Since this is the last blog, I have decided to write it on the end of the last season of Mad Men.

One of the most exciting things I think has happened all season is the progression of Peggy. When she started at Sterling Cooper, she was very much a small town girl. She was pretty modest and couldn't stand up for herself. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, Peggy has been asked to help with one of the campaigns. Throughout the course of the past few episodes, this has only progressed. The lipstick company loved her concept for their campaign. Don also put her on to another client who wants to sell a weight loss machine... that.... isn't exactly a weight lost machine. She takes her job very seriously, and most of the office doesn't like her for it. She follows the rules, and when possible, tries to get others to follow the rules as well.
The person in the office who might dislike her the most is Pete Campbell. They had an affair. He is married, and when he is stressed out with his wife, he uses her. The first time this happened, she was very passive, but since then she has learned to stick up for herself. She has become a very strong woman. I think she is almost like a physical representation of the bad decisions that he has made, and she no longer allows him to make her feel worthless.
This conflict comes to a head when Pete gets a huge client for the company via his father-in-law: Clearasil. Don suggests that Peggy and him work together on this project since the product is geared towards women. Pete is outraged, but blames it on her just being a secretary. Don responds to this by giving her a huge promotion to Jr. Copy Editor. She has her own office now and things are looking up for her so much. Just as she moves into her new job, she starts to get debilitating cramps. When she goes to the doctors, he tells her that she is pregnant, and later that episode, she delivers a baby out of wed lock, with no boyfriend, and no one to help her raise this child.

Rodger almost dies in this section as well. Prior to this, his relationship with Joan just kept progressing. One night, he took Don down to casting and picked up some models. He got really drunk and slept with one of them. She had a very fair complexion, which he kept complimenting her on. Out of no where, he had a heart attack and Don called the ambulance.  His spoiled wife and angry daughter where incredibly glad that he was safe. They hugged him and they all bonded. Once Rodger realized how short life was, he called off his relationship with Joan, regardless of that fact that he seemed to love her up until this point. As much as Joan acted like she didn't love him, at the thought of his death, she proved that she did.

Another reversal is in Don's relationship with his wife. He and his other lady friend ended things, and Don has been becoming very close with Rachel. He has told Rachel so much about his childhood in the short time that he has been with her, and his wife literally knows nothing about his past. Don suggests that he and Rachel just run away together. He would send Betty and the kids money, but never see them again but Rachel talks him out of it.

Sterling Cooper gets a new client, Kodak. They need a campaign for their new projector. Don uses pictures of his wife and children to pull in the nostalgic angle of the product. You can tell that he is having a connection with these pictures, and at the end of it, he takes time off work to be with his family for Thanksgiving. Betty had been begging him to talk this time off, and he was saying no. By the time he came to the realization that he needed to be home, they had already left to be with her parents. Betty has also come out of denial of the fact that she knows Don is cheating. She passive aggressively tries to give him a chance to admit it, but he doesn't. She also has developed a crush on a door-to-door salesman.

There are serious consequences for your decisions. You literally can't be a whore and mistreat everything you have, while expecting it to wait around for you--especially not people. What comes to mind her is the idea of becoming one flesh in Genesis. One. All of these people got into trouble because they were being sluts who disrespect their loved one.

So, interestingly enough... this most recent episode of Mad Men is called Babylon. (I say interestingly enough because one of my best friends comes home from Israel this week!) Sterling and Cooper gets an interesting new client: Israel Tourism. World War Two was long ago by this point, but there was still a strange stigma about Jewish people and Israel was in a very dangerous time. Don and his team were having a hard time figuring out how to attract people to Israel without using the 'overused religious angle'. Pete suggested embracing the danger and encourage people to go on and adventure. Since Don didn't like any of these ideas, he asks Peggy to set him up a private line and he calls the most attractive Jew he knows: Rachel. (For a refresher, Rachel runs her family department store. Don was rude to her when she refused to accept second rate ideas, like coupons, to improve the store. He apologized, and sexual tensions grew. He made an advance. She was into it. He admitted to being married. She ran away and demanded for him to be taken off her account. This was their last encounter.) He told her he needed to meet with her for business purposes, and she reluctantly obliged. He tried to get her to take her walls, but she seemed to be keeping them up--that was until she got back to the office. She called her sister and confessed that she liked a guy and wanted to allow him to pursue her regardless of his being 'limited'.

Another disturbing relationship we see blossoming is between Rodger Sterling and Joan Holloway. Rodger and his wife, Mona, have been out to dinner with Don and Betty and have been becoming more prominent of roles in this episode. It is pretty clear by their interactions that, although they try to keep up appearances, they hate each other. They have a daughter, and Rodger seems to really not care too much for his own daughter. Rodger and Joan have been sneaking off to hotel rooms to....yeah. He keeps saying that he would like to go to her apartment instead because it is more intimate. Rodger seems more about the relationship that she is, and I think it drives him crazy. He said that he doesn't want to keep sneaking around, but she rebuts with the fact that she knows men and that sneaking around is his favorite part. She also tells him that she knows that he is going to get bored of her and start going after the newer models soon.

The third prominent event that occurs has to do with lipstick. A lipstick company is looking for a new campaign. The men have a hard time thinking up a new slogan since they don't think like women and are so insecure in themselves that they refuse to even try. They decide that what they need to do is put all the women in a room, and stare at them through one sided glass. Basically they make fun of everything the women do, while at the same time lusting after them. It is kind of sick. Luckily, Peggy shows potential and they give her some extra work to do in making the campaign go.

