Mad Men 413

"Tomorrowland" puts Don into meaningful one-on-one scenes with so many beautiful women that their names take a couple of minutes to scroll during the credits. Each of these interactions has shown flashes of unbearable asymmetry, with Don apologetically distancing himself now from Peggy, Faye, and Betty. In contrast, he proposes to Megan with a suddenness and neediness that recalls the drunken passes he was making earlier in the season. It is so rash that she hesitates for a few seconds before her nearly-as-rash acceptance.

Though the Draper-Calvet engagement is unexpectedly sudden, everyone can easily interpret it as the kind of thing they say they expect. Roger says, ambiguously, "See, Don, this is the way to behave." Roger, of course, is married to a much younger and very attractive woman whom he found through work. A woman whom, the last we saw, he was prepared to leave in order to get back to another much younger and very attractive woman whom he found through work. Joan and Peggy both effortlessly understand the dynamic of the wealthy man but that it is so easily explained doesn't temper their reactions of distaste. They see the treadmill of eternally young secretaries rising to prominence of one sort or another, and know that they will have to run very hard just to lose less ground. Joan's life is a tangle where promotions bring no raise and the risk of exposure as she incorporates her real pregnancy into a very high-stakes fiction. It's finally paying off for her that she married a poor doctor: He won't figure out that she's not showing as much as she should be because she lied about the dates to make him out to be the father.

The engagement is particularly wounding to Peggy, not necessarily because she wants to be with Don; it is enough that he told her that business is the reason why he never made a play for her. It is more than enough that he tells Peggy that Megan reminds him of her. This reduces the basis of attraction, the reason why Don is making this leap with Megan instead of Peggy, to nothing more tangible than looks. The consummate ad man stumbles badly there in debasing himself, Megan, and Peggy in just a couple of sentences.

Faye ought to get tired of being right. She said earlier that Don would marry again within the year and so, it seems, he will. She says now that Don only likes the beginning of things. This can be interpreted on the time scale of relationships (months) or youth and human lifespan (the several years of youth that Megan has over Faye). Of course, Don is also gaining a hybrid wife/servant, who is still answering his phones, and who caught Don's eye in this episode while excelling in caring for the Draper children.

Henry and Betty's relationship shows us, at the very same time, one of the ways that these May-December relationships can flame out. Neither party has gotten what they wanted out of that, and Betty is less likely striving for friendship than a rekindled romance when she confides in Don about how things are not going well. Don and Betty look disarmingly natural together until the news slips out.

Meanwhile, Don employs uncharacteristically sentimental language in his proposal, appealing to fate when he remarks on how many things needed to happen for them to get together. He doesn't specify that his sleeping with Allison, the death of Miss Blankenship, the firing of Carla, and his unexpected acquisition of a diamond ring are four of those things.

The episode makes such a perfect soap opera that it is easy to miss it doing what Mad Men does best, using the various subplots as mirrors for each other. Via Don, SCDP has come to pitch the American Cancer Society precisely because tobacco had fired SCDP; substitute Betty for tobacco and Megan for the ACS, and there's not much difference between Don's business and professional lives. Faye, meanwhile, sees herself as the tobacco in Don's personal life although the comparison is flawed: Tobacco let go of Don instead of vice versa.

The "rebound" is also paralleled in the business of Topaz, who was forced to make a decision on short notice. Peggy's business success comes thanks to insider information about a desperate party who had the urgent need not to be single -- not so very different from Megan's romantic success. The unsavory confusion of business and one's lovelife is also paralleled by Harry offering some combination of work and social interaction to "Carolyn Jones", who looks near enough like Megan.

