Television Review: Mystery Date (Mad Men, S5x04, 2012)
Mystery Date (S5x04)
Airdate: 8 April 2012
Written by: Victor Levin & Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Matt Shakman
Running Time: 48 minutes
When the average observer looks back at the history of the United States, there is a pervasive tendency to seek out easily identifiable turning points—often, these are placed after which everything appears to have begun to unravel. While the authors of Mad Men approached the meticulous reconstruction of the Sixties with significantly more nuance than the average history book, it is impossible to ignore that they seemed to locate a definitive pivot point in the third episode of the fifth season, Mystery Date. This episode serves as a narrative fulcrum, demonstrating how the vibrant optimism of the early 1960s finally gave way to the disillusionment, fear, and violence that would characterise the latter part of the decade. This shift is hammered home by the convergence of disparate storylines, each wrestling with the encroaching darkness of a changing world.
The catalyst for this thematic shift is anchored in the real-world horror occurring in Chicago on the night of 13/14 July 1966. It was on this date that 24-year-old Richard Speck broke into a townhouse and systematically raped and killed eight of nine student nurses. The brutality of the Speck murders was a national sensation, a singular, horrific instance of violence that captivated the American imagination. It was this event that loomed over the collective consciousness of the characters in the episode, informing their actions and their anxieties. The episode opens shortly after these killings, immediately immersing the viewer in a world where the safety of domestic spaces no longer exists.
The narrative enters the SCDP office with Joyce Ramsey, who arrives to show her colleagues a series of extremely graphic and unpublished photographs from the Chicago crime scene. The spectacle of these images provokes a morbid curiosity among the staff, a collective rubbernecking at tragedy. This contrasts sharply with Michael Ginsberg, who is horrified that anyone could disregard the humanity of the victims and simply look at pictures. He refuses to look, maintaining a sanctuary of human empathy in a room wallowing in gore. However, the episode is quick to undercut this moral high ground. Later, when Ginsberg joins Don Draper and Ken Cosgrove to pitch a new campaign for Topaz shoes, he comes up with a concept involving toys that play on the idea of a woman being stalked. While the pitch is accepted, Don is furious because Ginsberg developed it on the fly without consulting him first. Ken warns Ginsberg that he came dangerously close to being fired on the spot.
Don Draper himself is in a state of physical and psychological disarray. He is coughing, running a fever, and physically unwell. To make matters worse, when he rides the elevator with his wife Megan, he stumbles into an old lover, Andrea Rhodes (Mädchen Amick). Andrea, unaware of Megan’s marriage, openly attempts to restart their relationship. Don is deeply embarrassed and consumed by a primal fear that Megan will suspect him of infidelity. He remains in the office until Megan sees him so sick that she orders him to return home. As he lies in bed in a delirious state, his apartment is visited by Andrea. He initially sends her off, but she returns and, misusing his half-delirious state, has sex with him. Later, she tells him that she controls him, upon which Don gets angry and strangles her to death, hiding the body under the bed before becoming unconscious. When he wakes up the next morning, there is no body, and Don realises he had a fever dream.
Elsewhere in the office, Roger Sterling, after realising he failed to assign a creative team for the Mohawk Airline ads, resorts to bribery, paying Peggy Olson to stay in the office and work extra hours. This power dynamic is palpable. When Peggy is to depart late at night, she sees Dawn Chambers sleeping in Don’s office. Dawn explains that cab drivers simply will not drive to Black areas due to the ongoing riots and rising racial tensions in the city. Peggy offers her a place to spend the night, and the two women bond over their experiences.
