In Motion #63 - The Suitcase

"I wouldn't be good company anyway."

(Warning: the following contains some spoilers for the first four (and a half) seasons of a show that ended nine years ago)

“…the only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone.”

“What if that’s true?”

“Then you can change.”

“People don’t change.”

Television has always been difficult for me. I don’t mean that the act of sitting down and watching something is hard. I was born in 1999 and I got a film degree in 2021; sitting in front of a large screen is basically my natural state. Starting television shows isn’t the problem either; a solid 45-minute-long pilot is basically crack to a screenwriting junkie like me. The difficult part comes when I try to watch the whole fucking thing. I can count on one finger the amount of long-running, readily-available television shows that I’ve watched every episode of (if you can guess the show, I will personally drive to your house and give you a cookie). It’s always been easier for me to start something than to finish something, and not just tv shows. Video games, books, hobbies, workout goals, god knows how many writing projects, countless entries of this very newsletter. Commitment…I’ve heard the word. Somebody somewhere uttered it a few feet away from me one time. It terrified me.

“I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things”

That’s one of the most devastating quotes from a show composed almost entirely of devastating quotes: Mad Men. It’s uttered in an episode I haven’t actually seen yet, which is par for the course for a lot of my favorite quotes from the show. It’s long been a source of (slight) shame that, despite my very vocal love for Mad Men, for years I’ve been stuck on the finale of its second season, unable to move on. At least, until now: having made it one of my missions of the summer to carve through the entire show (along with learning how to cook and taking dance lessons, both of which I solemnly swear to follow through on), I’m currently at exactly the halfway point of Season Four, which also happens to be the halfway point of the entire show. I’ve gotten this far in less than a month. Which, for somebody with the attention span of a nat, is almost impressive.

At that exact halfway point lies “The Suitcase”. Directed by former script supervisor Jennifer Getzinger and written by series creator Matthew Weiner, “The Suitcase” is probably the most notorious episode of Mad Men, the one most often cited by journalists as its finest hour (or 45 minutes). The premise is very simple: copywriter Peggy (Elizabeth Moss), about to go out for a romantic birthday evening with her boyfriend Mark (Blake Bashoff, playing the wettest of blankets), is instead drawn into an emotionally charged overtime work sesh with her boss, creative director Don (Jon Hamm). Both Peggy and Don have problems they don’t want to deal with: Peggy, upon learning that Mark’s invited her entire (annoying) family to join them as a surprise, opts to stay at work instead of wasting her time with people who don’t understand her (her soon-to-be-ex now joining that group) As for Don, he’s supposed to make a call to California, where bad news awaits him about his cancer-inflicted friend Anna. And so: a late night at the office commences, during which the two fight, make-up, grab some dinner, and reveal slices of themselves they’ve hardly shared with anybody else.

“Dating sucks”.

Peggy’s right when she says that, but she’s not just referring to Egghead Mark. She’s also talking about Duck (Mark Moses), the insecure, drunk, middle-aged loser she started sleeping with after Don bounced him out of the company, and who reappears in this episode pathetically trying to win her back after failing to drop a deuce in Don’s office. Not that Duck’s straying so far from the pack, as Peggy’s first big romance was an even bigger failure: her affair with the once-engaged, now-married Pete Campbell resulted in a bastard child she gave away, a fact she is rudely reminded of in “The Suitcase” when Mrs. Campbell (Alison Brie) runs into her in the bathroom, pregnant and seemingly blissful, her happilly wedded life contrasting loudly against Peggy’s solitary careerism. But despite her loneliness, Peggy doesn’t bother to patch things up with Mark. “He doesn’t know me”, she tells Don, her voice dripping with offense. It’s a terrible feeling to realize that you’ve shared intimate moments with somebody who probably didn’t deserve them, who never really knew who you were in the first place. You’re left feeling lonelier than you were before they walked through your door, yearning for somebody who might at long last see you for who you really are.

