jagging into each other here as the young girl tries to dress up like her version of a fairy tale princess so she can can go to the ball. Note the fact that she complains about the lack of stairs when she arrives at her destination, and the way her excitement at going to this sort of ball clashes with then eventually echoes Glen’s mention of “balling” during their first secret phone conversation.

While we’re talking about those phone calls (love your conspiracy angle amy!), I enjoyed watching Sally turn a childish accident into a source of very adult pride (she looked after her gandma and kept her calm!), all by way of creating a portal into her papa’s world.

Ad: Good call about the various uses of the word “ball” in the episode, Volume.

Illogical Volume: “You saw me, the baller…” etc.

Amy: Being as it’s a direct challenge to this season’s stated theme, Change, I think one of five’s key formulations has to be ‘Some things never change’ – the ways is which it’s true, the ways it’s false, the ways in which it might be true…. all these positions and their implications are explored. It’s even there in the debate about bras, with Peggy adopting the Freddy Rumsden-like conservative position that SCDP doesn’t need to aim for a different consumer base and that nothin’s broke and nothin’ needs fixin’, and Ginsberg and Stan insisting on opening up the teen market. Ginsberg’s entire schtick is that he’s basically an overblown kid. His boyish looks, frenetic energy, constant confusion at the world and complete lack of awareness of the others’ personal space, position Peggy, before she’s even opened her mouth, as a dinosaur, or at the very least some kind of weird entrenched power structure that’s probably had it’s day (which is all nonsense of course, but this must be how it feels to be inside Peggy’s head on a shitty day).

It’s also there in SCDP’s dealings with Heinz and the irony of a man obsessed with the future, only with values as traditional as a bowl of baked beans. Then there’s Peggy and Abe’s decision to shack up. It’s not breaking up, it’s not marriage, it’s something else, a new option that’s only just opened up for young women – and of course Joan’s the barometer, her acceptance underlines that society *is* changing (I said her attitude would be different after she kicked Greg out, now let’s see her apply this new open mindedness to herself….). Peggy’s Mum, though, she doesn’t change, along with her opinions about men. Her insistence on Abe going the traditional route, however, does open up the worrying possibility that the men of 1966 might not be as progressive as they’d like to think. This is Mad Man afterall, not a post-feminist fantasy.

Ad: Time Life. Or should that be Time vs Life, or Time & Life? Slots right in there with Roger’s rhetorical question during his conversation with Don about the cynical motivations of the anti-tobacco lobby: “Who knows why people in the past did good things?”. Certainly nothing about this episode guarantees that the world was ever a purer, more moral place. Again the message is things don’t change, or if they do the worth of any change or the extent of any change will be questionable.

The most miserable view – that things simply can’t improve – is unsurprisingly articulated by Pete Campbell. Sure, SCDP has landed Heinz, but the company is still out “over 15 grand on the account”; there are important things that the world needs to hear, things that could change it for the better? Nope, that’s just Pete saying what you want to hear, Emile.

amy: What else? Well there’s the game of compare and contrast we’re encouraged to play just by virtue of the Drapers’ proximity to the Calvets this episode. It’s the question couples always ask themselves when confronted with an aging, ailing relationship: is this what lies in store for us? And Don does a bang up job of raising Megan’s alarm bells when he misses the point about whether or not it’s cool to turn to the academic’s equivalent of a secretary, a pupil, instead of your wife when you’re down. As for himself, Megan’s father is concerned his daughter will reproduce the capitalist system he so despises, remaining an alienated labourer uninvolved in the production of the consumer goods she sells. There’s the old boys club that is the American Cancer Association, too, and how it doesn’t let plebs like Don Draper in. The line about the various corporate giants comprising the ACA not trusting Don after his letter can be taken in two ways: firstly that he was wrong earlier in the episode and that they do care that he’s a liar, an unscrupulous ad man who’ll say whatever he has to to get ahead, but secondly, and more alarmingly, that many of this crowd have a huge vested interest in tobacco, that they’re weekend anti-tobacconists, in it, like anyone truly aware of branding, for the image it presents. This is the world of ultra-privilege where truth is far slipperier than a poor little ad man born in a whore house can understand, and Donald Draper is locked out of it. Power always stays the same.

Ad: I’d add Roger’s acid trip in the previous episode to that list. As we’ve noted before now, Mad Men does a good job of not buying into the big cultural narratives about the Sixties. It isn’t about the rise of women and ethnic minorities in the workplace, or the clash between conservative mainstream culture and the burgeoning youth movements of the day, or whatever. Which isn’t to say that some of those threads aren’t in there is some shape or form, but that they’re never presented as straightforwardly teleological – this led to this led to this led to Full Equality and Working Girl – or uncomplicated. Roger’s trip is a case in point. In a lesser show the company man would have turned on, turned in and dropped out, or at the very least we would have been given the opportunity to wallow is some counter culture signifiers. Instead we get a company man who finds himself watching sport during his trip (could that be any less psychedelic?) and who doubles-down on his efforts to get in new business. He gets new insight (and a divorce) but not exactly the kind of insight that would be endorsed by the Timothy Learys of this world.

The new isn’t ever allowed to get too new in Mad Men.

Illogical Volume: Yeah, I loved the fact that the main thing Roger seems to have taken from his trip is that he needs to work harder at being Roger Sterling. Based on his scenes with Don and Mona, I also love the way he seems to have turned into that guy who won’t stop going about his revelatory LSD experience even while he’s dining in palaces of power and trying to work out how to charm his way higher.

Ad: Exactly, when he met with Mona there was a brilliant tension between all the trappings of wealth and power and how the audience has been taught to understand the psychedelic experience. Everything was off.

Illogical Volume: Mad Men never really plays out like a cringe comedy, but I was wincing through most of Peggy’s scenes in this episode. Looking at the fixed smile on her face while Abe bust out his modest proposal was like watching the faded Catholic guilt of season 2 Peggy battling it out with the ever-more-boho Peggy of seasons three and four, with the eventual victory for the later quickly undermined by a simple Freudian slip – “I do.”

The interactions between Peggy and Joan were every bit loaded as they always are. On one level, their interactions here were a return to the early days of the show, with Joan playing the role of the knowledgeable woman and Peggy the awkward neophyte. But as you say, the standards of what is and isn’t acceptable have shifted significantly since then. Joan seemed to enjoy taking on that position again, but she must have been feeling the distance between Peggy’s perception and reality pretty fucking hard since she decided to make it obvious.

Ad: Volume, I think that’s a pretty dry way of reading Joan’s and Peggy’s scenes together. I thought there was real warmth, real revelation for both of them. I was lovely watching two people start to change there minds in a positive way – in a way that will benefit them as women – even if the process is a struggle for both of them.

Illogical Volume: Oh, hey, no – I didn’t mean to suggest that their relationship was all power relations all the time. There was definitely a lot of warmth there, and Joan and Peggy have been cautiously working up a genuine camaraderie over the last couple of seasons, but that’s why I thought it was funny to see the ghosts of their earlier relationship haunting them even as they hugged.

Ad: Those ghosts are always there, aren’t they? Everyone and everything is haunted in Mad Men.

Illogical Volume: Well, as you’ve already said, “The new isn’t ever allowed to get too new in Mad Men”.

The more closely I watch these episodes, the more literary the realism of Mad Men seems to me – that’s not a value judgement in and of itself, but I’m consistently impressed by how neatly they tie everything together without getting too broad or clumsy about it.

Ad: I’ve been thinking that the show is best described as literary, also. It’s what makes it so distinct from other high quality dramas, I think. There’s probably an essay in that.

Illogical Volume: There’s definitely an essay in that, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to write it up so we’ll just have to leave that particular mess of implications all tangled up for now!

Jumping back a bit, Peggy’s mum did exactly what you’d expect her to do when faced with the prospect of her daughter “shacking up” with Abraham, and it occurs to me that most of the plots in this episode peaked with the uncomfortable revelations of sometimes obvious truths. And so Sally gets to see how hot dates usually end in adultland, Don is told exactly what the people in power REALLY think of him, and Megan finds herself faced with the possibility that even a good day in the office isn’t enough.

For all the carefully orchestrated power of that scene where all of the characters at the ball come back to the table and form a perfect line of disillusionment – forming “a goddamn tableau” of solitude and misery, as Sean Collins has already noted – I still felt Peggy’s ending hardest here. Not sure if that’s because you got to see her work herself up to being happy with Abe’s clumsy-sweet vision of life together or because she finished the episode on her own, but either way it still kicked the legs out from under me.

Ad: The striking thing about that shot is how atomised everyone is. It sits in sharp counterpoint to all the identity swapping and experimentation that made up the bulk of the episode. There’s nothing that defines a person quite as clearly as their limitations, eh?

I read what’s going with Megan slightly different, Volume, or rather I agree but I think there’s another way of looking at it.

To take us all the way back to our first post and our discussion about whether or not Megan is taking advantage of her status as the boss’s wife, it becomes pretty apparent in this episode that she’s not above exploiting her position. Her pitch to Don in his office, her pitch to Heinz, neither of these would have been possible without her privileged access to both Don and the client. Moreover these moments have to be seen within the context of an episode where characters are trying on different roles, blurring boundaries, and where Megan is put squarely in her mother’s shoes: she’s the one serving the children their favourite meal of spaghetti, she’s the one checking on her sleeping mum, she’s the one baring the brunt of her father’s sexual jealousy, and coping with her mother’s flirtatious (juvenile?) advances towards her husband. The net effect is that when Megan accuses Marie of being “so competitive”, we can’t help feeling that the same applies to her. That, despite her general decency – and I really do like Megan, she’s one of the show’s rare straightforwardly likeable characters – she has a ruthless streak. Which I suppose takes us back to conversations people were having at the end of last season.

Megan’s disillusionment is on some level about the tension implicit within Peggy’s assertion that “this is as good as it gets”, but at a more fundamental level it’s to do with her father forcing her to confront the compromises she’s made to get where she is. Megan’s anxieties match those expressed by Roger earlier in the episode: perhaps she has thrown her own game in marrying Don. Perhaps she’s been playing a role all season that maybe will never fulfill her.

Mind you, it’s not as if Mad Men believes in self-actualization, is it. Better or worse ways of doing things, yes, but nothing’s ever going to be perfect.

Illogical Volume: I don’t disagree with any of that, reckon it’s a deeper/more multifaceted reading of Megan’s situation rather than a contradictory one. Emile was an amusingly unsettled presence in this episode, wasn’t he? Megan’s insecure Marxist papa and sexily frustrated mama could’ve come out of a bloody Cidre advert if they hadn’t been written and played so precisely, but after Far Away Places watching Megan have to play the role you describe was doubly crushing. Too much acting, but not of the right kind?  Well, it’s never that simple, but I’ve already mentioned the play-acting theme of this episode, and in the end only Pete and Roger seemed comfortable in their roles here.

That’s just another temporary situation/trick of  perspective, I’m sure, and as Ad has already pointed out Pete also has the single least optimistic line of this episode.  Still, surely I can’t be the only one who enjoyed watching Pete demonstrate what he does for a living to Emile almost as much as I enjoyed watching Don and Megan’s back and forth Heinz pitch?

It’s a strange feeling, as a self-confessed pretentious socialist, to find yourself cheering for the victory of EFFICIENT SALESMANSHIP over reality.

Ad: Regarding Emile, Megan’s dad, no-one could have failed to note his incessant sniping, but what I thought was interesting was how almost all of it doubled as an attack on himself. The guy quite clearly doesn’t like himself or his life very much.

amy: Another ‘some things never change!’ moment has to be the aftermath of Megan’s ad pitch, because this is the second time in just a couple of years that a woman’s proven herself as valuable to the creative dept as any man, if not more so. It breaks the illusion of a seamless history, doesn’t it? It seems to say that all there is is change and when things are over, they’re over. You can’t make a home in the future or the past because now they’ve got gals running the show! The past was never what you thought it was and now it’s gone. The future? You might not even have a place in it, much less predict it. Sometimes it’s not marriage, it’s not breaking up, it’s moving in….

But…. Peggy – and the audience – have certain expectations too. The ad pitch is sacrosanct, and a woman who delivers a successful pitch, and her corresponding pride in same, doubly so. Like her colleague, we expect Megan to be jubilant, but somehow Peggy’s words of encouragement, “This is as good as this job gets!”, hang in the air and slowly take on the quality of a threat. Megan isn’t quite as fulfilled by all this as she should be. Afterall, is this all she has to look forward too? Surely, as she and her father discuss later on that night, there are other things – things she shouldn’t give up on? Maybe Don Draper will have to put up with his new Betty going back to ‘modelling’ afterall. He thought he’d got out of that one, but the stage beckons and history is repeating itself…

!

This time, though, if he wants to remain married he has to lose the argument.

All of this brings me back round in a circle to the kids. If some things never change, are they doomed to repeat the follies of their parents? The phonecalls lacunise the text, forming the borders of a 47 minute deep question mark.

Of course Sally’s extreme reaction to all this is one of the many privileges of being thirteen. She’ll long for the days of clear cut distinctions, when things were good or bad and there was no inbetween, soon enough. And maybe that’s what’s really bugging her, that there’ll come a time when things aren’t black, or white, but grubby.

“Dirty.”

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What is it Bubba? Whaddya want?

Firstly though, The Beast debuts his homework, ‘The Review Song’. And a jolly good job he does of it too. Don’t listen to Gary Lactus. He’s a giant idiot.

Then, they discuss the really important issues of the day: Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Thor, Hawkeye and Hulk. And then the Hulk again.

Rather churlishly they refuse to talk about comics, so amped up are they by this modern innovation of moving pictures! The cads! Suffice to say Lactus spent the week diseasing his already syphilis-ravaged mind with AVX-related stuff and more Owls, while the Beast ignored the new releases instead opting for Kurtzman & Co’s Frontline Combat. Both of these topics will be returned to at a later date.

So sit back…no further back than that…till you’re pretty much lying down. That’s it, like that. Okay so sit back and soak up the sound of two semi-retarded man-children discuss the most important cultural item of the last 2,000 years…

click to download

ASSEMBLE!

