7) Babylon (Season One, Episode Six)
Written By: Andre and Maria Jacquemetton
Directed by: Andrew Bernstein
As Don Draper famously said at the end of the fifth season, “But what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” While Mad Men has always focused on the unfulfilled lives of characters that ought to be more content with their paychecks and careers, few episodes so wonderfully pivot between what the characters want and what they have as “Babylon,” one of the drama’s first great episodes.
While Mad Men’s first season is much more Don-oriented than any of the seasons that followed, it has taken a while for two of the series’ most significant characters to come into shape. Peggy Olson shows her first real sign of ingenuity here, standing apart from the rest of the Sterling Cooper staff in the Belle Jolie lipstick try-ons and manages to land a job writing copy. In one of the episode’s best shots, we watch Peggy actually partake in the brainstorming, observing her co-worker kissing a tissue and tossing it in the garbage.
The episode also shows a more detailed look at Joan Holloway, who is sleeping around with Roger but also knowing that she is treated more like an object than a person at the office. (The bird Roger gives her at the episode’s end is not as intriguing a symbol as the gilded cage that contains it.) As Peggy explains to Freddie Rumsen, referring to the lipsticks, not everyone wants to be just one of 100 colors in a box.
Beyond its new ground for Mad Men’s women – including some of the slyest, most sympathetic work from January Jones in its entirety – “Babylon” comes into remarkable focus with its terrific montage at the end, connected to a performance of a song with that title at a Beatnik bar. All of the characters are in exile, the montage implicates, and not quite at the Promised Land where they can attain their happiness. (The Israel ministry of Tourism, fittingly, is this week’s client.) The episode ends with one of the series’ all-time finest shots, of Roger and Joan faced away from each other in front of a hotel, each trying to hail a cab.
Best Scene: The stirring montage that closes out “Babylon” is beautiful, but the scene between Roger and Joan in the hotel – a long take slowly reveals they are sexually entangled – does much to fill out the backstories and motivations of two of the show’s supporting characters, while also introducing us to this delightful, dynamic couple.
Line of the Hour: This one goes to Rachel Menken, doing a fine job of outlining the episode’s (and perhaps the series’) main theme: “They taught us at Barnard about that word, ‘utopia’. The Greeks had two meaning for it: ‘eu-topos’, meaning the good place, and ‘u-topos’ meaning the place that cannot be.”
