Mad Men 410

"Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?" Those are the lyrics of the Beatles ballad playing over the closing credits. But because it's an instrumental version, they, like most of the truths in this episode, are hidden.

That secrets are the common theme in every subplot in this episode is itself no secret. Early on, Don asks Sally, "Can you keep a secret?" Later, in bed with Henry, Betty says, "I don't want any secrets" while neglecting to tell him, a man defined by political ambitions, that she, his wife, has just lied to federal agents. In their elevator conversation, Pete answers Don's anxiety with "If you're asking if he knows how to keep a secret, he works for the Department of Defense." -- a line which presumes that Pete's friend is more devoted to hiding the truth than to his employer and nation.

If factually informed, as by Doctor Faye's research, this episode might be a tutorial in lying. It's not just that the characters in this episode have secrets. They lie more when they're caught. They lie when they talk about others' lies. Don smiles at his investor's suggestion that he's sleeping with Megan, because that's a scandal he could share with the boys -- and yet it's not true. Joan, anonymous at the abortion clinic, still lies to a stranger and says that she's there for her nonexistent daughter. Pete, who has kept two affairs -- one tinged with blackmail -- from his wife, grouses to her about how liars make life difficult for "honest people" -- a valid complaint, but Pete needn't worry because he doesn't know any.

The news of Lucky Strike's imminent defection is Roger's business-related secret, while Joan's pregnancy is the more immediate of his social secrets. That he suggests that he might leave his wife for her is another. He leverages Lee Garner, Jr., a man with significant lies in his life, into giving SCDP more time by reminding Lee of "all the lies I've told for you." Lee needn't worry too much about the debt incurred when Roger lies for him: Roger's lies come very cheaply. Later, Roger voices sympathy regarding the death of a client while callously thumbing through index cards for his next call. Wishing out loud  -- in front of the man's wife -- that Greg not return alive from Vietnam, Roger shows an almost sociopathic lack of care for anyone who's not him.

Lane has "gone native" in his new home, bearing a Mickey Mouse with red-white-and-blue balloons as a gift, when he expects his son but is met by his father. Lane has a secret girlfriend, who happens to be African-American as well as a Playboy Club bunny. To validate the care with which everyone else guards their secrets, Lane finds out that a cane across the head is the penalty for being found out.

And we are reminded that Don has more than reputation or a caning at stake should his secret past be found out: He is also guilty of desertion, a crime with no statute of limitations, and could face jail time -- in principle but not in practice, even the death penalty -- for a crime. He is rightfully grateful to Betty for hiding his secret. And for following his tactic of further evasion, as Don speaks elliptically once she suggests that they cannot speak freely over the phone. Pete seems to be savvy to this point, meeting Don in person and specifically avoiding the use of the phone. In so visiting, Pete sees Faye departing, and so finds out another secret that he claims he would have preferred not to know. Given the extreme lengths to which he went to find out Don's bigger secrets, this seems itself to be unlikely. Counter-truth tactics are second nature to everyone. Joan and Roger also switch to "code" when she opens his office door. Don and Faye do the same, to cover their relationship.

Finally, when the partner meeting takes place, Pete lies to explain why North American (fictitiously) fired SCDP. Roger, harboring a much bigger lie, berates Pete before giving a thumbs-up to describe business with Lucky Strike.

As the main action ends, Don eyes Megan with obvious intent. Joan's strategy to keep Don from his baser instincts lasted only as long as Miss Blankenship's heart held out. Don is ready to fall again. In keeping with the rest of the episode, this is an impulse than Don keeps, for now, to himself.

All of these private secrets come as second nature to the characters perhaps because their lives are built around secrets. As they propose an approach to advertising for the company that builds missiles ("You never need to say the word 'bomb'"), they scheme up an approach that doesn't mention missiles. The company's report is comically redacted with more black rectangles than it has words remaining. The exec from North American aviation addresses the black rectangles by saying "There'll be fewer black bars as the process moves forward." This prediction, not surprisingly, proves to be false.