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This 1989 version of Blackhawk came hot on the heels of Howard Chaykin’s fairly radical reinvention of the characters after they’d languished for years unable to make the transition from daring WW2 flyboys into the spandex world. Chaykin’s solution was to take them back to their origins and he crafted a complex, occasionally impenetrable tale of intrigue black ops and treachery, which looked stunning but was fairly hard going.

Pasko & Burchett took Chaykin’s reinvented Hawks into an ongoing that dialed back the heavy design somewhat (not to mention the Chaykin patented ‘bastardry’ – their Blackhawk is a tad more roguish and likable)  and produced a pretty strong run. Pasko writes dense, involving espionage thrillers which luxuriate in period detail. They very much have a pulp flavour, but he attempts to add complexity and tackle issues of the day with a contemporary eye.

But for me it’s the work of Rick Burchett that provides the real hook though. I’m a huge fan of his work and it’s clean, strong sense of design and composition. He’s a fluid, adaptable cartoonist who has continued to evolve with each project – I’ve talked about him a bit in an earlier Cover Versions on the Black Hood and his work was most recently seen on the rather wonderful Batman: Brave & The Bold comic.

Each of the covers for the 16 issue run is pretty ace but I’ve selected 6 of my favourites. The first issue, at the top of this post, is just a great iconic first issue cover. I love the bold pulp layout of this – it does everything you want – it sells the swashbuckling nature of the protagonists, as they tower over a night time cityscape. Add in some searchlights and a soaring plane and you have a simply great cover. Also: Lady Blackhawk has triggered a hitherto unknown eyepatch fetish in me.

I love the simplicity of this cover – it’s alive with movement, and the lemon yellow background really makes it pop. Burchett’s confident, fluid line work is really on display too. Also: hot air balloons, mid-air knife fights = easy win.

A classic ‘Uh-oh!‘ cover this. I love a cover image that leads you into the comic, and this is a great feint tactic. We know the Blackhawks aren’t finished, but we’re intrigued nonetheless. I really like the sad look on Andre’s face too – ahhh, poor Andre! Don’t worry, you’ve got ten issues yet! Note again how Burchett chooses not to clutter the image with unnecessary backgrounds. His bold use of space is a continual feature of these covers.

A great use of negative space here with Blackhawk picked out against a black background. Once again it’s beautifully composed – look at the way the planes arc around the main figure, depicting the evolution of the strip through the change in aircraft. Simple, elegant and effective.

A nice collage image that signals the strips move into a 1950′s setting – each image surrounding the main characters an iconic representation of the US political tensions of the day. Aside from the dubious colourwork (‘yellow peril’ indeed!) this is just a strong, nicely laid out cover. I really like the font used as well. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I also love the Blackhawk logo. It has a nice period tang, but is confidently modern in a way that reflects the increasingly graphically adventurous 1980′s.

Finally, possibly my favourite of the bunch, a cover that combines all the previous factors into one killer image. The composition is perfectly judged: a mid-shot of Blackhawk set against the quasi-silhouetted figure behind him, with planes arcing past. The grid of the map behind them serves only to enhance the near-geometric perfection of the image. Burchett’s confident brushwork is at it’s very best here too.  Check the smooth arc of Blackhawk’s scarf or the bouncing curls of  Lady Blackhawk. Add in the ever-present Blackhawk emblem on the compass (so very cool and iconic) and the whole thing just sings.

So there you go. If you fancy a dip in some pretty fun period espionage comics from a time when DC were actually trying to push a few boundaries, you could do a lot worse than get hold of some of these cheap. But for me it’s just a pleasure to soak up some more of that good Burchett art.

Now where do I find a girl with an eyepatch…?

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Ad: Wow. Far Away Places was another extraordinary episode by just about every yardstick I can throw at it in a season that’s seen even better.

So three trips: a trip upstate to Howard Johnson’s, an acid trip, and a power trip/a trip to the cinema. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. In the words of Burt Cooper, “everyone has somewhere to go today”.

Illogical Volume: I’m not sure if it’s a side-effect of the way I’m watching this series of Mad Men – I’m used to binging on three or four episodes in a row instead of taking the show one episode at a time – but I’ve actually felt overwhelmed by the show pretty much every week since it started back.

After the comparative simplicity of Signal 30, Far Away Places was a return to the perfectly structured glory of Mystery Date – in the previous episode it was noted that time was moving faster, but here time was like a stuck record, forever returning till the whole thing wore out.

Amy: Oh yeah, and that’s LSD completely. All that time distortion.

It’s odd because a friend and I were gabbing about LSD just the other day and we concluded that the tripping experience’s defining feature is pattern generation. It’s there in all the tessellated hallucinations, the sense that the universe conforms to an implicate design. It’s often the thing that drives some people over the edge, isn’t it, this obsessing over higher orders, etc.? Psychotic, paranoid states are defined by this stuff. But, anyway, this is all to say that of course Roger and Jane woke up the next day to find that the beautiful equation that was the end of their relationship only looked that way from above and that back on the ground it was all a painful mess, at least for her. Oh and that the return to the glorious, multi-tiered, almost holographic structure of Mystery Date, only now on overdrive, made a lot of sense. Someone dosed the text basically.

Illogical Volume: Peggy’s pitch was more prophetic than it might initially have seemed, I think. She had the content of a classic Don Draper pitch (the idea of the product as a vector for bonding, or for the memory of the same) but not the context in which to push it, or the ease that context would have given her. Like yon art-choppy said, it’s still expected that women will try to please men, and our Peggy wants to overpower them.

(Check the dynamics of her brief encounter in the cinema too – she’s “giving” and “pleasing” there, but in a very purposeful, controlling way.)

There’s a double fantasy involved in Peggy’s pitch, with the idea that baked beans can mean something wrapped up inside the idea that Peggy can be Don (and fucking hell, but that man’s shadow has got away from him at this point!). Peggy doesn’t quite manage to sell either fantasy at her meeting, and this failure echoes in the relationships between men and women throughout the episode.

Speaking of which, we got a real show-stopping turn from Roger this week, eh?

In the previous instalment of Mindless Mad Men, Amy made a neat point about how the reality of Signal 30 was skewed towards Pete Campbell’s perspective, which meant that Don and Roger seemed that little bit more trouble-free and heroic than they really are. This time round we got plenty on both Don and Roger’s realities, and only one super-brief appearance from Pete Campbell (“You’re off the business”).  Still, for this Mindless at least, Pete’s one scene came loaded with the suggestion that he’s either trying to do strict, professional work without being quite such a flailing prick right now, or that he appears to be doing the same from Peggy’s pov here, which is neat.

Amy: I always thought Campbell would make only the briefest of appearances in Far Away Places. It makes sense from a dramatic point of view. We all needed a rest after that workout.

Trips wise, there’s also: a martian stranded on Earth and a camping trip. I like the way Ginsberg’s story reverses the body snatcher story, that far from being an evil monster bent on subjugating the Earth, in fact he’s just lost – he doesn’t fit in anywhere and he might be alone. There’s also the point that places like Auschwitz may as well have been Mars for all we can get our heads around them. Any fiction, any story, about the concentration camps may as well be overlaid with whatever weirdness you like, because hell is the point where language collapses. ‘…that’s impossible…’, seems as good a summation as any. It’s easier to understand martian. Poor old Ginsberg, he’s had a rough old time.

Illogical Volume: It strikes me that as in Peggy’s plot, there was actually a double-implosion involved in Roger’s fantasy, with both the idea of his marriage to Jane and the idea of the clean break from this marriage he thought they’d agreed on while they were off their chumps failing to hold up in the cool light of day. Or at least, I thought it seemed chilly the morning after – as far as Roger was concerned, it was going to be a lovely day!

Ad: What really struck me about Peggy in this episode is how much she apes the Don of old. As you’ve noted, Volume, the pitch was vintage Don, as was the brow-beating of the client, although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Don take it quite that far. But then Peggy isn’t just mimicking Don, she’s taking out her frustrations, many of which are rooted in the limitations imposed by her gender. Her lunchtime visit to the cinema and brief bout of infidelity, falling asleep on the office sofa: Don. Even the phone call home to a cuckolded partner reminded me of Don and Betsy, although I think there was more going on there. By that point Peggy was coming down from her trip to Don-land. I’ll come back to that later.

Illogical Volume: Yeah, that’s what I was getting at with the bit about how Peggy lacked “the ease that context would have given her” – she wasn’t just having to deal with the fact that her client wasn’t reacting to her pitch like he might have reacted to Don (“Has Don signed off on this?”), but also with the way that her awareness of this was feeding back into her aggressive rhetoric at the end.

Amy: I’d like to add here that what kickstarts Peggy’s bad mood is probably the row with Abe. She’s not going to stand idly by and listen to the Heinz guy tell her she’s failed, when, in Megan’s words, the pitch, before she’s even started it, has already diminished her relationship by just another little bit. Afterall, this isn’t the first time Peggy’s had work take a big fat dump on her love life. And, yeah, it’s another toe to toe with yet another bloody man. They may all be interchangable by this point: Abe, Don, the Heinz guy. There’s the world, right? And she wants to get in, but she can’t because there’s a wall made of men in the way (check the opening scene and the way the placement of the bedroom mirror results in Peggy being literally surrounded by Abe – talk about claustrophobic!). Men who fall into a contemplative mood when someone with a bigger cock runs their mouth in exactly the same way Pegs does in this episode – but all she gets is infantalised (‘You’re lucky I’ve got a daughter…’ etc) and fired from the campaign.

It was depressing to butt heads so firmly with sexism again this time around. I wouldn’t say it’s been absent this season, but, probably because Peggy hasn’t been the main focus, it’s definitely been on the back-burner. Weiner and the gang won’t let it drop though. Good on them. It’s not a plot device, as it would be in a lesser show, an obstacle to be overcome before the hero gets where they’re going, but an intrinsic, bricks and mortar part of the overall terrain. Every time Peggy reaches out for more she’s going to get her fingers burned.

Illogical Volume: This ties back to the conversation we had last week about how Mad Men handles change and growth – whether you’re talking about Pete Campbell’s personality or sexism in the workplace,  it’s clear that in the world of SCDP hard fought victories are easily reversed or undermined.

Amypoodle: I tell you what did get my attention – that after their row, Peggy goes to see a film about someone surviving the African veldt just as Abe suggested, but one with a female lead! And then she goes on to *ahem* subvert expectations herself, there in the back row…

Ad: Yeah, I picked up on that. A film called “Born Free”, no less!

All this discussion of Roger’s trip brings me to what I took to be a central concern of the episode, the difference between reality and fantasy. Peggy tries to walk in Don’s shoes for a day but she isn’t Don; Don has a vision of a road trip with his wife that doesn’t match the fantasy; Roger and Jane have an acid fuelled epiphany about their relationship but it doesn’t segue neatly into the sober moment of their split. None of these dualities are strictly or entirely oppositional, a point reinforced by the dinner party conversation about the complex nature of truth. And I really liked that they downplayed that cliched, yeah it feels like that when you’re tripping but none of it translates into the real world stuff. Some of it clearly does translate – see the newly minted twinkle in Roger’s eye for evidence.

Amy: I hate those conversations. Of course meaningful experience can emerge in a psychedelic context. I walked away from my trips with plenty of workable insights.

You’ve reminded me of something I meant to say earlier, actually, how the loops in Peggy and Don’s narratives transform their relationships into the kind of closed, crystalline structures trippers are drawn to at the peak of the bell curve. As Ginsberg says, ‘This conversation went round in a circle and we’re back where we started.’ In Don and Megan’s case the loop is made explicit in the chase sequence at the end, which echoes the one at the end of the first episode, and by their return to the office – the alpha couple entrance they’ve made so many times this season. It’s life on repeat, the same note but playing at different scales, now sombre as opposed to upbeat. Then there’s the argument Abe and Peggy have at the beginning, where he complains about ‘coming all the way up’ to her apartment only to have her give him the cold shoulder/consent reluctantly to icy sex. Note how he doesn’t talk about her going to his place, the implied summoning – a prophecy made good by the close of her story. You can see the cycle repeating itself, can’t you? I don’t think this is reaching. Peggy calls Abe up at the end of a stressful day, he takes the subway over there, and when he arrives she’s just not into it. Ginsberg’s days in all likelihood possess a depressing circularity also, only in his case it’s almost even worse, because he’s stuck not with a girlfriend, a partner he chose, but with his overbearing father. ‘Stay where you are’, indeed. Far Away Places provides a far away enough vantage point to view these relationships from outside, as objects or formulas, and it’s fair to say that none of them look entirely healthy.

But, you know, in reality they’re probably more complex than the trip allows for. Everything looks weaker if you can see its boundaries and where it’ll break.

Illogical Volume: Talking of the many twinkles in Roger’s eye, here’s Sean Collins on the mirrorworld Don:

I think that’s a lot more complex a hallucination than the “haha he idolizes Don” sight gag suggests. He idolizes Don, he fears Don, he envies Don, he likes Don…but he also made Don. Don exists because Roger thought him up, essentially, saying okay, this guy has some talent, let’s see what he can do. The hallucination is, quite literally, a reflection of that reality. And since Roger’s the elder, he can never acknowledge any of these feelings, not to anyone else, not even to himself without the help of LSD, without violating a tremendous taboo against being less self-sufficient than the generation that follows you.

That’s a pretty sharp reading of that scene, I think, and it plays nicely with the fact that Don wouldn’t take Roger up on his road-trip idea. As non-Mad Men watching Mindless Andre Whickey has observed, there’s a reason we can’t write about robots without writing about them breaking their programming – whether you’re dealing with golums, children or proteges, if you’re going to try to mold someone you can’t be surprised when they decide to break out. “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, etc.

Amy: I never for one minute took that scene to mean Roger idolises Don, but rather that he trusts Don and that to him Don is a safe space – probably the only real friend, after Joan, that Roger’s got.

Ad: I’m open to the suggestion that he idolizes Don. Plenty of people idolize their friends.

Volume, I don’t know about you but I’m always a bit heartbroken when Don doesn’t rush to Roger’s rescue, but it feels right, in part for the reasons Sean mentions, and, yeah, because, as you say, that’s what the kids we raise do. There’s something of sadness of the parent child relationship there, at least there is for me, probably because I am a parent.

Illogical Volume: Yeah, I get it too and I’m *only* a child, but I can see how it could be a more obviously upsetting  relationship from the parent’s side of things.