In an important contrast, Ken declines to use his future in-laws to wrangle an account, saying that he will eventually lose every client he has, and implying a commitment, instead, to his bride-to-be. Don takes the opposite approach, seeing every client as a relationship that he hopes remains permanent, and he's fooling himself if he can say the same about his romantic life. He certainly understands why he moves on in his business life; he tells the ACS that he had an "impulse to move forward." And so he leaps into life's next chapter cannonball style, beginning the adventure of tomorrow in a place called Tomorrowland. Stephanie perhaps helped Don into it, noting that she and he each have their lives ahead of them. This is technically true, but Don has quite a bit less of his left ahead, and he is much more apt to live that part making the same mistakes that he has made before. Don may not know how much he's talking about himself when he tells the ACS that teenagers think first about themselves, and that they mourn for their childhood more than they anticipate their future. It's been quite a while since Don was engaged to a woman this age. He has a pretty beginning to look forward to.

- - - - -

My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees
Ep 11 Blowing Smoke
Ep 12 Tomorrowland

Return of Bruce Wayne 5

This close to the end of a story, the loose ends start wrapping up. So it is with Return of Bruce Wayne #5, much less because it is the penultimate chapter in a six-issue story than because it is the fourth-to-last chapter in a fifty-issue story that will reach its turning point next month. While the heroes are named on the front covers, the dominant force behind the scenes has been the enmity of Doctor Hurt, whose story will be providing its final answers very soon.

ROBW #5 itself has a plot twist that is revealed to us when we see Marsha Lamarr walking with Professor Carter Nichols and it becomes clear that she is "the woman", the "visitor" who serves as the ultimate temptation that Doctor Hurt offers the scientist. The betrayal is made clear to Bruce when he notices Marsha's absence and he is struck from behind. Betrayal is a common weapon of Hurt's -- Dick Grayson has been struck from behind by Jim Gordon in the most recent pages of Batman and Robin #14 and Bruce was betrayed by Jezebel as part of the coup in Batman, R.I.P. The plot of the main events of this story is thus complicated by acting and other lies. Lies within lies, actually.

Consider the seemingly simple question of whether or not Bruce, in this story, is the detective mentioned as far back as Batman #677 in the dossier that incriminates the Waynes. The dossier asserts that there was a detective hired by Martha's family. As it turns out, neither Marsha nor the others who arranged that dossier believed that there really was a detective, and considered Bruce to be play-acting, and he did not create any dossier himself. And yet he really did serve as a detective in the case, and was the person to whom the dossier referred, even though it was intended to be false. Lies within lies.

Since Infinite Crisis, Grant Morrison has been using old-time continuity selectively as a pattern for a new retelling of Batman's backstory. Two of the characters in this issue -- Doctor Hurt and Carter Nichols -- go back to the Fifties and Forties, respectively. Marsha Lamarr tells Bruce to wear a replica of the Thomas Wayne batsuit to frighten Thomas's murderer into confessing; this is the plot of Detective #235. But that plan is utter deception; she is sending Bruce into a trap so that he -- a nobody, in the eyes of the Black Glove -- can be sacrificed for their dark purposes. Nothing like the older story actually comes to pass in this issue, except as a lie. Nor, in fact, does this issue confirm the suspicion that the Black Glove had the Waynes killed, although it seems extremely likely.

Beyond the unreliable nature of Marsha Lamarr as a narrator, this story is complex because Bruce is being used for three entirely different purposes.

First, he plays the role of a detective during a meeting with his own grandmother, Betsy Kane. Why does this meeting take place at all? Lies within lies. Perhaps it falsifies the existence of a detective to explain the existence of a dossier that frames Thomas Wayne. Does it feed Betsy's belief that Thomas was really evil? It may help that belief along, but that's apparently not necessary -- she is already solidly convinced, for reasons that will merit comment later. Lastly, it helps lead Bruce along in the lie, because it gives the impression that Marsha was using the meeting to get the key to Wayne Manor -- a key she almost certainly did not need. However, it makes Marsha's phony investigation seem more plausible.

