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Season 6, Episode 10: “A Tale of Two Cities”
This episode centered around the 1972 Democratic and Republican national conventions, which not only played in the background on TV sets throughout the many characters’ plotlines but which also influenced their behavior. Cynicism, anger, and revolution seemed to be the emotions du jour. Don and Megan Draper start out the episode watching the Democratic national convention on TV and have different reactions to the party avoiding talking about the war: Megan accuses Don of being cynical. Later in the episode, the creative staff at the ad agency listen to the radio and discover that the Democrats rejected a peace plank in their platform about calling for end to the Vietnam War. Michael Ginsberg despairs over what he sees as a betrayal but Jim Cutler orders him to start working on the Manischewitz account. This sparks an argument in which Ginsberg yells at Cutler to stop being passive about the war. Cutler keeps his cool in front of Ginsberg but wants to fire him and all the SCDP creative staff while Roger Sterling, Don Draper, and Harry Crane are in California. Ted Chaough stops him, however, and tells him to stop thinking about the agency as part “their people” and “our people.”
Roger, Don, and Harry have three meetings in California (all of which are ultimately unsuccessful) but we only see the one with Carnation. They are trying to convince the company to allow them to advertise their instant breakfast in addition to their existing Life cereal account. The Carnation executives argue a little over politics and Nixon’s chances (one claims that the protests handed the election to him, while the other thinks they “shamed the country” in a way that Nixon can’t fix). Ultimately, they find that the executives are resistant to working with New York ad agencies.
Harry takes Roger and Don to party in the Hills where movie bigwigs are supposed to be. They run into Danny Siegel (an unoriginal, obnoxious ad man from a few seasons ago who is now a successful director). Danny enjoys flaunting his superiority in front of Roger, in part by punching him after Roger trashtalks him and walking off with the girl Roger is interested in. Roger clearly can’t adapt to the new hippie culture, despite his dabbling in LSD, which seems juvenile and shallow compared to the druggy lifestyles led by these people. Don, also trying to embrace change as he was able to do in California in the past, takes hashish and hallucinates Megan telling him she quit her job and is pregnant. He leaves a woman he might have slept with for this vision of domestic bliss, but then sees himself floating face down in pool, and thinks it’s a vision of himself dead.
When the partners are all back in New York, Ted announces that Chevy signed off on their work to move to the next level. To close a debate about changing the agency’s name from “Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce, Cutler, Gleason, Chaough” to something manageable, Ted and Jim suggest calling agency “Sterling, Cooper, and Partners” to be “equally offensive” to all of them. (This gets around Bert Cooper’s earlier half-joking, half-embittered idea to remove his name along with those of all the other deceased partners.) Pete calls the proposed name “a gravestone” for the young partners and frets that the ad business is not the same anymore, at which point Don tells him to get out of the business if he doesn’t like it.
Earlier in the episode, Cutler invited Bob Benson, the ever-eager and ever-ambitious underling, to the Manischewitz meeting to keep Ginsberg and the client in check. Right before the meeting, Benson finds Ginsberg in the middle of a meltdown over politics, rocking back and forth in crouched position in his office, reciting, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds” (The phrase from the Bhagavad Gita that J. Robert Oppenheimer used when describing watching an atom bomb test.) Benson is able to talk him into pulling himself together and going to the meeting, but for no gain: he announces to Ted and Cutler that Manischewitz is probably dropping the agency because they haven’t been happy with their work for months. When Ted is annoyed that Cutler didn’t go to the meeting, Benson covers for him; Cutler rewards his loyalty by bringing him on to the Chevy account.
At another point, Joan Harris watches footage of police attacking protesters outside the Republican convention and seems shocked. The show then cuts to Don watching the same images but looking unaffected. Megan calls him and is upset but he jokes about the situation. She asks him to be careful in case a riot starts, but encourages him to go for a swim to try to relax. (An ironic foreshadowing of the drowning scene.)
Joan later goes on what she thinks is a blind date, but it turns out that the man she is meeting (Andrew Hayes, the head of marketing at Avon) just wants advice on how to work with ad agencies. Joan is excited about the opportunity and wants to be the one responsible for reeling him in–the “account man” for the company. Peggy Olson tells her to talk with Ted, because she’s convinced that unlike Don, Ted won’t kick her off the lead. Peggy is wrong about Ted again, just like she was in the previous few episodes–unlike the egalitarian and perfectly mannered man she believes her crush to be, Ted turns out to be just as traditional as anyone else: he calls in Pete Campbell to sweettalk Hayes and relegate Joan back to her office manager position.
Inspired by the rioters, or perhaps sharing the same cultural anger at her repression, Joan shows up to the meeting with Hayes and tells Peggy that she didn’t invite Pete. Peggy, the groundbreaking career woman, is shocked and upset, but both the women try to win Avon’s business. Afterward, they argue outside the symbolic glass doors of the agency because Peggy thinks Joan lost Avon’s business and Joan is willing to take the risk to advance her own standing in the company that keeps reminding her that she only got to where she is by sleeping with a client. Joan feels that she has been doing different forms of ad work for so long that she wants to finally get credit for all that she handles.
When Pete finds out that he was cut out of the meeting, he calls Joan into the conference room and insinuates that Joan is sleeping with this client. Peggy once again overestimates her standing with Ted, believing that she can handle him when in fact he dismisses her like the subordinate that she is. Pete calls Joan’s actions a revolt and after Peggy calls Joan out of the meeting with a memo saying that Hayes is on the phone, Ted tries to calm him down by saying that whatever works to get a client in to the agency should be embraced. Pete, unable to wrap his old-fashioned mindset around this threat to his tenuous standing among the partners, angrily exclaims that anything goes only when there are no rules. The last image that we see is Pete, perhaps finally getting with the times and giving up on trying to live by the old boys’ gamebook, smoking a joint that he took from Stan.