We really need to talk about Burt Cooper here, too – seeing Cooper’s face on Roger’s cash was another great sight gag, but it pays off later in the episode when Cooper takes Don (and the audience) by surpise with his forceful intervention.

“This is my business” – it is and all!

Amy: It was a massive surprise. I wrote a thing just the other day about how Bert’s trademark zen master schtick, which was always made special by his general aloofness, is segueing all too effortlessly into senility – like a Buddha merging with Total Reality (or, put less romantically, his periodic bursts of kooky wisdom are starting to look like the flailings of a drowning man occasionally breaking the water line and coming up for air, and far from being a respite from the horror of watching a man slowly lose his marbles, only serve to accentuate it). So, yeah, because of this he really impressed here. If the audience are worried about Coop, then you can bet the partners (assuming they’re able to take their minds off their own problems for a couple of seconds), the people who actually share office space with him, are doubly concerned – and this means his words would’ve really hit home. A proper bolt from the blue. The buddha-mind ceased to partake of cosmic consciousness, honing in on earthly reality for just those few minutes it took to give Don a dressing down – It must’ve been really serious! I’m only half joking here. Anything that makes Bert sit up and take notice, something he’s disinclined to do in almost every other circumstance (see: the weirdness of ‘Marvelous fete!’), has to be a real problem.

Yeah, this bit worked so well. Very clever. I bet every proper fan sat up and paid strict attention.

Ad: Don is the lynchpin who made this episode’s trinity of stories possible: if he’d let Roger tag along to Howard Johnson’s the acid trip would never have happened, if he’d been in the room during Peggy’s pitch it might have gone very differently. It’s also worth noting that he haunts both Peggy and Roger’s segments. During the trip figment-Don acts as something approaching a spirit guide when he assures Roger that “he’s fine” and that “she wants to be alone in the truth of you” (lolz), a point hammered home later in the trip when Roger approvingly describes his and Jane’s experience in precisely those terms. And for Peggy, as we’ve already discussed, it’s almost as if she attempts to channel Don.

The effect of Burt’s words followed by Don watching his colleagues stroll past the room (through the glass wall) was to remove Don from his own world, to place him back in the office where things are going on without him. Part of the machinery – necessary but discrete. None of which is to belittle his importance, but it leaves us in no doubt that his “love leave”, his selfishness, his story, which in this episode and other episodes has taken on a kind of fundament of reality quality, is not the be all and end all. The show can be about other things and other people (see last week!), the world goes on without him even if it needs him. It’s Burt’s business and Roger’s “beautiful day” whether Don likes it or not.

It’s a brilliantly constructed scene on just about every level, come to think of it.

Illogical Volume: It really is. This season has played with Don’s status in some funny ways. The fourth season started with a question – “Who is Donald Draper?” – and at points this series has seemed to answer, “Who isn’t?” Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, we’re not quite living in the prismatic age of Don Draper, but his presence has been inescapable his season even when he’s been off-screen. This has always been the case, to one extent or another, but I’ve been quietly giggling about how everyone from Michael Ginberg to Pete Campbell via Peggy has seemed to strain to match his poise and creativity lately. I dunno, maybe he’s just that bit more impressive when he seems like he’s fucking up less, as he has for most of this season. Until now.

Far Away Places was like a cold shower to help the viewer shake off those sticky Don Draper fantasies – his panic when he couldn’t find Megan was all too real, with the perpetual threat of violence and death that’s been another recurring theme this season suggested in his every stumbling, disconnected movement. Then, following on from the animalistic rage of his chase, you got to see him shattered, clinging to Megan, nobody’s hero.

The transition from that scene to seeing them swan back into the office as thought The Megan and Don show had never been off the air to watching Burt Cooper take the top of Don’ head smooth off with a couple of well chosen words… that was some real rollercoaster shit!

Amy: Even though I still think Megan was abusing her privilege in the first episode, I take back the ‘oblivious’ thing – she’s hyper-aware of her situation, and as time’s progressed she’s obviously become increasingly uncomfortable with it. Who knew the straw that broke the camel’s back would be an orange sherbert sundae (That was brilliant. It’s the little things accreting over time that really accelerate these situations into all out confrontations)? I should’ve realised that the power games were all for Don’s benefit. Okay, we didn’t have enough information last time around to make that call, but in hindsight I think it was smacking us between the eyes. We know he has history with this sort of thing in the bedroom, we see its expression daily in the office, and now it’s clear that it’s one of the defining features of his relationship generally. And it’s operating on loads of levels all at once. We’ve examined it a bit before, so I don’t want to retread old ground, but what stood out this time was the way he seems determined to freeze his and Megan’s relationship in 1965. As the flashback to Tommorowland THE DELETED SCENE makes clear at the end, the trip to Howard Johnson’s isn’t about their present at all, but about reliving the moment they decided to tie the knot. It occurs to me that Howard Johnson’s is like the already gaudy and artificial Disneyland’s fallen twin – the mouse sans fun. This cycle is one of diminishing returns, just like their fights. Eventually the paint peels and the Magic Kingdom’s rusty mechanisms start to show. Sooner or later the fights just become fights. More depressing evidence that the new Don is all a dream and his relationship likewise. Again with the bloody beginning of things. That man needs to start liking who his wife is now. Who he is now. It’s why it must’ve really stung when Bert told Don to quit with all the honeymooning – he genuinely doesn’t know where he and Megan would be without it and he’s worried that to accept the present is to begin the downward spiral to separation and divorce. It’s sad because she’s a nice person. I think he’d really like her if he got to know her.

The masochistic scene Don and Megan were playing out in the first episode has suddenly got all too real and seriously unsafe. His constant desire to attain his wife, to relive those first moments when she said ‘YES!’ – to woo her, to take her on trips, to force her passionately to the ground and steal a kiss – runs the very real risk of permanently pushing her away, because in order for something to be attained it first has to be positioned as unattainable. And there’s nothing more unattainable than someone who actually hates you.

Man, Ill-Vol, I really like what you were saying about these stories exhausting themselves. You summed up in one sentence what I’ve taken paragraphs to explain.

Illogical Volume: Ha, well, I don’t usually do concise so I’m glad you enjoyed that bit!

Ad: All of these plots end at a similar point don’t they? With some kind of revelation. To bring it back to Peggy, she attempts to control her world with her lucky Violets and her Don Draper impression but ends up feeling that everything is far stranger and more difficult to get to grips with than she had hoped. Her conversation with Michael brings with it the understanding that even our own pasts can be incomprehensible and impossibly distant. We might all have memories but not all of them are warm like the campfire from the Heinz pitch, and some are completely lost to us. Love that final shot of her sitting in the darkness.

I thought the character’s had some exquisitely vulnerable moments this episode. Jane and Roger’s towel-wrapped come-down was as soft and earnest and beautifully absurd as anything I’ve ever experienced at the tail-end of a hallucinogen, and worked wonderfully as a counter-point to Roger’s day to day cynical, drunken existence. Don whistling I Want to Hold Your Hand tells you everything you need to know about where he’s at. It’s abjectly juvenile and quixotic, and he hates it (Megan: “I thought you hated that song”), but he’s whistling it anyway and he can’t stop. It almost made me well up.

What’s interesting is that Peggy and Don are left in a more difficult if more truthful place, whereas Roger seems to have found a clearer path back into the world. I love how in Mad Men the smaller things count: Roger doesn’t have to die or commit suicide for his story to make sense, it doesn’t have to be so overblown. He just has to get a divorce.

Illogical Volume: This is all part of the “and then what?” nature of this season, I think. We’ve discussed this sense of post-credit sequence, post-happy ending blues before, I know, but the Don and Megan interactions in this episode were striking in that respect. It was a bit of a “naked lunch” episode for them, wasn’t it? There was no way they could have avoided seeing what was on the end of every fork (too much sherbert, not enough pi).

I like that while we’re watching all of our well-established characters wear out their stories, Michael Ginsberg got his very own SECRET ORIGIN. Part-Martian, part-holocaust baby… it’s no wonder that Peggy settles into a curious orbit around planet Ginsberg here. His story is still taking shape, but its gravitational pull is becoming increasingly obvious.

Sean Collins has pointed out that Ginsberg’s origin reads suspiciously like a LOUDER version of Don’s:

He’ll see your whore and raise you a Holocaust victim. He’ll beat your army-grunt identity switch by never having been known by his original identity. He’ll take your Korea and give you a World War Fucking II.

He’s not wrong, though as Amy has already pointed out, Ginsberg’s dad is also a distinctly non-ghostly presence in the story, so it’s not a 1:1 match or anything.

Amy: The camping trip is everything the SCDP offices aren’t at the moment. Everyone together round the fire. Camaraderie. Friendship. Responsibility for one another. The willingness to defend one another, perhaps? And of course it’s rejected as an irrelevance, a sentimental fantasy.

I’m not sure that was ever the reality, but we’ve deviated about as far as is possible from this ideal. Just look at the ‘team’ working on Heinz: a hungry young copywriter eager to get ahead, an artist afraid for his future (I loved Stan’s blink-and-you’d-miss-it photography related mini-apocalypse this episode – the total non-sequitur that was the story about his date, his agitation when Mr. Heinz complained about no-one eating in the picture – “There is! He’s there!” – and then his hilarious bout of Stockholm Syndrome: “It’ll be clearer in the photograph!”), a junior writer who’s drafted by her husband, the campaign’s boss, to go on a day trip to a Happy Eater on Steroids. This team, of course, is the office in microcosm. Everything fractured, everyone wrestling with their own problems. The place couldn’t get more atomised. Nobody’s pulling together. The company has no substance, no body. No face.

So it makes poetic sense, then, that SCDP’s core absence, Bert Cooper, suddenly reverses into full-bodied presence.

And the immediate result?

As if by magic, Don Draper, SCDP’s beating heart, is summoned back into the room.

I know it’s stretching metaphor to breaking point, but if the rest of the staff are the backpackers, then he’s the fire.

Scratch that: he’s the beans.

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Quick look at how the trapeze strung out between these two strips is, on balance, making 2000AD the easy-best regularly published, mainstream, Anglophone, you know what I mean, don’t split hairs, comic on the racks today.

Zaucer of Zilk is like a bucket full of glitter and pixie dust flung in the face. The radical distance between its aesthetic coordinates and those of the standard fighting funnybook tips 2K into that strange occasional position where shit, it’s a comic, but I’m happy, proud to be seen with it in public. Fold it back to those pages so everyone can see you on your way back from the newsagents. Swing it around. Wow, who’s that cool guy over there, the one reading the comic?

ZoZ is only… It’s not pure love hearts. Know how sherbert lemons, to pick a comparison, you haven’t had them in ages, but if you have one you’ll quickly remember – that rush of irresistible tang, the diamond crack of glycerine unloading a dose of crazy sherbert buzz. Amazing. But then the lacerated mouth, the tiny slashing bastards, every sip of pop a pain.

The smiling swaggering Zaucerer’s problem is a grumpy old copper with a big fucking chin.

Prior to the expected pre-movie late-summer soft-reboot, Wagner and Flint – the former especially showing a confidence of control over the vast and multiplicitous scenery beyond the skill of literally any other comic scripter on the planet – are quietly (not quietly) getting on with a strip that’s staring down our our global predicament with steel enough to make the moment flinch. Dredd’s complex future society, always teetering on the edge of the precarious, is systematically pulled apart. Bugs with no cure (coming your way soon, penicillin-fans), ballistic dissidents, war-karma, brutal legacies of mistrust and abuse, horsemen rampant. HE may be resolute as ever, but there’s nothing to punch. MC1 is going down, and dragging us with it by the throat. No-one who cares about comics as a vital living mass medium or wants their art to square up to the demands of the new dark age can afford not to read Dredd right now.

Comics don’t have to be Doing Something Big. Disposable is fine. We call it recycling now: today’s throwaway is tomorrow’s permanent edifice. But if comics do Do Something Big, pluck their zeitgeist from the sky, or grapple their larger embedded social moment to the floor and daystick it to death… Well, that’s what I’m really here for. (That and the fighting.) Why shouldn’t comics try to be the world they exist in, dissect it, re-staple it together, stick it on the shelves there in reach of the toddlers, maybe change their minds forever? Wise their pissy asses up?

Because for all Zilk is doing that in its own charming way, it’s basically just a work of poptimism – a fleetingly useful and amusing cultural perspective that spurted itself out sometime in the middle of the last decade. Come on kids, sure things are bleaker than for 140 years, but there’s still natty slacks to think about, eh? Y’know, good parties? Sweets, sweetie? These things are still important, right? And OMG BTW, have you noticed how people on the internet are, like, sooo self-important and bipolar, actually?

That’s all fine in its own way, true enough of course, but really? Is that what’s playing on your mind right now?

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UP FROM THE DEEP, THIRTY STORIES HIGH, BREATHING FIRE, HIS HEAD IN THE SKY…

SILENCE!

IT’S SILENCE!!

and SILOOOOOOOOOOOOOKI….

In this 12th anxiety inducing episode of the World’s* Favourite* Podcast* Gary Lactus continues to sit at the table (verily) and The Beast is saddened by the imminent Geoff Johns revamp of his life. There will be blood…

After Lactus reveals his theme for America’s Got Powers, a strongly ethical SILENCE! news follows, before the pugnacious pairsome get all frisky with the latest comics fillies. Under the merciless eye of scrutiny this week…Peter Bagge’s Reset, Matt Kindt’s 3 Story, Garth Ennis’ Shadow (he knows, by the way), the truly exceptional Prophet (with added Dalrymple), King City, and Wonder Woman. But! Then! Gary Lactus reveals that he is the bravest man(god) on earth as he tackles EVERY SINGLE AVX and BATMAN: OWLS crossover issue released last week. And he plans to continue with this foolhardy plan until his eyeballs pop like cherry tomatoes on a griddle… what a guy! There follows a bit of discussion of Wolverine and the X-Men, and crossovers in general, and Lactus rounds things off with a mention of Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse’s Resident Alien.

That is not all, tough you lucky little piglets! The tenacious twofers then spend way too long discussing what kind of music superheroes listen to, before they head off into the sunset like Clint Eastwood and that orangutan in that film about Clint Eastwood and the Orangutan (and wasn’t it weird in that movie the way that when Clint hooked up with a lady, and then they’d go home and bump uglies and then there’d be a fucking orangutan in the mix…how fucking gross would that be having a post coital glow interrupted by a six foot ape wearing denim?????)

