Love Among the Ruins (S3x02)
Airdate: 23 August 2009
Written by: Cathryn Humphries & Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Leslie Linka Glaser
Running Time: 50 minutes
The title of the third season’s second episode, “Love Among the Ruins”, is something of a deliberate deception. Borrowed from a Robert Browning poem that dwells on decay amidst ancient rubble, it suggests a narrative of decline, doom, or romantic attachment persisting in a fallen world. Yet, as this intricately plotted hour demonstrates, the general theme steering Matthew Weiner’s series in its pivotal 1963 setting is not one of endings but of renewal and new beginnings—however fraught, ambiguous, or commercially motivated they may be. This tension between a nostalgic, crumbling past and an insistent, often unsettling future forms the episode’s core, making it a quintessential, if not always spectacular, piece of the Mad Men mosaic.
The episode’s most memorable sequence is its opening, which it pointedly shares with the 1963 cinematic musical Bye Bye Birdie. That film stands as a glittering, frenetic monument to a moment on the very precipice of change, a last, blissfully ignorant dance before the fall of the Kennedy assassination. The episode weaponises this cultural artefact. We see the Sterling Cooper office transfixed by the film’s hyper-energetic opening number, performed by a radiant Ann-Margret. The context is professional: client Patio Cola demands an advertisement exactly like this scene. The task is ultimately handed to Peggy Olson, who watches with a mixture of admiration and professional scepticism. She is visibly impressed by Ann-Margret’s galvanic performance—a symbol of a new, unabashed femininity—but voices doubts about whether “sex would sell” in this particular case. This moment is a fascinating character beat; Peggy, herself a product of the era’s shifting sexual mores, is analysing the mechanics of the very forces that are reshaping her own life. Her subsequent action—picking up a young engineering student in a bar for a night of casual sex—acts as a personal, unspoken answer to her professional question. It is a new beginning of her own, a claim on sexual agency that runs parallel to, yet distinctly apart from, the commodified version on screen.
This theme of personal renewal causing familial rupture is mirrored in the subplot involving Roger Sterling. His decision to leave his wife Mona for the younger Jane Siegel has estranged him from his family, a cost he perhaps underestimated. The episode makes this painfully clear through his daughter, Margaret, who coldly informs him that while he might be allowed at her upcoming wedding, Jane certainly will not. Roger’s attempt at a new life has rendered him a ghost in his old one, a man caught between two worlds without full citizenship in either.
Professionally, the episode centres on a grand, literal proposed renewal: Sterling Cooper’s attempt to win New York City’s public opinion for the demolition of the old Penn Station and the construction of a new Madison Square Garden. The assignment is daunting, a battle for the city’s soul. In a sharp irony, it is Paul Kinsey—the office beatnik, later called a “communist” by a Garden executive—who proves to be the arch-conservative in the room. While discussing the project with the developers, he passionately parrots the preservationist arguments of the project’s opponents, seeing Penn Station as an architectural marvel worth saving. He is, in effect, arguing for the ruins. Don Draper, ever the pragmatic visionary, suggests the alternative framing: the project should be sold not as a destruction, but as a “new beginning.” This encapsulates the advertiser’s alchemy—recasting loss as opportunity. The plot takes a bitter turn when Lane Pryce informs Don that the London office has inexplicably dropped the project. Don’s shock is palpable; he saw this as their ticket to the lucrative 1964 World’s Fair and decades of work. Lane’s impotent “I don’t know” in response to Don’s “Why?” underscores the existential precariousness of the American office under its distant British owners. A promised new beginning is abruptly revoked by unseen forces.
Draper’s domestic life offers a parallel, smaller-scale crisis of renewal. His dementia-suffering father-in-law, Gene, arrives with Don’s brother-in-law, William, and his wife, Judy. Their solution is to put Gene in a nursing home, financed by selling his house. Betty, clinging to a sense of familial duty, is vehemently opposed. Don, the masterful negotiator, imposes a Solomonic compromise: Gene will live with them, nursed by Betty, while William covers the expenses. William, intimidated by Don’s imposing authority, agrees. This arrangement creates a new, stressful beginning for the Draper household—a promise of duty that quickly sours. The episode’s poignant, darkly comic climax to this thread sees Gene, lost in the past, destroying their liquor supply in a Prohibition-era panic, causing Don and Betty to share a silent, weary look of second thoughts. Their new beginning has instantly decayed into a burdensome present.
The episode concludes with a scene of overt symbolism. Sally and Bobby participate in a Maypole celebration, a ritual of spring and natural renewal organised by their youthful, enthusiastic teacher (Abigail Spencer). Don, watching from the sidelines, is unmistakably drawn to this vision of vibrant, almost pagan freshness. The teacher, dancing barefoot with flowers in her hair, is framed as a proto-hippie—a harbinger of the countercultural forces that will define the decade’s end. It is a new beginning literally dancing on his lawn, and his attraction to it is both personal and emblematic of the era’s coming seismic shift.
Love Among the Ruins marked the television writing debut of Cathryn Humphris (co-writing with Matthew Weiner), and it bears the hallmarks of a solid, workmanlike entry rather than a groundbreaking one. It is well-directed and well-acted across the board, yet it must be said that the episode is not particularly memorable within the pantheon of the series. The various dramas in Don’s professional and family life, while expertly observed, feel somewhat petty and inconsequential—especially when juxtaposed against the explosive, anachronistic energy of the Bye Bye Birdie clip that opens it. That borrowed fragment from a decades-old film possesses a cultural charge that the original 21st century drama struggles to match.
Where the episode proves exceptionally clever is in its subtle but firm establishment of the season’s timeline—a crucial matter as the series marches toward the November cataclysm. We learn that Margaret Sterling’s wedding is set for 23 November 1963. The final Maypole scene is explicitly dated 1 May 1963. This simple dating creates a powerful dramatic irony for the viewer, who knows the historical doom awaiting these characters, and structures the season’s arc across the intervening months.
Thematically, the episode is a clear and effective study of the struggle between the old and the new. The irony is richly layered: the supposed radical, Paul Kinsey, is the one fighting a rearguard action to preserve a crumbling edifice, while the archetypal capitalist, Don Draper, is the voice of creative destruction and new beginnings. The forces of the new are not just corporate; they are cultural (the sexual energy of Ann-Margret), social (the teacher’s proto-hippie innocence), and personal (Peggy’s sexual liberation). The “ruins” are both physical (Penn Station) and metaphorical (Gene’s mind, Roger’s family life, perhaps even the old moral order). The “love” is more ambiguous—often appearing as longing, attraction, or duty strained to its limit.
Love Among the Ruins serves as a vital, if not flashy, component of Season 3’s architecture. 1963 was a relatively uneventful year until its shattering end, and episodes like this one excel at building character and thematic resonance within that quiet tension. It captures a society, and the individuals within it, nervously travelling from one era to the next, trying to envision new beginnings while still living among the ruins of the old.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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