Second, Bruce is to play the role of the human bat in a ceremony of sacrifice patterned on the one in the 1990 Peter Milligan-penned Dark Knight, Dark City. Summoning the demon Barbatos requires a carefully-prepared human sacrificial victim who is dressed like a bat. Marsha's poison lipstick (Bruce is, like Jesus, betrayed with a kiss) and the batsuit bring this about. And now we must ask, if that is the role this suit plays in one masquerade involving the Black Glove, why did Thomas Wayne wear such a suit? When Doctor Hurt wears it, it seems to imply power within the Black Glove, but Thomas may have worn it because he had been set up as a victim on some other occasion, maybe some lunar eclipse earlier during the same year.

Third, Bruce's murder is being filmed (by Mayhew, the aspiring director) as faked evidence that Martha Wayne was a Satanist. Marsha in disguise shows us why the Black Glove, in RIP, note Doctor Hurt's fondness for actors. (She mentions two others who could have played the role that Bruce plays; this could be another crucifixion reference, but more directly refers, possibly, to Mangrove Pierce and John Mayhew.) The Black Glove's plan is marvelously complex, in that duping Bruce during one day could help bring about three different goals.

But there are two other goals that Doctor Hurt has that day, and these offer conflicting evidence on who and what he is. First, he is trying to tempt the members of the Black Glove to evil for evil's sake. We see this most clearly with Lamarr, who had been offered eternal life, and ultimately sinned and loses years off a natural life span in the process. She goes on to die young, after becoming Mayhew's fifth wife of six, a death first described way back in Batman #668.

While Hurt succeeds with Lamarr and with the other Black Glove members, he fails with Nichols, who is offered wealth and fame (similar to the successful temptation of Wingman in the Club of Heroes story), but ultimately rejects them, backing out of the ritual at the last moment, a role played by Thomas Jefferson in Milligan's story. He goes on to be an ally of Batman as illustrated in many older stories as well as Morrison's Batman #700.

Hurt's desire to tempt others casts him again as the classic literary Devil, a motive he didn't display in his chronological prior appearance in ROBW #4. (There can be no doubt that Hurt is Old Thomas Wayne, or is what Old Thomas Wayne became, after Morrison's latest interview.) So perhaps something meaningful happened to Old Thomas Wayne sometime during the last hundred years, during which time he apparently began the Black Glove, took up the "Simon Hurt" identity, and perhaps committed the Jack The Ripper crimes. By the time of RIP, he is able to cast a curse, and perhaps do more. He seems to have more tricks up his sleeve than retarded aging.

What seems less devilish is his goal, seen also in ROBW #4 and B&R #14, to procure the bat-casket to attain immortality. Driven to attain immortality, he seems much more man (though one with supernatural longevity) than metaphysical. Among the many telling facts in this issue is that he is simply unable to find the casket, even though he is now, as in RIP, given free access to Wayne Manor. He asks for Nichols' time travel device to bring Barbatos to him, so that he can make use of what is almost certainly the Ancestor Box to give himself another jolt (perhaps an infinite one) of prolonged life. This is a goal he has attained before the possible future in Batman #666.

On a more straightforward note, we finally get a sense of how it is that The Devil would be living as an Army psychiatrist in order to brainwash Batman many years later. We see that he has used this job to make soldiers relive past trauma, possibly torture for torture's sake. At some point, he has to disappear from this role, per the "Gotham's Hurt Missing" headline from Batman #678. But he returns to it later. For now, he occupies the role at Willowwood Asylum, serving as a tie to the "Thomas Wayne, Jr." story from World's Finest #233.

Perhaps the most striking revelations of this story are in the language that ties Doctor Hurt's devil worship to Darkseid. Look at these two speeches.

Bruno Mannheim, 52 #25 (speaking of Gotham): "I'm looking to establish a new world order of crime, with its own capital city."

Doctor Hurt, B&R #14: "I give you Gotham! The new capital city of crime! ... [Where good men] must succumb to the new order of things."