So dig yourself in, and await the heavy shelling that is….SILENCE!

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Click below for SILENCE! gallery please!

Oh shit!

Loving the alien

B-Minus!

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I know one thing – they’re out there and I’m in here. Or rather, we are. Burrowed into precariously rented homes, needing increasingly mutilated services, awaiting mail that brings nothing but threats and bad news, painfully aware that social participation is as demanding of contacts, salesmanship and resources as much as livable employment, vaguely bewildered at a city that announces NOT FOR YOU from every corner: This is the Condition of the Working Class in Bizarro Town. Occasionally supermarkets, burger bars and pasty chains beckon for our devalued labour; if we can demonstrate the ‘right attitude’ (note: I can’t). Failing that, providers of job-seeking ‘services’ extract their own value promising to train us in the ‘right attitude’ and mandatory salesmanship. Otherwise we can shut the fuck up, get off the streets, and watch TV shows informing us that we’re scum. Or, as far as one’s amour propre can allow, talk to faceless strangers on machines that mine and collect details of every careless utterance. This is how neoliberalism ends: Not with a bang, but whimpering, numbing Dystopian cliche. A design against life.

(Pere Lebrun, A Hungry Gorge)

1931 Alex and Amy married and came to live at 11 Findhorn Street, Riddrie, east Glasgow: one of the earliest and best planned housing schemes built under the Wheatley Act, the only equalitarian measure passed by the first Labour government elected in 1924…

This scheme contained most things its inhabitants could need; two small shopping centres with baker, butcher, fishmonger, grocer, barber, newsagent-tobacconist, sweatshop, fish-and-chip shop, chemist; two Protestant churches, one of architectural merit; a Protestant primary school, splendid public library, a bowling green and allotments; also (on the other side of the Cumbernauld Road) two large cinemas, a Catholic church and primary school. The western half of the scheme was three storey tenements, the eastern was semi­detached villas, but many gardens, a tree-lined boulevard, the nearby park and a craggy knoll crowned with big old trees gave it a suburban, even rural feeling compared to Bridgeton, my parents’ pre-marital home. Bridgeton was a working-class district that was not a slum, but a place where families of any size lived in two-room flats, the largest room being a kitchen with one cold-water tap, a fire range for all heating and cooling, and a bed recess. The other room was usually much smaller. There were communal lavatories on the communal stair, and municipal bathhouses for those who paid to wash in warm water.

(Alasdair Gray, Curriculum Vitae)

People look tireder on this side of things. More aged & used-up. They’re having a harder time of it. It only takes a day or two to realise how privileged & unworn our faces are compared to theirs. Bus station cafe in a suburb of the provincial capital: I was served by a man with a string of saliva hanging from his chin. He had been eating something before I got his attention. In the corner table by the window, one of their transport police was undergoing a kind of role-playing interview, during which he had to demonstrate to the assessor how he would deal with various passenger situations, for instance how would he get someone to stop smoking here in the cafe ? “Here in the cafe ?” “Yes, here. I’m lighting up now, at this table.” Well, that wasn’t a difficult one. He had been taught to end each scenario with calming platitudes like, “Alright mate ? Cheers, mate!”

(M John Harison, Imaginary Fiction)

As one resident put it: “That community has been decimated. It was so callous and I’m truly disgusted.” What is happening here is a classic example of state-sponsored gentrification, of the transfer of public assets into private hands. What is proposed is the demolition of an inner-city housing estate and its replacement with something of much higher density, with far less open space and with no council housing. What there is, is a percentage of “affordable housing” – a vague, legally meaningless phrase that can mean anything from studio flats to key worker homes, but certainly doesn’t guarantee Heygate tenants will be rehoused.

And when they finally are, maybe some time in 2020, what will it look like? Examples are all around of the miserable, yet grinning regeneration tat that awaits. Across the road from the Heygate is a nasty block clad in Trespa, a thin, tinny material used to make concrete frames enclosing tiny flats look bright and shiny; nearby is Strata, a flashy tower with three non-functional wind turbines at the top, aimed squarely at the luxury market. As against the Heygate’s unfashionable simplicity, it’s a building that takes the Bruce Grobbelaar approach to design: making the easy – a tall tower of apartments – look fiendishly difficult; a cluttered and clumsy design that was the deserved winner of Building Design’s Carbuncle Cup award for the worst building constructed in 2010. The Heygate, harsh as it may seem, treats its residents as adults and serves a much-needed social function: keeping low-income families in the centre of London. The regeneration that aims to erase it is marked by the infantile, jolly aesthetic that so often accompanies acts of class-cleansing today. Southwark is becoming Shirley Porter’s Westminster, clad in timber and Trespa.

(Owen Hatherly, After the Heygate estate, a grey future awaits)

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress

Bulldog Spirit!

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THIS POST REPRESENTS THE FIRST COLLABORATION BY THE ILLOGICAL VOLUME/BOBSY DREAM TEAM!

FUCK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT!

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Diggers and Snatchers

PART 1 - 15 Thoughts About Fear and Cradlegrave

PART 2 - Staring Through Her Mother’s Eyes

PART 3 – Ghosts of the Cradlegrave Estate

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Botswana Beast: A lot of folk seem to be wetting themselves about the quality of this episode, which – I mean, I liked it obviously, Pete Campbell being a prime turd and getting an unlikely comeuppance, but it didn’t seem so tightly structured or to have so much of an “aboutness” to it? I guess last ep was maybe – arguably – a bit too on the nose for some of it, this was more about just the characters? (My favourite MM ep is still the first season’s closer, just for frame of reference).

Amypoodle: Oh The Wheel is a very good episode. Very sad, amazing ad pitch, etc. So people are getting excited over this one? I can see that. I mean, I preferred last week’s (despite on the noseness), but that’s a personal thing to do with liking ghost stories/Joan, but Signal 30 was still pretty bloody good. In some ways it was very traditional fare with its alcohol greased dinner party in a suburban dream home and Pete Campbell acting like an ultra dick (which is of course going to be the main focus here, isn’t it?), and it came complete with lots of nods to the past, particularly the first season, so it’s exactly the sort of episode someone who likes Mad Men should like.

But it very definitely was about something: Status. Status and Power.

Illogical Volume: You’re dead on about Status and Power, and it was interesting to see Roger thriving here in comparison to Pete when his young opponent seemed to have him on the ropes for the first three episodes. Roger’s still fucked, of course – like Don said, he’s miserable – but this episode was relatively free of his troubles.

I’ve got to say that I laughed pretty hard when I realised that Lane and Pete were actually going to duke it out at the end. What a sorry attempt to reclaim some status that was!

Compared to the last two episodes, Signal 30 was definitely less overt in its “aboutness” – there were no Lynchian dream sequences or fairytale castle’s here – but there was still a running theme of male frustration that tied Lane, Pete and Ken’s plots together.

It’s all about the endless drip-drip-drip that starts and ends the episode, how “fixing” the tap at the start gives flip-flop fancying Pete Campbell a sense of smarmfaced pride, only for the burst in the middle of the episode, and Don’s effortlessly and traditionally masculine handling of the same (still looking good in a vest, Don!), to cut him right back down.

Ad Mindless: I thought this episode was more about masculinity rather than just status and power. The whole scene in Campbell’s kitchen was a case in point: yes Don does win the race to fix the tap (Pete fumbling around in the toolbox, while Don pulls out his wrench and gets to work – lolz), and wins the admiration of everyone (status), but the nature of the activity itself – plumbing – is non-trivial, not simply because it represents one of the channels by which status and power can be legitimately pursued by men in 1966, but because it’s manly. This episode was as much about male identity as it was about anything else. Yes everyone’s measuring themselves against Don, but Don has his own struggles, underplayed this episode, but definitely there – he’s using different metrics. As Joan reminds Lane, there are good things about not fitting into the macho culture of SCDP, and talents other than those that are traditionally valued. When Lane notes that Joan could do his job the show is highlighting a blurring of gender boundaries that offers other options, options that perhaps a younger Pete Campbell, had he been born a few years later, would be in a position to take advantage of, instead of bashing his head against the traditional model that he so obviously loathes, but doesn’t know how to escape from.

Amypoodle: I do think Signal 30 is about masculinity, yes, but there are many, many instances of Pete going for something else in this episode, something that’s not just about being macho and tough. I think maybe power isn’t the right word. Perhaps it’s validation he and Lane are looking for. Value. The ground is shaky this season and people want to know they slot in somewhere, that they’re useful and respected. Pete’s dinner party is one of the things I was talking about when I mentioned this episode harking back to Mad Men of yesteryear. This is, as Molly says (but this thought doesn’t come from Molly – I don’t read other blogger/articles before posting), Don and Betty’s house circa 1960, and Pete and Trudy are presenting the same show-home front the other couple did. Sure, this is about Pete showing off what he has now, what a good bread winner he is, but it’s also about other things. He’s hoping that if he sees his life reflected through others’ eyes it’ll all be worth it, that everything will suddenly come into focus instead of feeling indistinct, hollow and empty. But, and again this ties into the Mad Mens of times past thing, more than anything else he’s looking for Don’s approval – he’s always been looking for Don’s approval. Trudy didn’t phone Don for herself, but for Pete. She knows, just as we do, that if Don believes in Pete’s new life, then so will he.

Well that’s the plan. Man, other than the one where Betty discovers the truth about Dick Whitman, I’ve never seen an episode where someone cracked so hard.

Ad Mindless: [I need to rewatch the episode tonight, but in the meantime does anyone know what Pete was doing at that school? Seems very pertinent, but I somehow missed it]

Illogical Volume: [Pete was there on some driver's ed shit, no? He's never learned before because he's Manhattan born & raised. There's something about this that ties in with the other challenges to his status as a traditional man - he's not as young and muscly as "Handsome" Hanson, nor as capable as Don, and on top of all that he's old enough to get mistaken for the tutor.]

With regards to this episode being about masculinity, well, you only have to look at how sidelined all of the ladies were this time round to know that there’s something to that.

Got to hand it to Vincent “Son of Angel” Kartheiser, he really knows how to ride Pete’s never-more-obvious sense of insecurity (and really, if we’re talking about “on the noseness” here, has Pete ever been more obviously exposed than in that scene in the brothel, with the bluff control of “You any good at this or not?” wilting away in the face of “You’re my king”) as far as possible out of the realms of the likable. Which, as your point about Joan’s comment to Lane indicates, he really could be, in another show, another performance, another (more cheerfully non-traditional) life.

Getting back to the end-of-episode boxing match, I liked Sean Collins’ point about violence in Mad Men:

…the big difference between Mad Men and Davids Lynch and Chase is that the threat of violence here remains an un-serious one, to be sublimated into dreams in the former case and slapstick in the second.

He makes some smart comments about how the horror-movie tone of the previous episode bleeds through into some of the footage of crashed cars here, real (if sometimes accidental) violence is at the edge of the story from the beginning, which only emphasises the slapstick nature of the violence that erupts at the climax to this plot.

Ad Mindless: Sean points out that Lane and Pete are people who have “no business fighting”, which is pretty much my point. They’re trying to adopt modes that don’t suit them, and they end up hurt and ashamed and feeling worthless.

On the violence, the sniper killer pretty much defines lurking at the edges. I’m sure we all noticed the way Don pounced on the gunman’s name, “Whitman”, but even more interesting, in an obtuse kind of way, was the reference to “shooting pregnant ladies”, a few minutes before Don suggests to Megan that they have a baby. The ghost of Don the lady-killer, the homewrecker, still haunting the show in the same episode where he successfully fights off his demons in the brothel.

Amy: Oh, very cool. Well spotted. The ‘Whitman’ correction made me laugh, and I thought it was nice in a whimsical weird-shit-happens kind’ve way, but I didn’t think to conflate the two men. Yeah, there are connections between these last few episodes, aren’t there? All of them feature the spectres of game-changing, indeed life destroying, monsters – tumors, rapists, gun-men (does Megan count here? Not as something ‘life destroying’, obviously, but in that first episode she still felt like an unknown quantity, potentially threatening, already game-changing) – lurking behind the scenes. Shades of Niles Caulder lecturing Cliff Steele about the catastrophe curve. It’s the same principle, isn’t it, but in different iterations? Perfectly apt background music in a season with a focus on change.

Illogical Volume: It seems to have become traditional for me to drop one Molly Lambert quote per write-up, so this time I’ve decided to up my game with two quotes this time.

Here’s the first:

References to death abound. Cars spin out and slice off limbs, Don doodles a noose in his notebook during a dull meeting, Ken and Pete recreate a shot straight from Hitchcock’s Rope while they talk about how a man could fit inside the giant stereo. (The corpse of Ben Hargrove, perhaps?) References are made to Pete’s gun and University of Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman (WHITMAN!). Mad Men is one to show a gun in the first act and then never make reference to it again, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if somebody blew his or her brains out before the end of this season, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if it were Pete (which is not to say that I wouldn’t be very sad).

Molly’s dead right that thoughts of mortality haunt this episode (this whole season, in fact), but I’m still not convinced that anyone’s actually going to top themselves in the end.

I’m much more openly enchanted by Molly’s aforementioned-by-amy description of Pete and Trudy’s house as a sort of time-delayed Draper household:

I didn’t think there could be a home more claustrophobic than Betty and Henry Francis’s dark mansion, but I hadn’t been to the Campbells’ busy patterned suburban nightmare yet. The plaid sport coats and bright party dresses looked more sickly than sharp. The interiors already seem out of date — ditto Trudy’s full-skirted hostess dress, even though it was fashionable just a few years ago when Betty Draper favored it.

The more I think about it, the funnier I find the idea that Pete’s trying so hard to live Don’s life that he’s taken on some of Don’s misery.

Ad Mindless: Ah, I didn’t pick up on the Rope reference at the time. Wonderful stuff.

The mise-en-scène of the Campbell’s house was vile, wasn’t it? And spotlighted by all those references to how nice everything was.

Illogical Volume: My eyes, they will never forgive me – they thought this was supposed to be one of the beautiful shows!

Molly and Sean seem to disagree about how much bullshit there is in Don’s contempt for Pete. Any thoughts on that?