Obviously a major theme right now is infidelity. I think about the verse where Jesus says that even looking at a woman in lust causes infidelity in the heart. Every single man has shown to be a pig in this show. So many of the men have committed adultery and every single one of them treat the women like objects. It is really sad to me, but there it is.

This forth episode was very highly about Pete Campbell. He was still newly back from his honeymoon and we meet his wife for the first time. She is very poised and expected. She really wants to move into a new apartment, but Pete isn't sure if they are in a good place financially for that. She asks him to talk to his parents and ask for the money. We see here a little bit about why Pete is the way that he is. His father is cold and nothing that Pete did was good enough for him. He thought advertizement was not a respectable profession. He refused to give his son any money, and Pete lied to his wife about it. We also see that He went into Don's office and stole some of his notes. In a meeting with a client, Pete tried to pitch the idea that Don had thrown out. It is a difficult balance of wanting to feel bad for Pete, and hating him at the same time. I think if there were a verse of this to use, it would be like "pray for your enemies". This may seem strange, but at the same time, everyone is going through something difficult. Pete is not the best person, because he was raised in a way that he needs to get to the top, no matter what the cost. All of out 'enemies' got their because outside influences. I don't believe evil is born. It is cultivated.

We also see Helen. who is a very similar case.  People don't like her because she is a divorcee. People think she is progressive and... i guess a quitter. I have talked before about her, but she is in the same boat as Pete. She got to a place that people define her as one thing, that they don't like, but it is because of the things she has been through. Her husband was an angry drunk who cheated on her. She did what she thought was best for her family, and is struggling through that.

The next episode up for review is the 'Marriage of Figaro'. In this episode, Don's daughter was having a birthday. He was trying to build her a playhouse as his wife cooked and planned a birthday. Over the course of the building, Draper had an almost uncountable amount of beers.

At the party, the topic of conversation was the fact that a divorcee had just moved into the neighborhood. All of the women where highly judgmental about that fact that she had this past. They judged every little thing about her, to the fact that she wrapped a present in Christmas wrapping due to her other paper being packed up to her going on recreational walks. I knew divorce wasn't super common, but I didn't realize how much it was looked down upon.

Another things that was very looked down upon was counseling. I have grown very passionate about looking into a future in counseling and to see that there was such a stigma to it not very long ago is strange. Don's wife has been told by a few doctors that she should see a therapist, but Don thinks that only really depressed people need therapy and since he has given his wife everything (but fidelity) she must be happy.We obviously know now that it has nothing to do with it, but as we accepted counseling, we also have, as a culture, accepted divorce.

The major thing that stuck out in my mind in this episode happened while all of the children where out playing. They were playing 'house', as Don had build a playhouse. The things that the kids where yelling were 'not now', I have a headache', 'it's your fault', 'you never listen', ext... Don was looking and seeing the kids doing this, and it got so overwhelming, he look off and didn't come back until much later that night. This really just reminded me of the verse in Proverbs 22:6 "train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it". Children really are like sponges and they learn from their parents how to be an adult. In that young state, these are the things they think they need to say in order to be like the parents they look up to so much. It truly broke my heart.

Mad Men is a drama set in the 1960's. It outlines the life of protagonist Don Draper. So far, what we know about Draper is that he is one of the top guys in a huge advertisement firm. He and his co-workers are huge womanizers, everyone in the show smokes, and one of Drapers huge accounts is a cigarette company called 'Lucky Strike'. In this episode, he was struggling to find a campaign that would make people feel like they can put their trust in these cigarettes. He also was terribly offensive to a woman who owns a Jewish department store. 

The majorly prevalent theme of the episode would be sexism. Sexism is all throughout the episode, and I am assuming the series. It starts with Don's new secretary Peggy. Multiple people mock her for the fact that she is dressed too conservatively. One of the men, a few days before his wedding, went as far as to sexually harass her in front of his superior and it was treated very causally. She was also told on her first day that she needed to take birth-control pills, in a time when those had in incredibly bad reputation.  In another situation, Draper yells at a woman in a business meeting because she disagreed with his thoughts on a new ad campain. He made it clear that the reason he was so livid is because of that fact that she was a woman standing up to him. Towards the beginning of the episode, Don goes over to a woman’s apartment in the city and sleeps with her. He tells her the next morning that he feels like they should just get married, which would give him the appearance of more of a wholesome guy. This would especially be shown paired with that as Don’s co-worker hit on his secretary, he tells him off. Peggy even tries to make an advance, which Draper rejects. In the last scene in the episode, it shows a beautiful woman waiting for her husband to get home, and you discover that her husband is, in fact, Don Draper and the two have two children together.

I think I verse that really sticks out to me in the context of this theme would be Mark 16. This is the text where Jesus is raised and the first people to discover this are the women. These ‘Mad Men’ have bigger problems than just the fact that they are sexist. John 3:16 should be the first verse they need to hear, but in the sense of putting women in a more equal view, I would say that they should see God placing women in the highest regards of letting them be the first to see Jesus.

The theme of sexism, although relevant to the culture of the biblical times, is in stark contrast to actual biblical teachings. The Bible was obviously the first of historical teachings to place woman in such a good light, but that equality was still not understood 1960, give or take 33 years, later.

For this class, I will be watching Mad Men.