Sunday Night Roundup - April 20, 2014

What a great episode of Mad Men! Was a disturbing scene in Game of Thrones! More stuff after the break...


This weeks Mad Men was really, really great. Sure, last week’s episode may have been a little slow, mostly there to set up the major players for this season, but it was totally worth it if the season it’s setting up with be full of episodes like this. This whole episode played out like a comedy, and while it’s one of the funniest episodes I can recall, a lot of important things are happening. A lot of power being shifted around. Lou Avery gets put in an awkward position, blames Dawn and demands she is put on someone else’s desk. Peggy embarrasses herself by assuming the roses on (the ultra beautiful and extremely short-skirted) Shirley’s desk are for her, and wants her off her desk. Joan finally gets the office she deserves upstairs with the rest of the partners (I love that it took anyone this long to recognize that she’s basically doing two jobs), but more importantly Joan hands off her position as Office Manager to Dawn, perhaps a bit of a subversive fuck you to Burt Cooper, whose racism caught me off guard and disappointed me. He’s always been so likeable! I thought he was the ultra liberal one? What a dick.

Meanwhile, Sally uses a friend’s mother’s funeral as an excuse to escape to the city, and of course gets left behind when she leaves her train to go searching for her missing purse. Something about that seemed fishy to me; I think she actually wanted to check in on good ol’ Dad. I don’t know why, but the scenes with Sally and Don are always my favorite. Every scene in this episode they shared was gold. Of course, ending this episode with her telling her father she loved him while “This Will Be Our Year” by the Zombies played was beautiful, but I might be biased because that was the song Brandi and I danced to at our wedding. I can’t help but feel like this could be a new start for Sally and Don, that they can reconcile, and become allies to each other. I hope so.

Over on HBO, Game of Thrones gave us what has to be one of the most fucked up scenes ever. How many levels of fucked up-edness did it even have? Where to even start? An incestuous rape at the feet of a child their previously consensual incestuous relationship led to? Come on! It was horrible. But then again, these are horrible people. I think it was such a shock because Jaime has been a much more sympathetic character as of late. Remember this is the guy who defended Brienne from a group of men that were trying to assault her. It helped us to forget this is the same guy that attempted to murder a child, and probably a few dozen other folks along the way. There seems to be a bit of an uproar on the internet over this scene, but it’s important to keep the scene within the context of the story. I don’t think think it was supposed to be titillating; considering everything we’ve seen on screen, it wasn’t shot in a way that seemed sexy or salacious. It was just terrible, because Jaime Lannister is a terrible person. He was once powerful, and now he’s less-so, in the eyes of his father and to himself. So perhaps this is his super fucked-up way to feel powerful again. It was not fun to see, and perhaps the information could have been given to us in a different way, but ultimately it makes sense in the context of the story. I can see how it will be problematic if we’re ever meant to admire Jaime as a hero for the remainder of the series, but I doubt that will be the case. I’m pretty interested to hear if anyone has a different take on this whole thing.