Ad Mindless: I think Molly’s pretty hard on Don, or at least makes too much of his hypocrisy. I consider hypocrisy to be one of the lesser sins, especially if the hypocrite is imparting a worthwhile message, which is pretty much what we get in Signal 30. Monogamous structures withstanding, Pete’s betrayed the trust of his wife and child, he’s done something bad, it doesn’t matter that the person doing the admonishing is a serial philanderer – except inasmuch as it might get in the way of the message being received – what matters is that Don has a point. Even if Pete’s marriage is a sham, which I’m not sure it is, and he’s miserable and needs to make some radical changes, Don still has a point. Infidelity is unlikely to help with anything, it just runs the risk of making things worse and hurting people. Don’s marriage was a sham, he was miserable, and yet his dalliances were never anything less than a problem, even if they were one of the few channels through which both his pain and his marriage’s emptiness could be vented.

As for where all this puts Don psychologically, the question of whether or not he’s lying to himself is an open one, all we can be sure of is that right now he wants to hold on to what he’s got. Right now he understands that infidelity could kill a relationship that he needs and hurt a woman that he loves, and he doesn’t want to see other people throw away the chances they’ve been given. Of course his judgement is wrapped up in the fact that he “likes Trudy” (whatever that means: as Sean points out Don has always had excellent taste in brunettes), and his own guilt and quite probably a fear that he’ll sin again, but since when has anyone ever done anything from entirely pure motives?

Illogical Volume: I’d agree with all of that, actually. Change & redemption are slippery phantoms (“slippery phantoms” - ?) but even if Don doesn’t think he’s going to be able to grasp them, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong to chase them, or that his advice to Pete was bad advice.

The way that Don’s anger was based on recognition seemed very fatherly to me, and Molly is very good on this later on in her post when she points out that Pete reacts badly to fatherly advice because he wants to treated as Don’s peer.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time in this season that sexy Don Draper has seemed parental away from his kids…

Amypoodle: And while we’re talking about the failure of someone’s bad behaviour to negate the truth of the words coming out of their mouth, I’d like to point out that what Pete says about Don honeymooning may well me on the money. It works both ways.

I’ll read Molly and Sean after we’ve posted, but as for whether or not Don has contempt for Pete, I’m squarely in the ‘it’s complicated’ camp. He absolutely does not straightforwardly despise Peter Campbell.

Illogical Volume: Oh, yeah, sorry – that was sloppy phrasing on my part. I reckon Don feels conflicted about Pete in the same way I’d expect the viewer to feel conflicted, which maybe suggests that there’s something about Don’s relationship with Pete that’s like a Rorschach test for the audience.

Ad Mindless: Show me a viewer who thinks Don straightforwardly dislikes Pete and I’ll show you a viewer who’s not watching the show closely enough. As you guys say, it’s complicated.

Amypoodle: Regardless of whether this episode is redemptive or not, and I think it might be, Pete really is destroyed by the end of it. His dream home and his perfectly shiny preppy head, in fact all the elements of the facade, were heavy with the imminent threat of being smashed to pieces from the moment they appeared. And that’s what happened, of course. The preppy head was cracked wide open, the smirk turned to a dull grimace – Pete’s perky robot voice (is it me or does anyone else think Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones and Alison Brie were cast in their roles because of their ability to speak like people in 1950s/60s TV/cinema?) cracking in that lift: ‘I have nothing, Don.’ Sure, the fight was funny (‘Mr. Toad’!), but it was also horrible watching Pete’s (failed, but very real) attempt at the sublime brought crashing down into the abject. It was as though the memory of those previous scenes in his house suddenly ruptured, the lens cracking. It always was cracked. We were just waiting, morbidly, for the fault lines to show and everything to fall apart.

Pete and Lane don’t want to be these people, the people they feel they’re forced to be by their surroundings, fighting for the pleasure of those who make all these shitty rules (sure, as Don says, maybe it was the only way things could’ve resolved themselves, but there was something terribly Roman about the whole affair nonetheless. In hindsight their boxing match seems tremendously unfair, the onlookers grotesque). They need new identities that they carve out for themselves, not to blindly ape the failed lives that’ve come before them. As you say, Ad, Pete’s in an awkward situation, between two worlds, the old and the new, possibly just out of time for both of them – and if he is, how sad is that? There’s a good and sensitive person in there somewhere and it’s so nice when he finds expression. It was miserable to see him punched to the floor with his bad self (‘We’re supposed to be friends’ broke my heart, bringing back memories of Lane’s ‘It pains me to hear you talk like this. On a personal level I’m rather fond of you.’), but maybe it’ll be the former who gets back in the ring. I really hope so.

Ad Mindless: So Sean C wants to know what we think about the scene in the pub. I don’t imagine you Scottishes, Botswana Beast and Ill Vol, will have too much to say on this but I’m more than happy to oblige.

Predictably I pretty much hated it. The word “bloody” is in there in the, what… the second line of dialogue, and they’re talking about football, and everything from the decor up is semi-comical, slightly tasteless and ugly? A line that runs all the way through “gum on his pubis” and into the boxing match. At least “football” wasn’t substituted for “soccer” – I suppose we can thank God for small accuracies, but not for unavoided gratuitous cliches, eh?

That aside, the absurd by modern day British standards  – as much as there are modern day British standards in this age of devolution – patriotism on display is appropriate for the occasion of England’s ’66 World Cup victory over Germany (non-Brit readers should know that it’s still considered a cultural touchstone today), and I imagine even more so when you take into account the context of an ex-pat community that spent their formative years fighting WWII and their childhoods wallowing in the dying glories of empire.

Amypoodle: Yeah, it’s difficult to judge that scene too harshly because the victory against Germany probably did see the most revolting displays of patriotism one can imagine – stupid hats, everyone shouting at the telly about Huns and whatnot and Union Jack bunting bursting forth from every ceiling like a horrible blue and red weed, and all of this would’ve been especially virulent in ex-pat land, as it still is today (just ask Spain). Having said that, I think Lane was probably playing the role of a Little Englander. His whole thing is that he wants to reinvent himself in the New World, and while he may’ve been shocked by just how much he wanted to be British there in that pub surrounded by his fellow countrymen, that’s play acting of a kind too, isn’t it? Saying that, though, all of this could just be me apologising for the usual awfulness we get whenever the British show up in an American TV show.

Illogical Volume: As a Scottish, I think I’m officially required to roll my eyes at any invocation of England’s 1966 world cup victory (“Cup of what?” indeed), because Jesus – not that again!

The “Britishness” of this scene scorched my devolved, Scottish eyeballs, but this overload of Empire has lots of connotations for this West coast boy that have nothing to do with Mad Men and everything to do with sectarian bullshit, so I’ll probably shut up now.

Amypoodle: Roger’s “Cup of what?” line is interesting though, and not just because of the cliche about Americans being oblivious to the biggest sporting event/sport in the world, but because it’s another example of Lane not fitting in. The greatest British victory since D-Day and it doesn’t even register with these people. It gains Lane no traction whatsoever and it underlines the casual arrogance and insularity of the culture, work based or otherwise, that he’s so keen to be a part of. But at the point where Roger says it Lane’s too buoyed up with excitement to notice. Poor old Lane.

England haven’t won a World Cup since, so it’s especially poignant actually – the last defiant gasps of Empire and nobody cares, in fact they don’t even notice.

The more I think about it, the more I’m fascinated by the constant reminders of the past this episode. It’s there in the brief nod to the upcoming Nixon campaign when Bert’s massaging(!) Roger’s shoulders, the resurgence of Kenny’s writing career as an issue and the reference to Pete’s declined dinner invite to Don and his stupid gun, as well as being echoed in the whole dinner party segment. Given that there’s so much of it I’d hazard it’s intended to do more than simply reinforce the verisimilitude. We’ve already mentioned that Don is seeing his own trajectory mapped across Pete’s current life choices, so that’s a thing, but it’s also worth noting that this season and the season before it has seen a jettisoning of the World of Mad that was and in some ways I think Signal 30′s concerned with reminding us of how close but distant this world is, how, as I said before, you can feel it round the corner, almost touch it, but in the end you can’t go home again, as well as pointing out the cyclical quality of history – that there’s nothing new under the sun, and how our lives, our hopes and fears and frustrations, aren’t so different from those of the generation before us. This is different from the simple recycling of plots evident in most soap operas, because in Mad Men it serves a thematic and philosophical purpose. And we’re presented with a tantalising What If? situation, aren’t we? How will Pete deal with the same challenges Don faced? Will he arrive home later and later each night, neglect his family, descend into adulterous frenzy….? Whatever, Molly’s comment about Trudy’s outdated fashion sense echoed my thoughts when I was watching the episode, but because I’m hazy on the 60′s sartorial timeline I couldn’t be sure if my suspicions were right. Thinking about it now, it’s evidence that Pete is out of time. He’s trying to duplicate and locate (FIND!) himself in a world that’s past, a ghost world. The horrible garishness of the Campbel household makes sense through this lens. It’s Don and Betty’s life with everything whacked up all the way in the mix. It’s desperate. It clashes with itself. it’s too loud, too brittle, and about to burst.

The other, and I think most interesting, point about the disinternment of all this history is how it relates to Pete’s behaviour this episode more generally. I’m a Pete apologist, tbh. I feel he’s made tremendous progress since the little shit of season one. But this episode really shook all that to the core. Much of what Pete got up to in Signal 30 is pretty much indefensible (even his protectionist attitude vis a vis his clients, which seemed so imminently justifiable in previous episodes, came across as miserliness), and we should’ve known what was coming when the spectres of Pete’s past (again, the invite, the gun, and also his unmentioned but nevertheless very real jealousy of Kenny’s writing success) began to creep in around the dinner table. Because what we saw this time was the old Pete, the guy we hoped had disappeared for good. It was quite a blow to see him back, snorting and scoffing and acting out his insecurities in the shittiest ways imaginable. I like that Weiner and co, while concerned with progression (see Joan last ep), are unafraid to let their characters revert to their worst selves occasionally – because it’s real. What pisses me off is the knowledge that there are some dumber viewers out there who will be all ‘I told you so!’. This episode proves nothing, it’s a portrait of someone at their lowest, Pete may learn from his mistakes this time and be even better in the future, but even if he doesn’t I don’t think this is a show that doesn’t believe he could.

Something else bears mentioning here: this is the first time Pete’s slept with a prostitute, as well as the first time we’ve seen him try to pick up a teenager, and all of this occurs, rapid fire, over the space of an hour. As I’ve been saying, this episode represents a explosion of pain and frustration, not, as some people probably believe, yet another black mark in a long line of transgressions. Don Draper spent three years commiting an infidelity an episode (sometimes more) – and he also tried to pick up Anna’s niece, remember? – but he doesn’t receive half as much ire because he’s handsome and pitches well. Shit, even Lane’s been with a call girl. Pete is relatively tame compared to many of his colleagues.

Illogical Volume: Just as a brief aside, since you mentioned Burt Cooper, I want to throw a little shout out to Roger’s “Burt speaks British” quip – mark that up as +1 for Cooper as walking joke!

I’d agree that it hurt to see Pete Campbell revert so fully and spectacularly to type here. Just a few entries ago  we were discussing whether he could accurately be described as a “disaster of a man” anymore and trying to work out how far he’d moved on, and now all we can talk about is how little he’s changed.

There’s a double sting in this tail, I think – Mad Men is definitely a show in which Pete, Joan, Don and friends are allowed the possibility of change, and of progress, but there’s never any illusion here about how easy it is to slip back, and I think Pete’s performance here is like the ghost of a possible future for Don too.

(MUST RESIST TERRIBLE “DONS OF FUTURE PAST” JOKE. MUST! RESIST! SHIT! JOKE!)

Amypoodle: Absolutely!

I’ve watched the episode a couple of times now – Mad Men is so much more excellent on second viewing – and it definitely goes to great pains to present Don and Roger as especially blessed. We’re told Roger is miserable, but we don’t really see it this time around (except in his exchange with Kenny – he’s taking out his stress there, isn’t he? Cue massage! How traumatic it all must’ve been for him! How stressful to work with all these ingrates!). What we do see is Roger the slick as fuck accounts guy, reminding us that even though he nearly killed the new agency last season, he was born to do his job. Perhaps he is being lazy, perhaps he should’ve pushed Lane into letting him come along to his meeting with Jaguar, but, regardless, we know that the advise he gives Lane is solid and that for him all of this is second nature (I always felt trepidatious about Lane, though. One: because: telly, and I quickly realised he was running the same script as Pete. Two: because people like Roger don’t necessarily realise that even though their approach is spot on, sometimes this stuff can only work for a certain sort of person, one with oodles of natural charm). The ease with which Roger comported himself this episode made for a noticeable change. Don likewise. This isn’t existentialist Don with his self hatred and ennui, but Don Draper Man About Town, who loves his skyscrapers and big city living, who all the guys want to be, all the babes adore and who can fix Real. Life. Taps. I like how this ties in with what Ad was saying about realism last time around. Mad Men doesn’t portray a straightforwardly objective reality – in this episode, even though we spent a bit of time with Don, for instance, we were nudged just slightly into another perspective, the perspective of Pete and Lane, where he and Roger are just that little bit more heroic.

Illogical Volume: That’s a tremendous point, actually. The realism of this show is subtly pliable, as shown by everything from Don’s uneasy dreams in Mystery Date to the gloomy fog that seems to hang over Betty’s fairy tale life in Tea Leaves, and it pays to keep this in mind while you’re watching, lest you mistake this reality for a true one.

Don and Roger definitely come off a lot more carefree here than they have in the last couple of episodes, but it’s all a question of emphasis – nothing has actually changed for either of them in the space between episodes, aside from the fact that Don seems to have shifted that nasty bug of his.