Meanwhile, back in the Draper household, Betty and Henry Francis are out of town, leaving Sally Draper in the care of her stepgrandmother, Pauline. The subject of their conversation inevitably turns towards the Chicago murders. During the chat, Pauline expresses her conservative social views, bluntly blaming the killings on sexual promiscuity among younger generations. She credits the killer being allowed to enter their home to the nurses' lack of virtue. When Sally complains about her inability to sleep and the fear of the still-uncaught killer, Pauline gives her Seconal for sleep, while simultaneously brandishing a butcher knife for protection. When Betty and Henry return, they find Pauline sleeping with the knife while Sally is asleep under the couch, hiding to match the role of the lone survivor of the Chicago massacre. It is a beautifully tense, almost Hitchcockian image that perfectly encapsulates the domestic paranoia gripping the nation.
The theme of returning soldiers and the trauma of Vietnam is visited upon Joan Holloway Harris and her husband, Greg Harris. Greg finally returns home for a tour of duty to see his baby boy, but the joy of family reunion is immediately hampered when he tells Joan that he will stay only temporarily. He reveals he has volunteered for another tour because he feels he is "needed there" and considers himself a "good man" for doing so. Joan is horrified at the prospect of being a single mother for an extra year and, against her usual pragmatism, decides to finally leave Greg. Here, the toxic concept of masculinity is laid bare; Greg believes that his value lies in his ability to command men in a war, while Joan is left to manage the domestic wreckage of that ideology. It is a tragic, messy ending to a marriage that had so much potential.
The title of the episode, "Mystery Date," refers to a popular 1960s board game for teenage girls in which players compete to find the right date and avoid a "dud." The episode features the television commercial for this game, a popular cultural artifact of the time.
When Matthew Weiner researched the episode, he was, by his own words, amazed to discover that US media at the time spent much more resources and coverage towards the single, albeit horrific instance of violence in the form of the Chicago massacre, than it did towards the ongoing and more important issues of race riots. Yet, all those events—the Speck murders, the race riots, the shadow of Vietnam—have one connecting factor: violence. This is the theme the script, co-written by Weiner and Victor Levin, tries to intertwine in all storylines. More importantly, it connects this violence to the concept of masculinity, rendering the whole term impossible to use without the qualifier "toxic."
This theme manifests in various ways throughout the episode, with different levels of explicitness and nuance. Ginsberg exploits the dark urges among men as an element of his pitch, commercialising the predator/prey dynamic. Pauline uses sleeping pills and a butcher knife as a solution to all of the world's problems, relying on traditional, violent protectionism. Dawn is terrified of racial violence on the streets of New York, living in a state of constant vigilance. Greg is obviously happier on the battlefield than having to deal with the challenges of domestic life, finding purpose in violence. And finally, Don discovers some very dark, repressed urges within himself. It is a heavy-handed thematic suite, to be sure, but it effectively captures the zeitgeist.
The episode was produced at a time when Barack Obama’s re-election wasn't looking that certain, and Hollywood was trying very hard to mobilise his voters by increasingly direct appeals on what would later be known as "wokery" and "intersectionality." The scene in which Dawn and Peggy discuss their positions as oppressed minorities in a WASP-dominated world is one of the less direct and more nuanced, yet slightly recognisable efforts in that direction. It acknowledges the shared struggle of women and minorities without resorting to the heavy-handed shouting matches that often plague modern television. However, it remains a deliberate attempt to position the show within the contemporary political conversation.
The episode, directed by Mark Shalman—who would recently become known for his work on the MCU—is well-acted and generally well-written. However, at times its message makes the plot look too "neat" and too didactic. The structure feels constructed to hit every thematic bullet point, from the Speck murders to the racial tensions, resulting in a bit of a checklist feel. The scene involving Don strangling a woman to death only to realise it was a fever dream is a twist that most viewers, at least those more experienced with television tropes, have likely predicted from the start. The simplicity of the twist—bad man has bad dream—feels a little cheap and feels like the writers were under pressure to provide a "shocking" content. This makes Mystery Date feel a bit too "gimicky" to be treated as a Mad Men classic. While it succeeds as a cultural snapshot of a violent, transitional decade, it lacks the effortless brilliance of the show's earlier masterpieces.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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