Batman: The Casket

Everybody wants it. References to it show up in the forefront and the background of the story. The story gives us clues to its nature, but deliberately holds its exact identity a mystery. The casket appearing concurrently in Batman and Robin and Return of Bruce Wayne is, as message-board poster hellblazerraiser points out, a textbook example of a MacGuffin. There are stories that leave the mystery of their MacGuffin's identity unsolved. Morrison has left mysteries hanging before, but the number and kind of clues suggest that he is going to wrap this one up sometime in the final four issues left in this "season" of his Batman work. What do we know about the casket so far?

The term itself is a bit unusual. In contemporary American English, the word "casket" is most often used to denote a coffin in which a person is to be buried. That meaning is not intended here -- the casket is simply a box, far too small to hold a person -- but the macabre undertones of the word go along with the story's tone.

Because this is a time travel story, the casket has appeared at many widely-separated points in time. The casket has definitely appeared as early as the 18th century and as late as the present-day. What may be the casket has perhaps shown up at the end of time. The known sightings, with exact or approximate years:

c. 1750: Jack Valor places papers with the words of Bruce Wayne inside. He sees a book and a mysterious something else inside. The casket is in the possession of a wealthy brother and sister who are probably Van Derms. (Jack's journal opens with a date of 1734, but he appears clearly more than 18 years older than the adolescent he was in the main events of ROBW #2.)

c. 1860: Darius Wayne holds the casket in a portrait set in the tunnels of the hidden Batcave that Dick finds in B&R. Interestingly, there is a beam of bright light reaching him in what seems to be an underground passage with no exposure to daylight.

c. 1880: In the main events of ROBW #4, the family of Catherine Van Derm is killed for the casket by people working for Vandal Savage and Old Thomas Wayne. They obtain the casket but cannot open it. By story's end, they lose it, and it falls into the possession of Alan Wayne.

c. 1890: In an understated detail to which no dialogue refers, the casket appears in the portrait of Alan Wayne. It is known from his narration that the bat-shaped design of the Garden of Death of Wayne Manor was created specifically to mark the location of the casket, so that Bruce Wayne can later find it.

2010: Dick retrieves the casket from the vicinity of the bat-cowl shrine that the Miagani created. This is concurrent with a source of light and an energy source that interrupts his communications with Alfred.
He has an encounter with a giant bat (as drawn, much larger than the large bat from ROBW #1) which may have been a hallucination. In the fight brought on by Talia's unrelated attack, he loses it to the 99 Fiends. A Fiend with the horsehead / knight insignia brings it to the station where Doctor Hurt's "Mexican train" arrives. Hurt still has the casket, and is unable to open it, as of B&R #14.

The casket itself seems simply to be a box. There are two kind of content: The writings of Bruce Wayne, and the mysterious "something else" which seems to have the larger importance. Of this, we know:

1) It creates the sound of bells, which may be not literally sound but a sort of psychic projection.
2) Jack Valor sees it, but says that he cannot speak of it.
3) Alan Wayne sees it, and says that it is "the sickening likeness of a coffin's lid", with "a yawning vacant grave within, and something beyond that seemed to be all our graves."
4) Bruce Wayne sees it before his jump forward from c. 1880 to c. 1980. Moreover, he takes the book and papers with him for that jump. He may or may not return them to the casket in the future.

What we know leads to a larger chain of suggested clues as to what it may be: Alan Wayne's description is a partial match the Ancestor Box that Darkseid holds in Batman #702, as he hits Bruce with the Omega Sanction. The two references to bell sounds match the Ancestor Box as well. This gives us a strong indication that the "something else" is exactly the Ancestor Box -- no more, no less -- but this is unproven, and would moreover raise the question of how anyone got their physical hands on the Ancestor Box in order to put it into the casket. We never see Bruce doing so, and he would be the leading candidate. If it is the Ancestor Box, was its capture against Darkseid's intentions, or was it exactly his intention?