Morrison's depiction of the cult of the Crime Bible and the armies of King Coal, who mention Mannheim in B&R #8 inextricably intertwine these worlds of evil. 52 joins older continuity in linking Mannheim to Darkseid. Hurt's comments in this issue explain that what seemed like demons and myth during his first encounter with Barbatos are now known to be "dark science". While he adopts all the Satanic of ritual and echoing Pyg's line about "Gotham" being a "goat home" (notice the near-anagram intended there), he also references, like Mannheim, the rock and the rage, the "dark side", and Apokolips' fire pits. This issue makes it clear that in Morrison's DCU, the one kind of evil is the other. Most likely, good is related, too, and a man in a wheelchair warns "Batman beware the hole in things." This is like Metron's appearances in Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis, although this man who "can't actually speak" lacks the blue squarish pupils that were Metron's telltale feature in those stories.

ROBW #5 is dense with offhand statements of fact that illustrate much more backstory. A GCPD Mayor James has been killed, replaced by the undoubtedly corrupt Mayor Jessop. Marsha's story of corruption (assuming she's not lying about that) also mentions Police Commissioner Loeb who was introduced in Batman Year One.

Yet more is told about Bruce's family. The Kane side shares a name with both versions of Batwoman, the younger of which is a target of those who follow the Crime Bible. They also sold Kane Chemicals to 

Ace Chemical, which is part of the Joker's origin in The Killing Joke. According to Batman #682, Ace Chemical also bought Axis Chemical, and that story also references Apex Chemical, which is the organization behind the mystery in Batman's very first story in Detective #27. On top of that, the given name of Betsy Kane figures to be the same as that of the original Bat-Girl, Betty Kane. You can't say that Morrison's not playing a deep game here.

Bruce's grandfather Roddy turned down Hurt's temptation, which apparently led to Hurt causing, somehow, his stroke. The agonizingly neglected invalid (wasps crawling on his immobilized face -- torture but no one seems to notice) moans out words of warning for Bruce. Words that he seems to say include "Army", "Martha", and "Hurt" while Betsy looks into her teacup and sees Hurt's "W" scar and the twin bat-symbols (of Bruce and Dick?). These words certainly would make apt warning,  and make, with the man in the wheelchair, a salient pattern of two disabled men assisting the hero with information. This pattern is familiar from aforementioned Morrison works as well as Twin Peaks.

Along the way, we find out that a constellation of facts about the Waynes, through the filter of disinformation fed to Betsy Kane. We find out that Martha's necklace is a Van Derm heirloom, via Alan Wayne's wife Catherine from ROBW #4. Thus, the famous pearl necklace, if as "worthless" as Betsy thinks, may actually belong to Anthro's wife from ROBW #1, and be more or less the world's first necklace.

We also know that Thomas Wayne had an evil night life, and appearances before Betsy that seem to stand out from his usual demeanor, and these are almost certainly the work of Doctor Hurt standing in for Thomas. This suggests that perhaps Hurt looked young about thirty years ago, but has aged since then at almost a normal rate, adding urgency to his quest for immortality. The maligning of Thomas Wayne seems to have left to him -- or Hurt? -- being kept in the secret batcave, covered up by Bruce's grandfather Patrick and his great uncle Silas (from 1958's Batman #120, and one of the portraits in B&R #10). This coincided with Bruce being sent to boarding school, which is a story element from Morrison's "Gothic". Meanwhile, Carter Nichols is revealed as a school friend of Thomas's.

It remains to wonder why the Black Glove did not thoroughly smear the names of Thomas and Martha while they were still alive. This may yet be revealed; it may be a plot hole.

While big and complex answers to many questions have arrived, and others seem to be on the verge, we also get a quick, easy answer as to what threat Darkseid has made of Batman's trip through time. In a dash of throwaway pseudoscience, the issue opens with Red Robin explaining that the trip itself is bringing an explosive dose of Omega energy.

