Television Review: The Jet Set (Mad Men, S2x11, 2008)

The Jet Set (S2x11)

Airdate: 12 October 2008

Written by: Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Phil Abraham

Running Time: 48 minutes

As Mad Men approached the conclusion of its second season, the series began to strain against the confines of its established narrative format. The eleventh episode, The Jet Set, is a pointed example of this tension, directly leaning on the events of its immediate predecessor, The Inheritance. Unlike the more self-contained, vignette-like episodes that characterised much of the early season, Jet Set commences precisely where the previous instalment concluded, forging a stronger serialised link that signals the show’s gradual shift towards more protracted story arcs. This structural pivot, whilst effective in deepening character exploration, also renders the episode one of the more conventional in the season’s run—a conventionality that is both its strength and its subtle weakness.

The episode opens in the tangled sheets of Roger Sterling’s midlife crisis. The image of Jane Siegel, nude on a bed with only a strategically positioned blanket preserving modesty for the cameras, is one of the series’ most potent and attractive. For the male audience, the scene is instantly telling: here is the visceral, physical answer to the question of why a man would jettison three decades of marriage and stability. Roger is not merely captivated by Jane’s body but by her performance of bohemian artistry. Deeply impressed as she scribbles poems about him, he is seduced by the fantasy of being someone’s muse, leading to his impulsive, almost absurd proposal to marry her. This moment perfectly encapsulates Roger’s tragicomic trajectory—a pursuit of rejuvenation through cliché, mistaking a young woman’s affectations for profound connection.

Meanwhile, the episode’s central narrative thrust follows Don Draper, who has arrived in California with the endlessly eager Pete Campbell. The contrast is immediate. Pete is a child in a candy shop, enthusing about the warm climate and the beautiful women by the pool, while Don must sternly remind him to prioritise business. This dynamic establishes the episode’s core theme: the confrontation between escapist fantasy and inescapable reality. Don’s professional purpose leads him to an aerospace convention in Pasadena, a temple to the era’s technological optimism. Yet, this dream of a Space Age future curdles into a specific, visceral nightmare. A presentation by an international ballistic missile manufacturer features a chillingly enthusiastic simulation of an American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, boasting of near-total annihilation and a drastically reduced retaliatory capability. For Don, a man who has seen the intimate, chaotic horror of war first-hand, this sanitised, corporate vision of apocalypse is profoundly unsettling. He abandons the convention, delegating the work to Pete, in a flight not from responsibility, but from a future that feels more grotesque than the past he fled.

His retreat leads him directly into another, more seductive fantasy. Previously spotted at his hotel by a cosmopolitan group including the enigmatic Joy (Laura Ramsey) and the European aristocrat Willy (Philippe Brenninkmeyer), Don is now invited to join them in Palm Springs. After initial hesitation, he accepts, arriving at a stunning Mid-Century Modern house with a vast pool. Joy, effortlessly played by Laura Ramsey, explains they are house-sitting for friends in Sardinia. In a scene dripping with erotic possibility, she slips into a bikini and suggests Don join her in the pool, either by borrowing trunks or going “au naturelle.” Overwhelmed—perhaps by the heat, the offer, or the cumulative weight of his disillusionment—Don collapses.

Upon waking, diagnosed with heat stroke, he is surrounded by this strange new coterie. Refusing an injection but acquiescing to convalescence, he remains, ultimately having sex with Joy. Their post-coital conversation reveals the group’s nomadic, hedonistic ethos. Willy discovers them in bed, but his reaction is one of paternal appraisal: “he makes beautiful babies,” he remarks, all but admitting his familial relationship to Joy. She later offers Don a permanent place in their rootless set, citing Willy’s admiration for his “beautiful” silence. It is the ultimate temptation for a man who once reinvented himself: to shed Don Draper completely and become a perpetual tourist in his own life. Yet, the fantasy is punctured by the arrival of a man named Christian with two small children, a reminder of the familial obligations that even this liberated circle cannot fully escape. Instead of embracing the nomadic future, Don makes a pivotal phone call, addressing himself as “Dick Whitman” to someone presumably privy to his original, discarded identity. It is a moment of profound regression, choosing to face the ghosts of his past rather than leap into an uncertain future.

Back in New York, Roger’s impulsive decision begins to unleash unforeseen corporate consequences. Consulting divorce attorney George Rothman (Alan Blumenfeld), Roger is warned that Mona will take half of everything. This vulnerability is spotted by the opportunistic Duck Phillips, who sees Rothman leaving and deduces the impending divorce. In a desperate power play, Duck confronts Roger, demanding a partnership, only to be bluntly refused due to his lacklustre results. Fearing for his job, Duck meets with his former colleagues from the London firm Putnam, Powell & Lowe. Failing to win back his old position, he makes an audacious counter-gamble: he suggests PPL simply buy Sterling Cooper. With Roger needing liquidity for his divorce, the timing is perfect. Duck’s condition is that he be installed as president post-merger. This corporate intrigue unfolds with quiet menace, threatening to dismantle Don’s professional world at the very moment he contemplates abandoning it.