Amypoodle: We’ve barely discussed the third guest at the dinner party. Just watch Kenny while Pete desperately flails around in his tool box trying to prove himself the equal of Don – like a writer he just hangs back and observes. By placing Don and Pete in the centre of the action, Kenny is easily overlooked by the viewer, just as the option he presents is easily overlooked by the Petes and Lanes of the MM world, but his mingled awe and fascination is a very real, perfectly plausible and valid response. He’s got nothing to prove – he can just sit back and enjoy the show. And it’s so great that, even though for a ew minutes there Roger forces us to believe that not playing the game isn’t a real possibility at SCDP, when we cut to the final scene the only thing Kenny’s finished with is Ben Hargrove. This is this episode’s rebuttal to Pete’s pitiful ‘I have nothing, Don.’, because it’s clear that what Pete doesn’t have is something he doesn’t really want. Kenny has something precious, another life he can retreat into whenever he wants – a secret life and passion that all the subjugated sex workers in the world can’t hold a candle to. There are these things out there, but Pete has to stop looking in all the wrong places for them. He has to stop struggling for a moment, take stock, and ask himself what he really needs. Not a gun, not a miniature orchestra like in the story, not to be Don Draper, but something true and real. He may never find it, but I think at the end there Weiner and co are letting us know that these things are a possibility. It’s not hopeless. And of course one of the ways Kenny gets there is by swallowing as opposed to shoring up his pride. He’s happy to convince everyone his successful writing career is over, completely rejecting the macho competition favoured at his agency.

Anyone got any thoughts on why he makes the transition from SF to realism, though?

Illogical Volume: I like the way you’ve just imagined Pete’s new life as sort of sci-fi scenario (“WHAT IF… PETE CAMPBELL WAS DON DRAPER?!!”) just before asking why Ken switches back from sci-fi to realism at the end.  To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why Ken changes his style up, maybe he’s just trying to distinguish his new pen name from his old one, testing what kind of suit he can wear, or maybe the Pete Campbell scenario was just so loaded with metaphor that he didn’t feel that it required a shift in genre.

Ad Mindless: Or maybe he’s getting real about his writing career. Who the fuck knows? Can’t fanwank this one into something particularly interesting.

Illogical Volume: Aye, fair dos, this question is definitely far less important than the fact that Ken wins by (A) not being a dick, and (B) not trying so hard to be Donald Bloody Draper.

Amypoodle: I think maybe it’s like that bit at the end of the first volume of The Invisibles where Brian Malcolm is sacrificed so that Mr. Six might live. It speaks to the idea of reinvention – the sense that the old Pete Campbell is finished, even if he doesn’t know it (I know he certainly feels it!), and if that man in that skin wants to pick himself up off the floor and meaningfully carry on, he needs to switch the script. Switch genres. No more unrealistic dreams. Life isn’t a metaphor. You can’t be Pete Campbell pointing to Don Draper. It doesn’t work like that.

In light of all this, the episode’s title, Signal 30, the American police code for a trauma case, is particularly telling. Trauma is defined by Wikipedia as:

‘an often serious and body-altering physical injury’

Pete’s old ‘body’ is useless, maimed.

(Jeez, even my cursory search for Signal 30′s meaning turned up a few hits with people waffling about suicide! A character may or may not off themself this season, but you don’t need that to happen for the thanatic symbolism to make sense. All the car crashes and nooses fit perfectly with the events of this episode, and this season’s themes thus far.)

Pete is a ghost when he leaves his office. ‘Ben Hargrove is dead’ – he died in the car wreck of that dinner party, the head on collision with all that office realpolitik and busted up self delusion.

Long live Dave Algonquin!

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GET OUT OF THE ROAD YOU LITTLE FOOLS!

IN TODAY’S EAR-SCALDING INSTALLMENT: The Beast finds his life has taken on lashings of fully painted Euro-sauce, while Lactus drags his cosmic chassis from the sofa to the table!!! The Beast debuts his paean to internet fuckwittery ‘Steve Dave is Online’. SILENCE! News comes and goes like a ship in the night, but not before the Greatest Jingle of All Time makes an appearance.

Finally the pusillanimous pairsome get onto the important business of comics. They discuss America’s Got Powers from top British TV man, and all round alpha-nerd Jonathan Ross, SAGA no.2 from BKV and Fiona Staples. Lactus talks about Avengers Assemble and Avenging Spiderman and Avenging Avenginators vs X-Avengers (one of those is a fake, eagle-eyes!). Mark Millar and Dave ‘The Rave’ Gibbons’ new spy tale the Secret Service is chewed and digested; Frankenstein Agent of SHADE is a thing, Casey & Fox’s Haunt is too. Saucer County and the Shade – these are the things that little boys are made of… Lactus has a less yellow experience with Fantastic Four and then the Beast tackles the baffling but kinda brilliant Glamourpuss from Dave Sim in You Should Have Known Better.

All this and the second coming of Tupac Shakur? Surely not (don’t call me Shirley) I didn’t I said ‘surely’ (Oh. my mistake) That’s okay Shirley.

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Don’t forget to click below for the SILENCE! gallery…

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If you’re going to talk about Cradlegrave, you’ve pretty much got to face up to this image at some point:

Stripped of context it’s just a doll, just a tired horror-movie prop, a signifier of terror rather than something actually terrifying. In context however, this dull prop seems far more potent:

The sense of surprise, that feeling of “what the fuck is that face doing in the middle of this conversation?”, is enough to give the image some fresh charge here.  The last panel of the sequence hints at the answer, but for the duration of the two panels before it you could be forgiven for thinking you were in another, more Lynchian kind of horror story.

Still, even the most bewildering emanations in Cradlegrave trace back to fleshy, non-Lynchian sources, so it’s just as well that there’s more to the this sequence than  lifeless eyes and startling incongruity.

Look into these eyes, and tell me what you see…

Is this a flash of what’s to come or just a bit of scattered bit of wreckage, the battered possession of a battered girl? Well, handily enough, it’s both! This panel is a premonition of the imminent collision between the car Shane and Cal are riding in and a young girl called Keira, a collision that leaves the girl in a wheelchair and puts the boys in the sights of her drug-dealing dad, Tozzer.

It’s worth noting how blankly terrified this little harbinger of the future looks, especially when compared to the withered face of Mary, that other sign of things to come on the Cradlegrave estate…

The doll’s wide open eyes acquire a resonance beyond the generic when compared to Mary’s barely-open peepers. Neither picture is exactly optimistic, but taken together they suggest a before and after portrait of suffering, one that moves from inert terror into crumpled half-life before becoming something else, something other(ed).

In the first part of this series, when I said that “Cradlegrave is a book full of dazed, tough, frightened faces”, I negected to mention that these two images show where those faces might be heading and where they’ve been…

…but maybe I was just trying to be kind, trying not to emphasise what could happen to said “dazed, tough, frightened faces” when the toughness gets worn away.

So: the doll’s stare begins to look cruelly prophetic when Tozzer decides that he can’t stand the way that Keira (the doll’s owner/his daughter) is looking at him, with eyes that belong to her mother and not to him, and glues her eyelids shut to avoid the sight.

Keira’s final scene in Cradlegrave shows her squirming, immobile and unseeing as her abusive dad is offered up as breakfast to Mary’s litter. You might think that she’d be better off not seeing this scene play out in front of her, but unfortunately her other senses are still working, and her expression throughout this scene seems just a little bit too much like either a follow up or a precursor to the doll’s face to me:

The more I think about it, the more I think that the image of the doll’s face is not only the axis on which the whole story turns (the car crash brings the non-horror aspects of the plot up to a boil alongside the horror elements, and Keira’s final scene works as a revelation of what’s left when both plots have burned away) but also Cradlegrave in microcosm.  The way it appears out of nowhere at the bottom of that page, a bewildered alien presence that seems to clash with everything else around it, reminds me of something Bobsy said in the comments to my first Diggers and Snatchers entry:

I think the way Bagwell’s art slips into the computer-rendered images creates a pleasingly horrid but appropriate dissonance. It creates a point of stress between the chaacters and their environment, which is kind of what the whole story’s about.

While I still don’t take much pleasure from the way Edmund Bagwell‘s characters jar with their backgrounds, I know a good visual metaphor when I have it pointed out to me, and I’ve come around to Brother Bobsy’s thinking of late.

To be honest, it’s currently hard for me to look at this sequence…

..without thinking of this:

What do you think Shane sees when he looks down into the otherworldly estate he calls home? A lot of things, probably, but I reckon that if you could give them an abstract form then they might just look right back at him like this off-centre phantom:

If you stare at this sequence long enough you might even come to realise that the same dissonance between character and landscape that is reflected in the doll’s placement at the bottom of the page also mirrors the clash between grim Northern realism and oblique fantasy that characterises Cradlegrave. It’s all there in the eyes, if you want it to be:

Still, as I’ve already said, both this image and the book’s horror element are defiantly non-abstract in nature. They both have their place in this poverty-ravaged environment – both are their environment in their own stark ways – but that doesn’t mean that having faced up to them, you’re done with Cradlegrave.  It just means you’ve started to figure out how you fit in there…

…or rather, how you don’t.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Diggers and Snatchers

PART 1 - 15 Thoughts About Fear and Cradlegrave

PART 2 - Staring Through Her Mother’s Eyes

PART 3 – Ghosts of the Cradlegrave Estate

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Amy: This episode wrapped its themes around itself so tightly the drama could have suffocated, but in the end it never got so arch that it failed to pack a punch even though as a construction it was pretty close to immaculate and, so, highly conspicuous.

Ad: Absolutely. It was testimony to the fact that Mad Men is only superficially realistic – realism is never so overtly self-conscious of its themes, or given to blurring the lines between dream and reality, for that matter.

Amy: It’s enjoyable to watch Weiner and co unpacking the theme of change in all these different ways, isn’t it? In Mystery Date it was all about the intrusion of an unknown element into the characters’ lives – a date with someone they didn’t know, a situation they couldn’t plan for. Basically they’re all Cinderella in Michael’s commercial, aren’t they, turning round to confront the stranger? We could break it down every which way, but that’s just a bit too anal for me. I think we should just play it by ear and discuss the threads we liked most.

Actually, no, we’re presented with two possible narratives, aren’t we? That the stranger is Prince Charming come to sweep us away from all the drudgery, or that he’s still Prince Charming, but he’s a rapist and a murderer and we’re fucked.

Illogical Volume: Aye, like Molly Lambert said:

The fairy tale that Ginzo pitched was Cinderella, but the psycho-sexual subtext of “Mystery Date” was all Bluebeard. What’s under the bed? Who’s tied up in the basement? You murdered all those other women in cold blood; I’m supposed to believe you won’t do it to me?

And trust mad men to blur the difference there, eh?

Amypoodle: I have to say I smiled when I realised Greg was Joan’s mystery date. As Gail said at the start, ‘it’s the idea of coming home and finding a hole in his life and sticking his elbow through it… until he gets all the way in’

 Since he’s been gone she’s been through that most unknowable (for a man anyway) of all female experiences, childbirth, and then single motherhood, andhe’s been at war – and there’s a new person between the two of them making the distance even harder to overcome. But I think the problem goes deeper than their recent separation. They’ve never really known each other, have they? Or at least Greg’s never really known Joan (I think perhaps she knows him all too well), not Joan as she’s happiest, in her role at SCDP, the strong, ultra-capable, unflappable Mother of Mad(i)sons. And in the end of course that’s just a fucking disaster, because he could never have that Joan, he could only *take* her, and that Joan, the Joan that’s been on pause for their entire relationship, sacrificed for the security of the 50s nuclear dream family, is the real one. It could really only end one way, couldn’t it, for this Prince Charming? He always was a dream, a dream I’m bloody pleased Joan’s got herself out from underneath. I mean, he’s got everything you’d want hasn’t he? But scratch that: he’s the rapist afterall.

Just realised the mystery date in question also refers to when Greg returns to active service. You could unpack him forever wrt Henry’s mother’s retelling of the Chicago Nurse Murders. That line about how they probably knew their killer. That’s Greg. That tension right there. You let him the guy in because he got that reassuring smile you know from the movies, the hero’s smile, and he’s dressed in familiar clothes, but he’s…. someone else. Someone you don’t want in your life at all.

Illogical Volume: You’re definitely right about that square-jawed monster Greg. I always find myself squirming when he has a scene with Joan, more so in this episode than before – I guess the knowledge that he’s both rapist and cuckold comes loaded with the potential for violence, no matter how reassuring his smiles try to be.

Joan’s always been very good at being what she’s supposed to be, it’s what gives her the (limited, by what’s “acceptable“) power she has in the office and it’s what’s limited her in her relationship with Greg. Of course being what you’re supposed to be is never enough, can never be enough because it all comes down to “I’ve got my orders, you’ve got yours” in the end. I didn’t expect us to get from there to “I want you to go and never come back”, let alone to “you’re not a good man and you never were” and the following reminder of his pre-marital rape though. Fucking hell!

Like you, I’m glad Joan’s made this move, but Greg still worries me on a fundamental level.

Amy: Joan gets to the meat of it when she tells him she’s sick of trying to make him feel like a man. That’s Greg’s problem all over, that insecurity. It’s the reason he rapes his wife to be, why he goes to Vietnam and why he decides he wants to stay there. Even from a practical point of view Greg isn’t husband material. He can’t physically be with his wife for fear of being emasculated. This guy can’t bring up a child.

Illogical Volume: Joan’s perfect, practiced poise as she greeted Greg at the doorway was particularly gutting in this context. Really, honestly, this fucker’s enjoyed the “happy, obedient wife” pretense for far too long.

Ad: Gail’s line about sticking his elbow through brought to mind images of Jack Torrance. Forced entry. Probably wasn’t intended, but Greg is firmly associated with unpleasant things in my mind, and in an episode shot through with phantom strangers, serial killers, midnight stalkers…

It was great to see Joan kick him out not only because he’s about as close as Mad Men gets to having a villain (his comment about “Negroes in Saigon” being “plenty brave” was typical of Mad Men. We’re not allowed to get too comfortable with Greg the monster, however much we’d like to), but because for me Greg gives an outlet to the worst excesses of Joan, or at least the aspects of her character that I like the least. The subserviant Joan, the studiously demure Joan, the Joan who wants to live in the past.

Amy:That’s what I think’s really important here, not that Joan dumps Greg, but what it means. So many of us were disappointed at the end of last season when Don chose Megan over Faye, we saw it as Weiner’s gloomy prognosis for the possibility of real change, but change really is afoot wrt the female leads. Peggy’s not who she was at the start of the show and neither, it seems, is Joan. Mystery Date could mark the beginning of a new life for this character, where she’s got her priorities straight. She’s tried the dream home on for size and found it wanting, now it’s time for her to get back to SCDP and do what she loves.