Bruce Wayne, as a sort of Batman, appears in the present at the end of this issue. But he is not arriving directly from the Black Glove ritual. He has gone to the End of Time, served as the Archivist, and encountered the rescue team of Superman, Green Lantern, Booster Gold, and Rip Hunter before using their Time Bubble to pop into the Hall of Justice. The next issue is likely to tell of a more complex path through time, possibly giving Bruce at least one stop to pick up the Ancestor Box from the casket before going to the far future. Perhaps the use of a non-Darkseid time conduit breaks the effectiveness of the Omega Sanction, but clearly Bruce has more to do to escape this trap. For despite the use of the Time Bubble, the bells of the Ancestor Box are ringing as the JLA are caught unprepared. We know who will play the key role in ending the threat.

We now await more of the Doctor Hurt saga in B&R, with whatever comeuppance awaits him, whether it be defeat in battle, or the metaphysical despair that he has always been something less than he thought he was. He may have to suffer from the revelation that his Barbatos was the Miagani tribute to Bruce.

Meanwhile, ROBW #6 will provide the conclusion to the tale of Bruce's Omega Sanction, a science fiction story whose forthcoming twists and turns seem almost utterly impossible to guess now, except that they will end with Bruce Wayne back in his own time, ready to begin a distinctly new era as Batman.

Return of Bruce Wayne 5 Preview

Tomorrow, the long-anticipated resumption of Grant Morrison's Batman saga comes with Return of Bruce Wayne #5. This issues comes after a delay of several weeks, but it also follows on build-ups begun during Batman, R.I.P. and even in Infinite Crisis. That crisis provided a soft reboot, allowing the creators (primarily, Morrison) to redefine the terms of Batman's past, so long as nothing drastically changed the present. Instead of beginning this process with a beginning-to-end redefinition, Morrison started by telling a story in the present, as though nothing much had changed, but at irregular intervals, he has served notice that the backstory has already changed -- we can say that it changed with Infinite Crisis, but off-camera. In doing so, he tends to pattern things loosely on older continuity, but with a very free hand to modify whatever he wishes, not only recording a new mythology, but using it to drive a story being told now. (Geoff Johns has followed a similar strategy with Superman, choosing to write an origin that focuses on events that played into his current stories rather than, say, the stories of a few years earlier.)

What makes ROBW #5 central is that we are going to revisit the general timeframe of the Wayne murders. To be specific, Bruce is revisiting that era in person, having arrived not too long after the murders have taken place. The time travel journey of the Omega Sanction is going to give him an opportunity to interact with his own personal past, putting the adult Bruce in a world (of about 1980) where the child Bruce is just beginning a life mission. That Morrison would revisit this time frame had been promised by the flashbacks to the Wayne murders in his 2006-2008 run in Batman. My take, from over a year ago, on how inevitable this chapter of the story was can be seen here. Now that chapter is upon us.

The key story from the past is Detective #235. Morrison has been teasing a return to that story from the time he showed the Thomas Wayne batsuit from that 1956 comic in the first issues of his own run. Now, the preview for ROBW #5 shows that batsuit as the actress Marsha Lamarr asks Bruce to wear it. Very likely, he will wear it for the same reason he wore it in 1956 -- to intimidate the people responsible for the Waynes' deaths into thinking that Thomas has returned, supernaturally, to haunt them.

The 1956 story was itself a retcon of the 1948 story in Batman #47 that showed Batman confronting Joe Chill, the mugger whose unplanned killing of the Waynes set the course of Bruce's life. Detective #235 added the significant detail that a mobster named Lew Moxon hired Chill to settle a score. In both of these stories, Batman confronts the person behind his parents' deaths and the encounter results in the death of the malefactor. Morrison has revisited the first of those stories, that of the gunman Chill, in Batman #673. The last page of RIP hinted that the new Lew Moxon is actually the Black Glove, probably Doctor Hurt himself, who has intriguingly chosen to wear the Thomas Wayne batsuit. Why? As part of demonic worship? Does the cowl have some power? Did it affect Thomas when he wore it, and will it try to do so when Bruce wears it?

The answers, and another step closer to the shadowy backstory of Doctor Hurt himself, may come tomorrow.