To add to the exact timeline above, we have the following possible appearances of the "something else":

2008: In a moment that for the "something else" precedes all of its past appearances, Darkseid incorporates the Ancestor Box into his trap for Bruce Wayne. If so, then it apparently goes back to 9,000 B.C. An interesting question is whether it exists normally in time, present in and near Gotham at every moment between then and the Twentieth Century, or if it leaps along with Bruce. However, Jack Valor sees it in a time that Bruce's travels do not involve, indicating that it has been "captured" and put into the regular timeline, either in 9,000 B.C. or c. 1645 in the main events of ROBW #2. This capture, as noted above, is never seen or directly indicated. Is it possible that the tentacles chopped off by Bruce are the contents, referred to by Martin Van Derm as "the Devil" when he writes c. 1670? In any case, it stays on that timeline until at least c. 1980 and the events of the forthcoming ROBW #5.

1765: Old Thomas Wayne, in ROBW #4, when Catherine reports the bells, suggests that he has previously encountered the mysterious contents of the casket when he and others participated in the Barbatos ceremony. This fits easily with the known presence of the casket in Gotham before and after this date, although it indicates that the casket's possession was shared by or exchanged between the Waynes and Van Derms.

The End of Time: When Bruce Wayne encounters his rescue party at Vanishing Point, his presence at the End of Time and his ability to stop Superman and Green Lantern is unexplained. This would likely be within the abilities of an Ancestor Box. He is clearly more knowledgeable about the larger plot than he was in ROBW #3, indicating that sometime after the events that will begin in ROBW #5, he will gain control of the casket, retrieving it as Alan Wayne intended, some hundred years after it has sat waiting under Wayne Manor. At that point, he will cease to be an amnesiac dupe in Darkseid's trap and will begin his counterattack.

c. 1980: The main events of ROBW #5 will show the long-anticipated interaction between Thomas and Martha Wayne and the Black Glove. Bruce Wayne is alive as a small boy and also present as the gunshot victim of Jonah Hex, and will act as a detective, perhaps the same one hired by Martha's family as referred to by the Mayor in Batman #677. If the masquerade ball from Detective #235 takes place in Wayne Manor, it might be in the hidden Batcave, with Doctor Hurt striving to collect the casket which is present. The adult Bruce Wayne might be the one to come away with it, leaving Hurt waiting another 28 years until RIP to try again. Doctor Hurt's presence in Wayne Manor when Bruce is a child would resonate with his words to Bruce in Batman #678, "My, how you've grown." Clearly, ROBW #5 will be a big event in the mythology of Batman.

The facts that Old Thomas Wayne wanted the contents of the casket in c. 1880 so that they could provide him with immortality and that Doctor Hurt still (again?) wants them in 2010 indicate that Hurt is Old Thomas Wayne, bestowed with longevity but not total immortality. (He seems to have aged about 35 years as 245 years have actually passed.) He received his partial immortality in a first contact with the "something else" in 1765. Just as Bruce will be able to use the box's vast powers to travel in time and stop his super-powered friends, Hurt has found a way to use it for life extension but -- for unstated reasons -- only got partial immortality instead of the whole thing.

This would provide one explanation why he wants to get back to Wayne Manor and why he wanted to do so in RIP. Why didn't he obtain the casket in 2008 when he had control of the mansion for about five days? The fresh paint that Dick sees at the Barbatos shrine indicates that Hurt was probably within mere yards of his goal. Maybe he never got through the final wall/gate barriers that took Dick only a minute to get through. The timeline suggests that Bruce Wayne may be the answer: If Bruce took the casket from c. 1980 but it is present again in 2010, then the casket must return at some point. Perhaps Bruce, finally seeing the big picture, deliberately takes it from the End of Time back to c. 2009, so that it is absent from Wayne Manor during the events of RIP but is present again for the current story.

For however many of these jigsaw pieces fit together, more is unexplained. How did the contents get into the casket? Is Doctor Hurt, the curse-casting Devil of RIP just a man who got his hands on some New Gods technology and mistakenly thought them to be instruments of demons, the Devil, and black magic? If so, is Morrison portraying Earth's occult beings as a byproduct of DC's gods and devils? How much of the larger story is known to the Joker, who was a moment from reaching the door of their crypt when he was struck down in B&R #11? However much is clear now, Morrison has more to reveal to us before the story ends next month.

Edits:

One, I'm adding an image of the casket in the portrait of Alan Wayne. It appears in the extreme lower right of this cropped version of a much bigger panel from B&R #10. Click to enlarge.