Illogical Volume: There was something very gothic about this episode, wasn’t there? I think Don’s description of Betty and Henry’s castle as “that haunted mansion” was more than just a funny line in this respect. Sally’s mystery date with Henry’s mum was particularly charged with this atmosphere - granny’s early attempts to tut over the news every five seconds while keeping it from Sally were amusing, but by the time you got to her pills and her “burglar alarm” via the warmest description of child abuse this side of Ghostface Killah the arrival or a murderous rapist seems almost inevitable.

See, also: Don’s murderous dream logic and the genuine confusion on his face when he realises that his wife was the one who was with him the night before. Don’s never been particularly good at resisting the urge to medicate through sex, as Molly Lambert would have it, and it’s jarring to see him project his anger over this outward, which… I mean, you’ve just got to note the visual doubling of the body under Don’s bed with the image Sally under the seat at the end of the episode.

Amy:Oh yeah, you couldn’t help but pick up on the doubling. It kind’ve made me laugh and quiver at the same time. Ties in neatly with the date(rape) thing, Sally being drugged up – rohypnoled – by her mysterious stranger.

And well spotted, the haunted mansion ref’s definitely more than just a throwaway line.

Ad: To go back to my earlier point about the borderline between reality and dream, I liked what Sean Collins had to say about the Madchen Amick’s spooky reappearance in Don’s bedroom

“ability to disrupt Don’s life with her ever-increasing bluntness and directness had an uncanny air to it that went beyond “oh, it’s just a dream.” She literally only entered the story due to a physical separation between Don and Megan; she disappeared from Don’s apartment through a crack in the wall — that Gothic staple, a secret passage, one which may or may not exist in real life; she gave Matthew Weiner the opening for his most direct riff on David Lynch yet.”

Amy:You know, even though I knew it was a dream, when Don leaned over to check under his bed after his fever broke I felt really tense and I could’ve sworn I saw something poking out from beneath it.

Uh….

I’ve just checked it.

There is!

There is something under there! Or the suggestion of something. Have we slipped into Labyrinth territory, where you bring a little bit of the fantasy back with you? New readers don’t know us, but just to say that the Mindless are unconcerned with intentionality when it comes to this sort of thing. I prefer the idea that, yes, we should still feel that creeping feeling. What *happened* in that bedroom was so visceral – Don huffing and straining, Andrea in close up, choking, her body kicked under the bedspread like a unwanted bit of clutter Don can’t make room for – that we can’t expect it to just disappear in a puff of smoke in the daylight. We musn’t expect it to. Do any of you remember the episode where Don passes out while getting a blow job only to wake up with a new woman in his bed and to the chilling discovery, courtesy of a phone call from Betty, that he’s lost a whole day? I’ve nearly been there, it’s horrible – the sudden realisation that the lulling fade to black never denoted sleep, but the complete loss of control. Mad Men always goes in close in these scenes, close on the hot bodies and the sweat. This episode was no exception. Andrea leaning over Don, over us, is like a suffocating blanket we want to throw off but are too weak. The sickness, Don’s sickness, the sickness he can’t get enough of and being reminded of, is still heavy in that room. Mad Men’s excellent at fever states.

And more slowness! I’ve only just realised it was Madchen Amick! My g/f and I have been watching Twin Peaks every night and I still missed it! It really adds to the gothic horror/dream reality vibe, actually. Fictions overlapping. The witchiness of Lynch.

Anyway, Don’s plotline weaves in and out of the Chicago Murders story in really interesting ways. There’s that inversion again, where we’re led to believe he’s the damsel in distress, only to see him murder his old flame at the end. Andrea comes across as really predatorial, doesn’t she? The moment when you realise it’s not Megan but her soothing Don’s fevered brow is proper horror movie. Interestingly, I’ve just rewatched the beginning again and just before Andrea appears – when Megan makes some space between herself and Don’s cold in the lift – Don says something to the effect of, ‘Fine, if you think you’ll be safe over there by yourself….’, and isn’t this just what we’d expect in a horror film, the couple, separated, become prey? But this is a modern gothic horror and so the twist is that it’s the man who’s the victim. And then the whole thing contorts again, and he’s not. I can’t help wondering if this is the way Don would like to see himself, as the victim of all the women he’s fucked. And if he’s in that movie, if these women really are vampires skulking behind the drapery of the princess’s four poster bed, then he’s right to get out the garlic. Only this is all bullshit. He’s the one responsible. No one else.

My g/f had a different take on everything, though – not that Don sees himself as having been the victim, but that he’s the victim now. Now that he’s commited and open, everything he wasn’t with Betty, he’s suddenly vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable in ways he’s never been before – genuinely terrified of losing what he’s finally found, an intimacy where everything is laid bare, an honest relationship. We’ve heard talk this season of the nicer, kinder Don Draper, as though it’s a weakness, something that’s happened to him, that he’s caught like a cold, but maybe it’s something far more conscious, something he’s entered into with his eyes open and prepared to guard so jealously that any threat to it makes him murderous.

Whatever, he really does not want to be having affairs. Or if he does, he really hates himself for it.

That dream is such a confused thing, it suggests so much while playing its cards very close to its chest. Be interesting to see how things play out. It’s the first time the spectre of infidelity has reared its head this season, isn’t it? Speaking of hauntologies, it’s been the thing haunting the margins of the first two (three, depending on who’s keeping score) episodes. The stuff no-one wants to look at. This episode had Don and the viewers feeling its hot breath on their necks. The tension between its absence and presence is quite delicious actually.

Illogical Volume:From the lift scene onwards, this episode was really good at presenting Don in two lights at once, as both the promiscuous stud and as a weezy, woozy older man. The space between Don and Megan in the lift was filled by both of these possibilities in the end, you could almost see the air between them thickening at the journey went on.

Amy: you’re spot on about the old man thing. Don’s age is a theme of this season, so that reading was always going to be there, but I think it was amplified by Betty’s cancer scare in Tea Leaves. The characters’ mortality can’t help but be on our minds after an episode like that. I half expected Don to wind up with cancer by the hour’s end.

Ad: Completely agree that this was one hell of a follow up to Tea Leaves. Don’s illness locks the two shows together. Deborah Lipp describes the amplification nicely in her episode recap:

“The dirty, violent, erotically-charged, drug-fueled, violent, violent, violent world is encroaching, and none of us can hide from it. Not Sally, not Pauline with her knife, not Don in his fever, not Dawn on Don’s couch”

But let’s remember, Don’s fever is part of the threat!

Illogical Volume: And you’re dead right, Amy, about the way Don seems to view himself (as a victim), and it’s also worth noting that Megan seems relatively clear-eyed about what he really is, or at least, what he has been. She’s got at least some idea of his history, so you can hardly blame her for being wary of what she can’t see here, despite Don’s weak assurances (“You don’t have to worry about me“).

Peggy had quite a strange episode here, taking advantage of Roger’s blatant desperation (“like a man“, maybe?) early on, before heading off with Dawn for their mystery date. Contrasting her seeming confidence in those early scenes, where she was busting balls like a pro (“Fly over the picket line, with Mohawk“), with her awkwardness in the later parts of the episode, you see the contrast between playing a part and feeling comfortable with it looming into view again, yet another absence made present.

This particular plot strand wasn’t as charged with the uncanny as some of the others in this episode – the tensions here were all very real, very social – but by the end Peggy’s still sweating as though she was in a horror movie with Don, possibly because she was feeling a different sort of breath on her shoulders. The dynamics here were maybe a little obvious, what with Peggy’s well-intenioned attempts at solidarity inevitably leading to self-reflection/self-obsession – “Go ahead, you can talk.” / “I’m trying to.”

Was the whole thing with her looking nervously at the purse at the end overkill, maybe, or did her unintentional racism need to come to a boil at the end of the episode?

Amy:Maybe it did. I think it’s difficult to imagine just how tense these sorts of situations must’ve been back then. I think what’s interesting about the way Peggy’s date ended up- awkward mumbling, bed vacated before she woke up, like a bad one night stand – is that all of this might not have signified anything at all. We just don’t know. But it’s Peggy’s hypersensitivity wrt her communication that’s the issue. We’ve all been there, when we just don’t know if we’ve made a massive gaffe. It was very well articulated. particularly the note on the handbag. An accident or……

Botswana Beast: Peggy Olsen Makin’ Dollars [POMD]

I find it really difficult because you’ve covered – and better, I didn’t see the Sally/Don synecdoche, for example, and I don’t like to watch things twice immediately – many of the bases I would have…

I mean, to me, I’d shift the accent, the inciting incident for ‘Ginzo’ (he is cool, he could be annoying, like Chachi, I’m always hyperconscious of Mad-Men-AS-TV refiltered, instagrammed, whatever) talking about Snow White was obviously the multiple rape-murder. At the end the rapist fuck gets his comeuppance: Bye Greg, you shit.

And the past and shit: cool facts from ex-Barbelither Flyboy here

Illogical Volume: lol @ that Peggy Olsen gif.

Amy: Peggy’s story initially sets her up as the victim, and in years gone by (the 1960s?) she would have been, the young, creamy white copywriter set upon by the jealous, thieving negress, but as we know it’s her tall dark stranger who’s the real victim here. Her story’s similar to Don’s in that the presumed vulnerable party turns out to be the aggressor. Sure, Dawn doesn’t wind up dead like Andrea, but she must’ve wound up feeling pretty shitty after a night of conversation focused on race, complete with well meaning but misguided comparisons between her own situation and her date’s (who, it turns out, is still beating the ‘I can’t do many of things they can’t do’ drum), and Peggy’s general overeagerness to make a new, exotic friend (or at least acting in way that could, if Dawn’s day had been bad, be interpreted that way). Dawn begins this segment of the story, just as black people began the 1960s, as the monstrous, shadowy other, but the irony is that in the end she’s as conspicuous – as exposed – and therefore as vulnerable as it’s possible to be. The irony’s there in her name. Sure, her skin’s dark, but she’s got a spotlight on her at all times.

Teyonah Parris is brilliant in this episode actually. She’s really convincing as someone used to negotiating the tricky minefield of colour – gracious, accommodating, but somewhere inside oh so weary of it all.

Illogical Volume:  Parris definitely conveys a lot in those scenes through a couple of small looks and inflections. The more I think about it, the more I like the conclusion to that plot – something about the ambiguity of whether that note was left there on purpose really adds to the sting of it, and contrasts nicely with the confused revelation that there was nothing under the bed in Don’s story and the search for the Sally at the end of her story. The whole episode dissolves in a haze of wounded confusion, doesn’t it?

It occurs to me that the song that plays over the credits provides a link to a work that attacks the same themes as Mad Men through a poetic mix of archive footage, brightly coloured text, and pop music - Adam Curtis’ It Felt Like a Kiss. 

Which… well, if you want to talk about new dreams collapsing into old nightmares, you could always talk about that (I did, here).

Amy: Getting back to Don and Andrea, I’ve only just noticed that like the nurse in the story she (along her real life echo, Sally) ends up under the bed. God, how slow am I? This episode really is a perfectly functioning mechanism. All that messy guilt (barely) tidied away. We’re just praying the corpse doesn’t reanimate Halloween style.

Illogical Volume:Ah Amy, you don’t mean to but you’re almost pushing me to make a stupid statement that it’s the ghost of the nurse’s story that’s haunting Betty’s mansion and Don’s dreams, but that it’s the ghost of RACISM that’s haunting Peggy’s apartment.

(Though, on that topic, note that this story is raised then dismissed when Peggy discovers Dawn in the office at night.)

Michael Ginsberg still feels like he hasn’t settled into a role yet in this episode, which is good, because that seems to be the case both in the show and in the office. So you get him freaking out at the monstrous smirks of his colleagues, doing good work in the office and then overshadowing Don while laying out the theme of the episode, and reacting to a threat from his boss like it was friendly advice (“He’s such a decent guy” - haha, really?).

There wasn’t much time for office politics in this episode, so the little bits of it we did see felt like a relief, even when they had their own sort of tension.

Amy:Yeah, you get the feeling young Peggy would’ve responded like Michael, don’t you? See? See what I mean about Peggy evolving into someone disappointing? Okay, her old self rears its head eventually (‘He’s right.’), but for a minute there…. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more examples of this tension inside Pegs this season. I know some people will want to construct it as Peggy trying to fit in versus the REAL Peggy, but I think it’s more complicated than that. She’s a hardarsed copywriter who’s had to claw her way up the ladder, jettisoning a baby on the way, and she’s also a moral person who picks a counter-cultural activist for a boyfriend. Both are equally true. Peggy’s large, she contains multitudes.

Ad: For an episode that did such a good job of soaking itself in horror I thought there were some brilliant laughs. Ginsberg’s inappropriately over-eager “and I’ll see you later!” to Don, for one. Roger’s latest bout spectacular incompetence had me in incredulous hysterics – what the Christ did he think he was doing? Collapsed, probably hungover, on some absurdly expensive reclining chair juxtaposed with him, twenty seconds later, prancing anxiously towards Peggy’s office. And what does he do? He offers the only person in the world who can come to his rescue ten fucking dollars.

God knows where he’s going this season. It’s very tempting to slip back into the perennial, he’s gonna die or commit suicide mode, but as I said in last week’s comments, that stuff just feels too obvious, too easy for Mad Men. To bring in the third Roger related cliche: hey, Joan’s single again… and she’s got his kid…

That shot of Henry glancing up from the knife he’s just pulled from his Mum’s drugged hands, his face totally consumed by “THE FUCK?!” was good for a chuckle or five too.

Amy: LOL!! I didn’t notice that on my first or second viewing, but I’ve gone back and checked and it’s really funny. Speaking of Joan, and lighter things, that’s the last mystery date, isn’t it, Joan and her baby? We’ve had all the creepy stuff and the confusion and what we’re left with in the end is a mother and her little boy. Who knows what he’ll be like? Will they get on? Share the same interests?

As Henry says, there are no fresh starts, just as there are no happy endings, but it’s a new day and life goes on.

What a stunning bit of telly this was.

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SILENCE! #10 IS NOW BACK UP. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, LOYAL FANS!

We are 10 today! That’s right SILENCE! Has reached double figures…look at it! Ahhh! Look at it’s cute little face….ahhhh…

Okay, enough.