The episode’s subplot involving the junior staff at Sterling Cooper provides a pointed, if somewhat clumsy, commentary on the changing social mores of 1962. As they discuss the growing civil rights disturbances in Mississippi, the German art director Kurt Smith asks Peggy to attend a Bob Dylan concert at Carnegie Hall. The open invitation sparks office gossip about a date, which Kurt deflates by calmly stating, “I am a homosexual.” The revelation lands like a grenade in the sterile office. Salvatore Romano, himself a deeply closeted gay man, reacts with panicked awkwardness. Ken Cosgrove declares he would never “work with a homo,” while Kurt’s partner Smitty lamely explains it away as a “European thing.” Peggy, however, agrees to go. In a subsequent scene, Kurt visits her apartment, cuts her hair into a more modern style, and acts as a confidant. Herein lies the episode’s most glaring conventionality. The depiction of Kurt and Peggy’s friendship leans heavily on a tired Hollywood cliché: the gay man as the single woman’s stylish, non-threatening mentor and best friend. While the episode deserves credit for directly naming homosexuality in a 1962 setting—a taboo breaking that shows that times have indeed changed when someone clearly identifies with being gay—its execution feels sanitised and familiar, a safe narrative compromise.

This conventionality is a defining feature of The Jet Set. It is, paradoxically, a very good episode—arguably one of Season 2’s best—despite being one of its more conventional. Its conventionality manifests in its multiple story structure and in its treatment of social issues like homosexuality through recognisable, almost formulaic, tropes. It even concludes with a cliffhanger-like revelation—Don’s “Dick Whitman” call—that feels designed to propel the serialised narrative forward in a manner more typical of television dramaturgy.

Yet, to dismiss it as merely conventional would be a grave error. The Jet Set’ is a richly multi-layered hour of television. Series creator Matthew Weiner employs multiple levels of irony with a master’s touch, most effectively in the brutal confrontation of Don’s dreams with reality. Don’s dream trip to the promised land of California immediately devolves into a minor nightmare of lost luggage and professional disgust. His dream of a gleaming, technological future is perverted into a simulation of nuclear genocide, triggering his suppressed wartime trauma. The season uses California to give hints of both protagonist’s future and present, and here that future is rendered as a seductive illusion. Don, the master of self-reinvention, is wooed to perform the act again by the rich, idle nomads—a group whose lifestyle of endless travel, sun, sea, and sex represents the very antithesis of his stifling suburban existence with Betty. Joy is the embodiment of a freedom Betty could never offer. Yet, for Don, this step proves a step too far. Whether due to age, ingrained fear, or a latent sense of responsibility, he cannot make the leap. In a supreme irony, he turns to face his past at the precise moment Duck Phillips’ machinations threaten to annihilate his present. The escape hatches both forward and backward are simultaneously closing.

Directed with exceptional flair by Phil Abraham, Rge Jet Set is one of the series’ most visually appealing instalments to date. The cinematography luxuriates in the Californian light and the sleek lines of modernist architecture. It is also arguably the most erotic episode by this point in the series, though, as noted, AMC’s broadcast standards ensured it never reached the explicit heights of contemporary HBO or Starz productions. The allure is in suggestion and composition rather than graphic display.

The episode has also accrued a curious cultural afterlife, sparking persistent fan theories that Joy, Willy, and their set are not merely rich socialites but vampires. This reading, whilst fanciful, speaks to the group’s uncanny, ageless, and predatory aura—they feed on the vitality and beauty of those they attract, offering an eternal, parasitic existence that mirrors Don’s own vampiric relationship with the identity of the real Don Draper.

Jet Set operates on two levels. On the surface, it is a superbly crafted but structurally conventional episode that advances key plotlines and explores social change through occasionally clichéd lenses. Beneath that surface, it is a profound and ironic meditation on identity, escape, and the inescapable. It presents Don Draper with a mirror reflecting two possible selves: the rootless hedonist and the haunted fugitive. His choice to call out to “Dick Whitman” is not a choice for freedom, but a recoil into a different kind of prison. The nomadic group’s seductive utopia might be an illusion just like those Don sells his clients. In Jet Set, Don Draper, the master illusionist, briefly becomes the mark, before recognising the con and retreating to the devil he knows. The episode’s greatness lies in making that retreat feel not like a failure, but like the tragic, inevitable conclusion of a man forever trapped between the selves he has been and the selves he might have been.

RATING: 8/10 (+++)

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