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Season 6, Episode 11: “Favors”
This week’s episode, although titled “Favors,” focused on the variety of characters’ relationships with sex: repression, redirection, rediscovery, disillusionment, etc.
Peggy Olson starts the episode in her now boyfriend-less apartment, fleeing from a rat but struggling to undo all of the locks on her door to get out fast enough. When she returns home later, she finds that the rat was caught in a trap and left a bloody trail to her sofa. Unsure of whether it’s alive under there or not, she calls her friend Stan Rizzo to ask him to come over and take care of it. He’s in bed with a one-night stand, however, and after brusquely reminding her that he’s “not her boyfriend” and not interested in her, he hangs up. By the end of the episode, we see Peggy relaxing on her sofa, smoking a cigarette next to her new cat.
Pete Campbell’s mother and her nurse (Manolo) come to the SCP office and the two seem to have a good connection. While Pete calls Manolo into his private office to thank him for taking care of his mother and to tip him for taking her on a long drive recently, she talks with Peggy. Thinking that Peggy is Trudy, Pete’s mother suggests not just that she is happy with Manolo, but that they are having an affair. Later, while Ted Chaough, Pete, and Peggy are unwinding over drinks, Peggy discloses Pete’s mother’s comments–she tries to cover up for the senile woman, though, by suggesting that perhaps she thought Manolo was her husband. Alluding to their previous relationship, Pete expresses jealousy about the way Peggy looks at Ted (while the latter is not at the table), but as they are laughing, Ted flashes a jealous glance. Ted returns home to his lonely and dissatisfied wife who expresses her frustration with his disengagement at home. She suggests that not only does Ted get off on having Peggy around, but that he also finds a deep personal satisfaction about doing battle with Don every morning–satisfaction that he doesn’t get from spending time with her.
Pete opens his apartment door later to find his mother and Manolo, who had planned to go out to dinner with him. He calls his mother inside for an “adult conversation” (in her words). After defensively asking why he thinks it is any of his business “what goes on in [her] bedroom,” she admits to the affair and twists the knife a little by critiquing Pete for having being unloveable since childhood. Back at the ad agency, Pete calls Bob Benson into his office to yell at him about Manolo, says he “sent him a rapist.” Bob suggests that Manolo’s “interests don’t turn that way,” which doesn’t reassure Pete, who spouts off some homophobic rhetoric. In trying to reassure him by spinning one his now-trademark inspirational speeches, Bob kind of comes on to Pete, touching his knee to Pete’s. Pete pulls his leg away and says he’ll give Manolo a month’s severance but doesn’t otherwise address Bob’s subtle advance. A frequent question on the blogosphere this season has been “Who is Bob Benson?”: Is he a clone of a young Don? Is he as earnest as he seems? Or does he have a darker and deeper set of motivations and character traits? It seems that the show is FINALLY returning to the issues of sexual orientation discrimination, after Sal Romano was booted from the ad agency and the show partway through season three. This would be a welcome development after Sal’s disappearance was left underdeveloped and uncommented upon. The possibility remains, of course, that Bob is just opportunistic and in his constant quest for advancement, misread Pete’s homophobic vehemence as a sign of repressed desire and tested the waters to see if it would benefit him to bring Pete out of his shell. In either case, Bob’s defense of Manolo suggests an enlightened attitude that few characters have consistently demonstrated.
On the Draper front, Don returns home from work one afternoon to find Megan meeting with Mitchell Rosen–the son of his friend Arnold and former mistress Sylvia. Mitchell immediately leaves so Don has to learn from Megan that the 19-year-old boy has been designated 1A for the Vietnam War draft and wants her to help him escape to Canada. Don tells Megan that she shouldn’t do so because he can’t spend his life on the run (as Don is, in fact, doing). Arnold later shows up at the Drapers’ door and takes Don to a bar where he opens up to his friend about Sylvia’s emotional distance and his son’s radicalism that caused him to get his draft classification bumped up. He says that he is angry that his son is now on “a damn list for the rest of his life” (a striking but undeveloped call back to the Holocaust when coming from a middle-aged Jewish doctor in the early 1970s). Arnie admits that he wants his son to do his duty but Sylvia doesn’t want Mitchell to go to Vietnam, and asks Don for advice.
At the office the next day, Don turns to Pete for advice on how to get a military deferment–Pete suggests that their Chevy contacts might be useful since the company is the biggest military contractor. At a dinner with the Chevy executives, Don brings up Mitchell and fishes for tips on how to get out of being drafted. All he achieves, though, is a seriously stilted conversation that Roger and Ted have to work to smooth over. Back at work the next day, Ted yells at Don for creating an awkward moment with Chevy reps, but offers to help Mitchell become a pilot in the National Guard if Don agrees to “stop the war” of competition between them. Don agrees with a handshake and thanks him. Eager to share the good news with the Rosens, Don calls the apartment and gets Sylvia instead of Arnie. She cries with gratitude and relief but refuses to rehash their breakup over the phone.
Meanwhile, Sally Draper is staying with her father in Manhattan. She is attending a Model UN competition in the city but Betty refuses to let her daughter stay in a hotel with the other students because there’s only one other girl going but a lot of boys. The other girl, Julie, ends up staying with the Drapers, too. When they arrive at the apartment building, Mitchell opens the door for the two girls. Julie immediately starts flirting with him, and later that night, the girls play a sleepover game, writing down what they like about Mitchell. On the cab ride to the conference the next day, Sally reviews all the facts she needs to know for the competition but Julie’s mind is only on boys. Julie tells Sally that she signed Sally’s name to their letter about what they like about Mitchell and slid it under his apartment door to “introduce” them. Mortified, Sally leaves the Model UN conference early to sneak into the Rosens’ apartment and retrieve the letter. While doing so, she sees Sylvia and Don making love. Don runs after her, fighting back tears in the elevator, but she is off in a cab before he gets to the lobby.
After a trip to a bar, an intoxicated Don returns home to find Megan, Julie, and Sally at dinner. Megan greets him with a kiss, which is clearly unexpected, and then answers the doorbell to find Mitchell and Arnie. Sally tries to leave table but Julie stops her. Mitchell only pays attention to Don, however, and thanks him for pulling strings to keep him out of combat. The tension builds as Arnie says he owes Don, and then Megan kisses Don and says he “is the sweetest man.” Unable to take the hypocrisy, Sally exclaims, “You make me sick,” and storms out of the room. Don talks to her through her locked bedroom door, claiming that although she thinks she saw something, he was just comforting “Mrs. Rosen” and that the whole situation is very complicated. She quietly accepts this, but it is clear that not only has her sexual innocence been shattered, but her idolization of her father has as well.
The iconic scene from this episode, though, is not Sally walking in on her father, not Bob coming on to Pete, but rather the artful montage of lonely souls: the camera cuts from a scene of Pete pouring himself a bowl of Raisin Bran in his empty apartment, to one of Peggy smoking in front of her TV with her cat, then to Ted walking in on his wife asleep and his sons watching TV, and finally to Don drinking alone in a bar. It remains to be seen if any of them will be redeemed.