Mad Men 412

A line or a circle? Businesses, comic strips, and all human lives have to decide if they see life as a progression or a cycle -- one thing after another, or the same things over and over. There's more than one proverb arguing for each perspective. The last time Charlie Brown tries to kick the football is indistinguishable from the first time. And so it is with addiction and other character flaws. Don's constant inconstancy, Roger's elegant callousness, the firm on the brink of catastrophe. Is Mad Men taking us on a journey or in a circle?

The Heinz man says that "food is cyclical" and he's convinced that beans would inevitably return to the position of dominance that ketchup had taken over, "But I don't have that time. So I want to force the issue." The mid-Sixties was a perilous time to begin waiting for the past to return. Unhappily, for many the rear-looking optimist, the past was not to come back soon or ever.

For an addict, the past is all too certain to repeat. And so this episode brought back Don Draper's first on-air dalliance, Midge Daniels, whose life chose a most unfortunate moment in which to freeze. Once upon a time, Don might have left Betty for Midge. Now Midge is being prostituted out by her husband so one or both of them can get another heroin fix. Midge and her husband disagree on whether he reminds her of Brendan Behan (an incurable Irish drunk who died at 41) or Dylan Thomas (an incurable Welsh drunk who died at 39 -- actually, not far from Midge's apartment). Behan or Thomas -- they have this to look forward to. (Incidentally, for the number-minded fan, the Consumer Price Index lets us calculate that all of the prices for which Don is offered Midge, as well as the massive inconveniences that Pete Campbell faces, tabulate 7-to-1 in today's dollar's.)

Which brings us to Don, who has habits of his own. He's tamed alcohol down to a manageable intake. The explosive potential of his infidelities simmers with bookend shots placing Megan literally between Don and Faye. Don didn't think about his actions leading to the end of his business relationship with Faye, so he certainly didn't think about it outing their personal relationship. When Don calls Megan his bodyguard, he may be giving his future self a line to rue, if Megan proves to be less cool-headed than she was when she promised perfect discretion on their night they had sex in his office. Faye unknowingly provides the same potential when she tells Don to have "his girl" make dinner reservations. (Don may subconsciously have Ted Chaough's prank in mind when he chooses a place the Kennedys used to frequent.)

The overall geometry lesson is clear: When life is bad, you wish it to be a line leading to change. When it is good, you wish it to be a circle. Fate curses you by offering you the opposite. Sally's mental wellness is a line... she shows progress and can start cutting back sessions. Betty's is a circle: She still yearns to see a child psychatrist (even with the comic animals painted on the wall), years after her first psychiatrist fairly or unfairly compared her to a child. In order to break Sally's burgeoning relationship with Glen, she agrees to let the family move to another town. Much earlier, Betty had nurtured Glen's crush, itself a remarkably childish fixation, and the worst Betty has to risk from his contact with Sally would if he told Sally that her mother had confided in him when he was even younger.

Much as that plot resembles The Graduate, the end of the episode will inevitably be compared to Jerry Maguire, with Don's treatise promising higher ideals to the world, infuriating his colleagues (who can't do away with him just yet), and garnering the admiration of both Megan and Peggy as a two-headed stand-in for the Renee Zellweger character. And yet, that comparison is categorically too favorable to Don. What drove Don to write it was not an actual epiphany but a calculated risk that the open letter would be good for business. As the firm faced a vicious cycle (every potential new client believes, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, that the firm will not survive the next few months), Don's letter was an attempt to do as Peggy suggested when she turned Don's words back to him, to "change the conversation." Don can't accept his colleague's criticism, but neither can he Megan's praise. He lets her know that he is interested, as we always have known him to be, in seeming rather than being. And she knew that.

But when we first heard in the voice of his journal that he was quitting tobacco, did we think that he meant he was quitting his personal habit or anything otherwise lofty and not merely making a business move? Did we think that he ripped the binding out of his journal for nothing? The creators are to be commended if we believed that Don was on a line and not a circle, because he had a lit cigarette in his left hand while he spelled high ideals out with his right.