In this episode Lactus continues to monitor the South Coast from his swinging cosmo-lounge, while the Beast reveals the details of his new Prestige Life. Not only that but Lactus unearths an extremely rare Booster Gold promotional item! (with thanks to big bad Bob Ferrie for sourcing it) Following that the dyspeptic duo barrel straight into the SILENCE! News, covering such cultural hot potatoes as Shaky Kane’s pop art act of terrorism and the re-colouring of Flex Mentallo.

With nary a thought for their, or your, safety the turgid twosome somersault into the week’s reviews covering Daredevil 10.1 (gah!), Action Comics (featuring the debut of Shit-eating Superman), the final issue of OMAC (One Man Actually Cares), Freedom, Avengers Vs X-Men (omigodtotallypsyched) Animal Man and Sweet Tooth, and Alan Moore’s Supreme. Not in that order.

Then the prosaic pair have a lovely long chat about Urasawa’a masterful Pluto, and the Beast takes us synth-rockin’ all the way back to the 80’s with the sublimely ridiculous Slash Maraud in the Beast’s Bargain Basement. In addition they fizz and pop with enthusiasm about Community in Notcomics before the show slides into gibberish for the Coming Attractions. All this and perhaps just a little bit more in the comics podcast that stands gills and flippers above all others, SILENCE!
What a show. What a world. What.

Remember these colossally egotistical man-tards need love to keep going. Please submit feedback, questions, erotic fan-mail and abuse to mindlessones@hotmail.com.

 

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Click below for the SILENCE! gallery…

THE

GODDAMN

1980′s

SON!!!!

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Okay, as you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo is a very good comic by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, a four issue Dennis Potter style drama in which a young man who [may or may not] have taken an overdose of paracetamol looks back at this life through the lens of superhero comics.

As you [may or may not] know, Flex Mentallo hadn’t been reprinted until now because of various preposterous legal issues.

Now it’s finally been reprinted in a very handsome hardcover package, you [may or may not] be aware that it’s been the victim of a strange recolouring job, the sort of recolouring that transforms Flex Mentallo’s greatest foe The Mentallium Man from a Jolly Rancher nightmare…

…into the grayest daydream you never had:

Now, I’ll throw a couple of kind words in the direction new colourist Peter Doherty in a minute, but it has to be said that anyone who thinks that a character called the Mentallium Man, who is an exaggerated parody of an old-fashioned comic book villain, needs to look all clean and boring like that is just plain wrong.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that anyone who prefers this new incarnation of the character needs blasted with all five types of Flex’s own Kryptonite-derivative “Mentallium” at once:

Sadly we never find out what the fifth type of Mentalium, “Lamb and Turkey”, does to The Hero of the Beach, but I think we can take a guess and that our guesses will all be equally delicious.

Thinking about this, I realise that what Peter Doherty – that fucking name! – has done is to show us Flex Mentallo through the eyes of a Flex who has been dosed with a previously undiscovered sixth form of Mentallium, “Grey Mentallium”, a lump of dull moon rock that shows you all of life’s possibilities as filtered through the PRISM OF ADULT DISAPPOINTMENT.  And hey, maybe it’s only fitting that you find yourself freshly disappointed while reading your favourite superhero comic about how your perception of superhero comics change as you get older.

After my first read through the freshly recoloured Flex Mentallo, I went on That Twitter and suggested that this new look brought out the aforementioned Dennis Potter influence to the fore. It’s certainly possible that this is what Doherty (and whoever commissioned this recolouring) was aiming for here, and the colouring is certainly more nuanced than some of the “Vertigo Brown” jibes would seem to indicate:

If Peter Doherty was trying to provide an illusion of reality in Flex Mentallo’s world, then images like the one above suggest that he was able to make it a convincing illusion, full of detail and life. The problem is that even if the faded, Hollywood realism of the new colouring does resonate with the themes of aging and disappointment that run through the work, it doesn’t do so in a very interesting way.

Now if I’m honest, I’ve never really raved about Tom McCraw’s colours while I’ve been raving about Flex Mentallo. The man’s no Jamie Grant, basically, and there’s a colourist who could have maintained the toxic brightness of the original colours while still providing the illusion of depth to these pages! That’s just how it goes though – sometimes you don’t notice how important simple artistic choices were until you’re confronted with the alternative.

Looking back over my single issues of Flex Mentallo now what strikes me is that even the scenes that are supposedly set in the real world benefit from the irradiated, post-Watchmen hues in which they’re depicted. The whole story takes place in in-between spaces, in the interzone streets of Wally Sage’s mind, and as such it’s only fitting that these streets are painted in these horrible tones, which seem to have been splashed on in anticipation of nuclear disaster:

Contrast with the treatment this same scene is given in the new edition, in which everything is coloured in the same moon rock gray:

Being the enthusiastic comic book readers you are, you [may or may not] have read Jog’s take on the latest issue of The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred over on The Comics Journal. Using the smart-but-clean head that’s always marked him out as the best comics reader in town, Jog take time to note that there’s something pointedly vicious about the depiction of a young boy playing with his superhero toys that runs through the comic:

The boy isn’t just there to go nyah, superheroes are for mean little kids!! He’s also an exhibit of how the very notion of ‘play’ — and the pop culture works that fuel it — are affected by the environment in which it takes place. There’s an obvious Commie-smashing theme running through Disinterred — the main Red Menace villain from this issue also shows up in #2 — so that the general ain’t-the-’50s-great decoration Kane lends his neo-beatniks and Silver Age designs become inseparable from the politics of their day of origin. Likewise, the boy is strongly influenced by his ‘cool’ uncle, a deranged ex-police detective-turned-vigilante from issue #1, whose all-action manner unmistakably affects the child’s games.

All of this is visible in the gorgeous flat colours of Kane’s art, which burn with the uncompromising clarity of an indoctrinated child, and a similar sort of tainted playtime is developed throughout Flex Mentallo. Despite Wally Sage’s description of how “pure” the comics he created as a boy were, it’s obvious that his understanding of comics has got mixed up with his understanding of the world to the point that they’re indistinguishable from each other. For Sage, and thus for the reader, comics are both frustrated sexual fantasy and pre-sexual fun, punitive adventure stories and glimpses of a better world, nothing and everything all wrapped up in a series of tiny package, printed on cheap paper and held together by a couple of staples and a little bit of exploitation.

They might even provide him with an alternative to all the CND nightmares he’s got on loan from the young Grant Morrison, if he’s lucky:

The drama in Flex Mentallo is all predicated on a question of perception that’s also a question of possibility.  Wally Sage either has nothing more serious than a bellyful of M&Ms to contend with or he’s taken too many paracetamol and he’s going to die, and the difference between these two states is decided by what he ends up seeing in both comics and the world around him.  And so you [may or may not] prefer Peter Doherty’s more detailed colours to the old ones, and you [may or may not] think that Tom McCraw’s colours reflect the acid-splashed inner space of Wally Sage’s mind more clearly, but you should know that the two different version of Flex are actually two different stories written around the same theme.

In the end, the choice is yours: you either expose yourself to Grey Mentallium and see the world as you feel you’re supposed to see it or take the UV Mentallium and see where you end up…

All I know is that for me, the mortally panicked and lysergically enhanced state of mind we find Wally Sage in demands something a little bit louder than these new colours are able to offer. After all, all he really wanted was to talk about something cheerful before he died…

…and really, who can blame the daft bastard?

Candyfloss Horizons all round then, eh? Just remember, if you don’t agree with me about this comic, MY REALITY DIES AT DAWN!!!

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POSTSCRIPT 1

As you [may or may not] be aware, Peter Doherty also coloured the first volume of Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy. I bring this up because his work on that comic represents a far more successful attempt at balancing garish adventure with a sense of frazzled melancholy:

You could argue that I’m able to enjoy the colours in Seaguy more because they’re not replacing a set of choices I’ve become attached to, but I actually just think Doherty’s colours look a little more alive in that book . The colours in Seaguy are every bit as nuanced as the colours in the new version of Flex Mentallo, but the fairground attractions of New Venice just pop out at you here in a way that nothing in this Grey Mentallium world is capable of doing.

POSTSCRIPT 2

If you’re still struggling to decide whether to take the Grey Mentallium or the UV Mentallium, bear in mind that the Grey option is at least 10% whiter than the original UV trip:

This isn’t quite as obvious a travesty as the whitewashing of Mister Miracle in Final Crisis, but there are other examples (the All-New, All-White Mandoo the Mysterious being the most obvious one I’ve spotted) so it’s still a depressing part of a deeply depressing trend.

This shit really shouldn’t happen, but sadly it’s not surprising when it does.  I mean, it’s not like I think comic book colourists jump out of bed in the morning and ask themselves “What I can do to make popular culture just that little bit whiter today?” or anything. I presume that this has come about because the new colouring was done with little reference to the original, but while you [may or may not] think this issue trumps all of the aesthetic concerns I’ve outlined above, if you don’t think it’s worth talking about then I really don’t know what to tell you…

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Baker and Martin are not bad writers — very far from it. Bob Baker is the only writer on Doctor Who ever to have won an Oscar for scriptwriting (for the Wallace And Gromit animated films, which he co-wrote), and Baker and Martin also created K-9, almost certainly the best-known character in Doctor Who outside the Doctor himself.

But the fact remains that nearly all of their stories for the series are considered fairly poor efforts by most Doctor Who fans, and it’s easy to see why. The Three Doctors, for example, for all that it has a place in many people’s hearts for having all the first three Doctors in it (though William Hartnell was so ill from arteriosclerosis by this point that he had to appear only on the TARDIS monitor, reading his lines haltingly off a teleprompter, and quite obviously has little clue even where he is), was only ranked as fifty-eighth in the Doctor Who Magazine readers’ ranking of the first two hundred TV stories.

And as a piece of TV, they were quite right to rank it so relatively low. It’s a fairly poor piece of work, with the Doctors fighting a bright rainbow-coloured video effect and three blokes in jelly suits that look made out of bubblewrap. There’s a comedy yokel who doesn’t even get to overplay his part enough to be funny, everything’s overlit, and Patrick Troughton and Nicholas Courtney are fighting against a script that has them both reduced to caricatures of their characters (but both still manage to steal every scene they’re in. It’s all directed by someone who hasn’t learned about framing a shot yet, and the whole thing’s a mess.

And it’s a wonderful mess. Partly this is just because if you stick Pat Troughton and Nick Courtney in front of a camera, no matter what else you do you’ll get something watchable out of it (and Jon Pertwee ups his game considerably here in response to Troughton). But also it’s because the reason this fails is that it’s trying to do too much, and a story that’s trying to do to much and doesn’t quite succeed is always preferable to one that’s not bothering to try to do anything.

On one level, this is the first meta-Doctor Who story. It’s the first time the series has become about its own past — something that would, in ten years time, destroy the series, and something that’s still a problem today. Courtney and Troughton are not playing Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and The Doctor, they’re playing “the Brig” and “the second Doctor”, the characters that exist in the minds of the viewers (not — not yet — the characters in the minds of the fans). It’s a celebration of the popular image of the show.

But it’s a rather brave one. No Daleks, no Cybermen, no Master…only those returning elements that can actually be used to tell a story.

And the story that happens when Doctor Who starts examining itself is an absolutely fascinating one. I feel embarassed to say it, actually, but it’s one that resonates very much with my books Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and An Incomprehensible Condition, and certainly anyone who’s a fan of Grant Morrison or Jack Kirby will be saying “Hang on…” quite often during this story (even though there’s no evidence of Baker & Martin ever reading Kirby or Kirby watching Doctor Who).

Because while their brief was “write an exciting adventure story with three Doctors in, that can be done quite cheaply, and that has some funny business with the second Doctor and a recorder”, or words to that effect, and they achieved that brief perfectly satisfactorily, Baker & Martin seem to have taken the idea of a black hole — at the time the very cutting edge of science — and immediately seen nearly every metaphorical possibility that could be got from it, using it to tell a story about identity and freedom.

Because the story of The Three Doctors is a powerful one, one that evokes Blake and Milton, and one that calls upon, and in some cases creates, a whole web of associations. Omega (who was originally named OHM, which is ‘WHO’ upside-down, but whose new name reflects both the Christian God being both the Alpha and the Omega, and the Omega Point hypothesis of Teilhard de Chardin, with which Barry Letts at least was very familiar) is a Promethean, Luciferian figure. He communicates by sending lightning bolts from the sky — raining fire down from the heavens — and he is trapped for having given the Time Lords the secret knowledge of time travel. Revered by them as a hero, he is left in the singularity of the Black Hole whose power he harnessed for them, and in that singularity he is trapped, but bounded in that nutshell he manages to become a king of infinite space.

For Omega is both a scientist and a kind of magician — he calls upon his True Will and manages to create a universe of anti-matter in the singularity — in fact, as well as being a Prometheus figure he’s also a Newton figure (as if there was really a difference), between the rainbow colouring of the creatures he unleashes on the world and the way the Time Lords repeatedly emphasise that his power is “equal and opposite to” their own.

And Omega could indeed count himself a king of infinite space were it not for his dreams of revenge — his will for power, and for revenge, is so strong it survives the death of everything else about him. The moment at which he takes off his mask to reveal nothing underneath, and he realises he no longer has any physical existence and screams is one of the most chilling in the series. He has achieved the ultimate magical goal of becoming one with his will, casting off his mortal form, and gained control over an entire universe, yet that’s still not enough — he wants to punish those who left him to his fate.

But in seeking out another Time Lord to take his place so he can escape into our universe, he is finally undone. The Time Lords break all their most sacred laws in order to defeat the founder of their civilisation utterly, before their Prometheus breaks his bounds, and put three versions of the Doctor to work against him — their Prismatic chaos against Omega’s singularity of purpose — and the Doctors win by offering Omega the only freedom he can ever have, the freedom of death. They turn his black hole into a supernova, turn the darkness into light and destroy him.

And in return for that, the third Doctor is given his own freedom back by the Time Lords, and can use the TARDIS to travel freely. This means, of course, that it’s only a matter of time before the UNIT format ends. Because the lesson of this story is that if you stay in one place too long, stay the same for too long, you might as well not exist at all. Only when we are changing, when we are moving forward, are we really alive.

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