Television Review: Flight 1 (Mad Men, S2x02, 2008)

Flight 1 (S2x02)

Airdate: 3 August 2008

Written by: Lisa Albert & Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Andrew Bernstein

Running Time: 48 minutes

The narrative pace of Mad Men was famously, often agonisingly, glacial. Matthew Weiner’s meticulous period drama preferred the slow burn of character revelation and ambient social tension to conventional plot propulsion. This deliberate tempo was, however, periodically shattered by unexpected “wham” developments, many of which were intrusions from the eventful real history of the 1960s. Flight 1, the second episode of the second season, stands as a prime and ironically meta-textual example. Its plot hinges on a sudden, mass-casualty air disaster—a classic force majeure event. The irony lies in the fact that the episode’s very existence was itself precipitated by a tragic force majeure in the show’s own production.

The real-world event that catalysed the episode occurred on 25 January 2008, when a sudden avalanche at California’s Mountain High ski resort killed three people. Among the deceased was Christopher Allport, the actor cast as Andrew Campbell, Pete’s patrician and dismissive father, who had appeared in Season 1. The character was originally intended to recur, but showrunner Matthew Weiner made a decisive creative choice: rather than recast, he would kill Andrew Campbell off, weaving an unexpected death into the show’s fabric. The episode is dedicated to Allport’s memory, a sombre footnote that lends the on-screen proceedings a palpable, unscripted gravity. This decision transforms a production setback into a narrative strength, using mortality as an unannounced guest that disrupts the Sterling Cooper ecosystem as abruptly as it did the writers’ room.

The episode’s plot begins on the evening of 28 February 1962, with a jarring cultural collision. Junior executives attend a party thrown by the pretentious Paul Kinsey at his New Jersey apartment. The scene brilliantly shows subdued alienation. The Sterling Cooper men, in their uniform grey suits, are visibly uncomfortable amidst beatniks, interracial couples, marijuana smoke, and the sounds of Black music. Kinsey’s motivation is transparently pathetic: he brandishes his new Black girlfriend, Sheila White (Donielle Artese), primarily as a performative act of “cool” aimed at wounding Joan Holloway, with whom he shares a romantic history. It’s a petty, personal drama set against a backdrop of simmering social change, effectively establishing the era’s pervasive anxiety about shifting norms.

The following day, 1 March, the personal is violently eclipsed by the national. Roger Sterling, complaining with characteristic cynicism about traffic snarls caused by ticker-tape parades for astronaut John Glenn, finds his staff gathered silently around a radio. American Airlines Flight 1, a Boeing 707, has crashed into Jamaica Bay shortly after take-off from New York, killing all 95 on board. The initial office reactions are a cocktail of morbid curiosity and gallows humour. For Don Draper, the tragedy is immediately professionalised: he must retool an entire advertising campaign for Mohawk Airlines, whose competitors are now tainted by association. For Pete Campbell, the news soon becomes catastrophically personal. Learning his father was aboard, Pete is rendered catatonic, a boy in a man’s suit, desperately seeking guidance from Don, who offers none. The subsequent revelation that his father was insolvent, leaving a mountain of debts, completes the brutal lesson: death brings not closure, but a cascade of vulgar practical problems.

This is where the episode’s core thematic engine roars to life. Duck Phillips, coming out as the opportunistic weasel, learns through old contacts that American Airlines is in a panic and will require a massive public relations salvage operation. He lobbies Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling to ruthlessly jettison the small-potatoes Mohawk account and pitch their services to the far more lucrative, wounded giant. His logic is coldly pragmatic: even a rejected offer would burnish the agency’s prestige. Don Draper, who worked tirelessly to secure Mohawk, argues passionately for loyalty and stability. In a defining moment for the series, he is overruled. The honour of the individual—Don’s word to his client, Pete’s grief—plays little to no effect against cold corporate calculus. Season 2 excels in showing history reflect[ing] on some private and seemingly ordinary lives, and here that reflection is merciless: capitalism’s brutal essence is its capacity to metabolise tragedy into opportunity.

The episode then brilliantly bifurcates to contrast two forms of professional humiliation. Don is given the unenviable task of informing Mohawk’s Henry Wofford (Matt Reidy) that they are being dropped. Wofford’s chastisement—accusing Don of having fooled him during the original pitch—stings precisely because it contains truth. Don’s creative prowess is exposed as a commodifiable service, devoid of genuine loyalty. He ends in Japanese restaurant, sitting in silent defeat. Conversely, Duck’s pitch to American Airlines’ Shel Kenealy (Vaughn Armstrong) is a grotesque performance of corporate dedication. In a stunningly cynical manoeuvre, Duck brings the shell-shocked Pete to the meeting, using his fresh bereavement as a prop to demonstrate that personal matters wouldn’t matter. It is a chilling illustration of how human feeling is instrumentalised for gain.

Lisa Albert and Matthew Weiner’s script is at its most incisive in this main storyline, but it also constructs a potent symbolic contrast. The technological triumph of the Space Age, embodied by John Glenn (whom Roger cynically compares to a man driving around the block), is immediately undercut by the limits of that same technology in the crashing jet. Yet, for all this brilliance, Flight 1 suffers from its weaker, filler subplots. The domestic scene at the Drapers’, where neighbour Carlton Hanson complains about a teenage babysitter allegedly hired by his wife to tempt him, feels like a trite, underwritten parody of suburban sexual anxiety. Similarly, the introduction of Peggy’s devoutly Catholic sister Anita (Audrey Wasilewski) and mother Katherine (Myra Turley), who are caring for her illegitimate son and pressuring her to attend Mass, is thematically relevant but clumsily expository, lacking the nuanced integration of the show’s best B-stories.

An intriguing, if slightly opaque, grace note concludes the episode. In the Japanese restaurant, Don is approached by an attractive Asian waitress (Elizabeth Tsing) as “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto—a genuine 1963 hit—plays. This serves a dual purpose. Primarily, it is a period-accurate detail, a piece of fan service for 1960s aficionados. More interestingly, it visualises Don’s escapist fantasy, a fleeting, exoticised alternative to his present humiliation. It is a silent offer of anonymous solace, a theme that would define his character, though its presentation here is perhaps too subtle to land with full force.

In the end of the day, Flight 1 is a bifurcated episode. Its central narrative, forged in real-life tragedy, is a masterful dissection of American capitalism’s cold heart, showcasing how adroitly the machinery of commerce co-opts personal catastrophe. The performances, particularly from Vincent Kartheiser as a shattered Pete and Jon Hamm as a professionally neutered Don, are superb. However, the episode is dragged down by subplots that feel like obligatory, underwritten padding, preventing it from achieving the flawless status of the season’s later entries like The Jet Set. It remains, however, essential viewing for understanding Mad Men’s overarching thesis: that the great, unsettling forces of history and the market ultimately leave individuals scrambling in their wake, whether they are grieving sons or betrayed ad men.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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