- - - - -

My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees
Ep 11 Blowing Smoke

Mad Men 411

"Were you lying when you said your career came before everything?" That's a line from 1927's The Jazz Singer, the first "talkie" Hollywood ever made, but it could have fit into just about every scene in "Chinese Wall." Men -- and sometimes women -- sacrificing the rest of their lives for career has been a theme illuminating the series as a whole. But in this episode, it glowed white hot, leaving virtually no one with their non-work life unscathed.

To see Ken Cosgrove walk out of dinner with his fiancée and her parents is to be reminded of Peggy's missed birthday dinner four episodes back. Ken, having at least shown up before hearing the black news about Lucky Strike, walks away without incident. In the next scene, and others throughout the episode, Pete Campbell is called away from his wife's labor. In one of Mad Men's "sign of the times" moments, his father-in-law admits to having been absent from his daughter's birth, and cheerfully excuses Pete to do the same. Perhaps it was excusable for men to be at baseball games while their wives delivered, but Ted Chaough is driven enough to turn up for Pete's wife's delivery so that he can hard-sell Pete with a job offer -- a car and driving lessons included. That work should take precedence over the birth of one's daughter is so taken for granted that when Don accuses Pete of having the delivery as a higher priority, Pete rebuts the accusation instead of accepting and defending it.

Screenwriter Erin Levy adds a deliberate "from the cradle to the grave" universality by showing the SCDP men trying to save their business with a mercenary approach to David Montgomery's funeral. They whisper strategy between eulogies, and that the event is for them purely a work event is highlighted when Megan asks Don how the funeral went and Don, thinking of business, not reincarnation, replies, "We'll see."

Birth and death fall by the wayside. Naturally, so does love. Don without hesitation asks Faye to break the titular "Chinese Wall" of confidentiality that should keep her from using her insider status to help Don, her lover. After Don makes his Jazz Singer confession that his career "is everything to me", Faye becomes the episode's lonely mouthpiece for the alternative perspective, saying, "I know the difference between what we have and a stupid office." Eventually, she recants, and gives Don an "in" with one of her other clients. And in the betrayal that makes her regard for Don painful to behold, we get a suggestion that Sex -- for Don, following up the lingering gaze he held on Megan last episode -- actually does trump Work even though Birth, Death, and Love do not. In Megan, he may have found his perfect woman -- one who wants him to go home and sleep alone after they are done for the evening. And his flirtation with truthfulness may have received its own eulogy when, undoing the ending of "The Suitcase", he asks Peggy to shut the door to his office.

Roger joins Don as a man who betrays the love of the beautiful woman in his life. In fact, he betrays two, keeping his dark secret from Joan until he begs for the consolation that she can't give. This feeds Joan's best line of the series thus far, "I'm not a solution to your problems. I'm another problem." Soon enough, Roger burns with Bert's brutal but accurate assessment of him inside as his wife Jane (who poses when nobody else is around) lovingly presents him with his now bitterly ironic autobiography in hardcover. (How many copies will this book sell? Ten? Five?) He signs Jane's copy with the agonizingly specific, "To my loving wife", with no comment about loving her back.

Once again, Peggy has hope of being the moral survivor in this dark world. She finds love with Abe despite the fact that his leftism may endanger her role as a cog in the corporate machine. But she has more experience than most people in juggling work and non-work: Stan's pass at her leaves him in need, again, of reading material to cover the sight of his lap, and later asking her, with double entendre he does not intend, "No hard feelings?"

Is there hope for the men of SCDP? Don doesn't see it when his shifty eyes look past the loving and trusting Faye before he nuzzles her hair. Maybe it's there in the eulogies for David Montgomery, who felt that his daughter and not the Buick account was the best thing he ever did. Then again, why are all of the stories about the late Mr. Montgomery about his work?

- - - - -

My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees

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.