Two, the discussion of the casket has to lead into the larger plot of the All Over that Darkseid is threatening. In 1718, the Miagani mention this along with something leaving the Batcave. The Native American Midnight Horse mentions it in association with the casket in ROBW #4. This lends support to the idea that the "something else" was obtained after the events of ROBW #2 in c. 1645. Possibly associated with the chopping off of the tentacles. But was this part of Darkseid's intentions, or something Bruce did to start to overcome that plan? And is it associated with the Joker's "everybody dies" comment or is that a separate parallel threat? There is more to discuss, and I'm sure the comment section below will fill up with the excellent ideas of the people who comment here. The delays in the series provide more opportunities for discussion before the story resumes.

Mad Men 409: After The Fall

It's there for the retina -- if not the mind -- to see. As the first shot of "The Beautiful Girls" comes up, an image near enough to the last shot of the credits fills the same shapes of light and dark and it is not plausible that director Michael Uppendahl staged the shot without intending this. The repeated image asks for a reexamination of the much-admired credits, which show a man walk into an office that disintegrates before he can sit. The collapse of the room sends him into a fall to the backdrop of Fifties-seeming advertisement art with a strong emphasis in the subject matter on beautiful women, or as they would have been known at the time, beautiful girls. The man's fall transitions to a shot of him in repose, right arm outstretched. And so we see Don in this episode -- in that pose, just as his destructive negligence of his children and self has been halted. Whether series auteur Matthew Weiner gave his approval or not, the director is telling us that we are moving to a new phase in the series -- what comes after the fall.

How the series begins this new phase is by moving sideways -- Don is still the central figure in this episode, but only insofar as a few, but not all, of the titular beautiful girls are involved in plots that revolve around him. Spanning the range of ages from ten to dead, Sally, Faye, Betty, and Miss Blankenship become plot devices that impact Don's life in suddenly inconvenient ways. An early episode of The West Wing, also featuring Elisabeth Moss, had "these women" as part of its title and focus, but only part. "The Beautiful Girls" suggests that women are inherently enough of a type to group them and make an episode around them; to make an episode about nothing more specific than women is in fact as well as politically objectification.

But there's no mistaking that that's how Don sees the collection of females who complicate his week in this episode. While he sees them as a nuisance to the career and affair that he wants to be having successfully and simply, he is with lies turning away the daughter who has taken a considerable risk to reach out to him. And however much Ida ruins Don's afternoon with her demise, the event certainly inconveniences her more than it does Don. Don's self-centered take on these events, along with parallel insensitivity from lesser characters such as Stan and Harry, call attention to Peggy's less-than-resounding call for civil rights for women.

The strongest of "these women" are weak in this episode: Peggy somehow has to read Abe's piece to be insulted by it, not seeing enough in the reference to Nazism (and the "I was just following orders" defense) in the title. Her efforts to instill social consciousness in the company only make her laughable. Joan, still wearing the pen around her neck that earned Joey's spite last episode, is all too easily wooed by Roger. Faye, who has stumbled into Don's life long on schooling and short on extracurriculars, feels that she has been judged for how she measures up in precisely the endeavor she has neglected, mothering.

The episode comes together in Roger's line, "If it looks like I'm going [to die], open the window. I'd rather flatten the top of a cab." This reprises the culmination of the opening credits' fall and Roger possibly chooses his words mindful of the 1947 suicide of Evelyn McHale whose suicide note lamented that she would not "make a good wife for anybody." Literal ups and downs fill the episode, from Bert Cooper's sadly superficial eulogy noting that Ida died at a higher elevation than she was born (making her, in the era of Program Gemini, an astronaut), to Sally's spill onto the floor.

Is the fall from the opening credits a deliberate topic in this episode? Stan croons with anatomical thoughts that Peggy is going to meet Joyce "Down below..." Megan consoles Sally with "I fall all the time." And the episode's final and signature moment is the closing of elevator doors on Joan, Peggy, and Faye, before they begin to descend. Certainly they are taking a slower and safer descent than Miss McHale's fall from the Empire State Building. And in all probability, with Don's life as the show's utmost focus, their gender's "Mad Men" episode in the spotlight closed along with those doors.