Duck doesn’t seem to know Peggy either, despite his repeated utterances of “babe” and his claim that he needs her “so bad”. Much like how Mark breaks it off with Peggy after she rejects the surprise family dinner she didn’t ask for, Duck gets angry when Peggy turns down a sketchy job offer she also didn’t ask for. Later, upon seeing her alone with Don in the office, Duck immediately assumes the worst and starts calling her a “whore”. Which brings us to Don. Yes, it’s mean of him to keep Peggy at work on her birthday. And yes, he yells at her (famously culminating in one of the show’s most iconic moments). But his treatment of her is entirely different, and far more accepting, than that of the other two men in “The Suitcase”. After making her upset, he’s the one who extends the olive branch and encourages her to open up to him about her troubles. He’s the one who buys her dinner, who makes it clear that he’s not interested in diluting their relationship by sleeping with her, who responds to the reveal that she watched her father drop dead in front of her by admitting that the exact same thing happened to him. Don, even as he gets increasingly trashed, takes the time to make a connection. Probably because he knews he has to.

“I can’t tell the difference anymore between something that’s good and something that’s awful.”

For somebody who only likes the beginnings of things, it’s fitting that Don’s role in “The Suitcase” is to accept the fact that something is coming to a very definitive end. Anna, the wife of the man whose identity he stole after accidentally killing him in Korea (it’s a long story), is depicted as the only person who admits to accepting him for who he really is. “I know everything about you, and I still love you”, she says the last time they see each other, leaving him speechless. But now it’s over: Don knows that Anna is either dying or dead. And the way she made him feel, the way that no one else ever could, is dead too. Don tries his best to distract himself, but his trademark method of running away and “moving forward” fails to work in “The Suitcase”. He tries to listen to the fight in the bar, only to spend half of it yelling before frowning at the first-round knockout. He tries to drink his problems away (Don while they eat dinner: “Ugh, I don’t want water”), only to vomit his guts out in the men’s room. He tries to fight Duck after he insults Peggy, only to end up with his ass on the floor, muttering “uncle” while Duck brags about how many men he killed in Okinawa. When Don finally wakes up the next morning, it’s clear that he has nowhere left to hide.

“There are people out there who buy things, people like you and me. Then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves…is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do.”

Don says the above to Peggy at the end of the show’s third season, throwing a verbal hail mary to get her to join him at his new agency. It’s both dazzling and astonishingly frank. Don, for all of his suits and pomade and conservative attitudes, can see things most people can’t. Not because he’s a genius, but because he’s broken. Growing up poor and abused, literally stealing a new name for himself, cheating on and humiliating his wife, witnessing his nuclear family detonate…Don knows the lie behind the American Dream. He can see the atoms that make up the molecules, the space between things. And, having visited her in the hospital after she gave birth, Don knows that Peggy does as well. She too has known loss. It’s what makes him trust her with both the work and himself. When Don cries for the first time in Mad Men, it’s in “The Suitcase” and it’s in front of Peggy. The whole episode is a staggering depiction of connection. Not pretty, not clean, not romantic. Just organic, honest, and necessary.

It’s crossed my mind on more than one occasion that I may fall back on my old habits and fail my Mad Men mission. I’ve done it before with Breaking Bad, with Better Call Saul, with Frasier. But this time feels different. This year feels different too; a couple of college friends I hadn’t seen in a long while saw me the other day and said that I looked “grown-up”. Is that what 25 is like? Maybe it was just my new haircut. Or maybe something really has changed. Maybe I’m finally going to make some progress with my new workout plan. Maybe I’ll start cooking with the new apron I bought. Maybe maybe maybe. On a totally unrelated note: it’s telling that, in a show that loves to end its episodes with Don quietly pondering his misery in an empty room, “The Suitcase” ends with his office door wide open, Simon & Garfunkel playing as employees walk past, the promise of tomorrow born anew.

(Mad Men is currently streaming on AMC+)