Spoiler alerts below.
Seven years ago, the pilot episode of “Mad Men,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” pitched audiences a dramatic portrayal of America in 1960. April 13, the premiere episode of part one of the seventh season, “Time Zones,” landed audiences and protagonist Don Draper at LAX, across the country from the usual New York City setting.
From the AMC series’ beginning, the opening montage has depicted the silhouetted suit falling into space, and audiences always assumed “Mad Men” would follow Draper, conqueror of Madison Avenue, to his inevitable downfall. Fueled by one too many Old-Fashioneds, Don seemed to have finally fallen from grace in the finale of Season 6. He was forced to take a leave of absence from the agency of Sterling Cooper & Partners and has unintentionally made plans that will further estrange him from his still fairly recent upgrade of a wife, Megan Draper.
In the season premiere, Don is found traveling to Los Angeles for his now-routine weekend reunion with his wife, who is unaware of her husband’s professional hiatus. Don re-emerges, doing some last-minute shaving in an airplane bathroom and later riding one of the airport’s moving walkways.
If sex correlates to power in Matthew Weiner’s groovy universe, Megan is all strength and promise. The twenty-something picks Don up from the airport in psychedelic slow motion, wearing a mini-dress and driving an Austin-Healey convertible.
On the West Coast, she has created a world independent from her husband, in which she has her own career and calls the shots. When arriving home in the Hills, Megan informs Don, “I love it, but my next house is going to have a pool — [pause] our next house.” In contrast, Don’s notorious libido has at last become diminished by his personal failures. When propositioned by a young widow on his return flight to New York, Don fittingly tells her, “I’m sorry, but I have to get back to work.”
On the East Coast, Peggy Olsen finds herself as always, in a parallel position to that of her former mentor Don. She possesses more innate talent and determination than perhaps any of her coworkers, yet she finds that after nearly a decade of climbing the corporate ladder, she is suddenly in a submissive position in direct contrast to the one she has fought to attain. Her new boss, Lou Avery, douses Peggy’s every drive to exceed mediocre work.
At the end of the episode, Peggy tearfully collapses after failing to succeed in her personal and professional relationships. Peggy and Don finish the episode as outsiders. Though they still hold the facade of success, these characters, as Nixon put it in his inauguration speech, have plummeted, “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord.”
Other subplots of the episode included Roger Sterling lightening the mood by having adopted a harem of sexual partners in some luxury hotel room. Joan Harris enjoys some well-earned success by maintaining Butler Footwear as a client, despite an executive director’s attempt to disregard her as the agency’s uneducated sex pawn.
Despite Joan’s triumph, the Butler “shoe-boy’s” dismissive image of Joan seems to often mirror her own self-reflection. When the hour-long episode has passed, no one is altogether content. Peggy is left crying next to a Christmas tree, and a drunken Don is sitting on his freezing terrace, on the outside looking in. Viewers are reunited with these characters as they clamor to stay atop their skyscraping pedestals. Despite the revolutionary years, their positions are not so different from when audiences first met them in 1960.
The question is asked, can these characters find their way to redemption, or will they be perpetually damned by social prejudice and their own hubris? As Freddy Rumsen says in the episode’s first scene, “I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something.” But that something has yet to be realized. “Time Zones” recaptures our attention by asking all the questions, but gave viewers none of the answers.