Out of Town (S3x01)
Airdate: 16 August 2009
Written by: Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Phil Abraham
Running Time: 48 minutes
The second season of Mad Men concluded with a narrative gambit that frustrated a not-insignificant portion of its audience: it left its characters, and the viewers, suspended in the palpable dread of the unresolved Cuban Missile Crisis. This choice created a disappointing cliffhanger where the manufactured suspense was undercut by historical inevitability. When the series returned for its third season with Out of Town, the world hadn’t ended, but the episode immediately situates its characters in a more intimate, though no less consequential, state of emergency. Written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Phil Abraham, the premiere is a workmanlike exercise in re-establishing the show’s themes and dynamics. It is competently crafted and offers key character developments, yet it ultimately feels like a table-setting episode—solid in its execution but lacking the profound spark that distinguishes the series’ finest hours.
The episode’s most striking formal choice is its unconventional delve into Don Draper’s origin story. Abandoning the straightforward flashbacks of previous seasons, Weiner opts for a series of dreamlike, almost feverish visions that assail Don as he mechanically prepares breakfast. We see his stepmother, Abigail, enduring another stillbirth; his father, Archie, with the prostitute Evangeline (Kelly Huddleston), who delivers the grimly pragmatic warning that she’ll “cut his penis off” if he gets her pregnant; and finally, Evangeline’s death in childbirth, with the midwife handing the newborn boy—named “Dick”—to Abigail to raise as her own. This vignette is brutal and economically poetic, efficiently cementing the foundational trauma of Don’s identity: birth intertwined with death, and motherhood as a transaction. The device is later revealed to be triggered by Betty’s advanced pregnancy, a neat psychological explanation that also firmly anchors the narrative in March of 1963. This temporal setting is crucial, as the season at large is preoccupied with the last gasp of the pre-assassination ‘Camelot’ era, in 1963. the year American baby boomers retroactively identify as the beginning of the end.
If Don’s domestic life is defined by cyclical trauma, his professional world is in the throes of a corporate shake-up. The new British owners, PPL, have installed the impeccably mannered yet steely Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) as financial director, heralding a regime of austerity. A third of the staff have been made redundant, and the episode introduces the head of accounts, Burt Peterson (Michael Galston), seemingly for the sole purpose of having him fired in a spectacularly bitter scene. As a narrative device, it’s a blunt instrument. The audience has no prior investment in Peterson, so his meltdown registers as workplace spectacle rather than emotional tragedy, a flaw the episode doesn’t attempt to mitigate. His function is purely catalytic: to vacate a position that is then offered to Pete Campbell. Pete’s fleeting triumph, however, is immediately diluted when he learns he must share the title and workload—though not the salary—with his rival Ken Cosgrove. It’s a suitably cynical corporate manoeuvre, but as a plot twist, it feels somewhat predictable, reinforcing the episode’s tendency to favour schematic plot mechanics over genuine surprise.
The episode’s core, and its most significant narrative development, occurs when Lane sends Don and art director Salvatore Romano to Baltimore to court the raincoat manufacturer London Fog. Liberated from the constraints of their New York lives, both men indulge in extramarital affairs. Don’s dalliance with a stewardess named Shelly (Sunny Mabry) is standard Draper fare, but Sal’s encounter with a male bellhop (Orestes Arcuni) is transformative. For the first time in the series, Sal acts on his homosexual desires. The execution, however, is remarkably prudish by modern—or even 2009—standards. The encounter is discreetly framed, and the revelation to Don occurs farcically during a hotel fire evacuation, with Sal caught in a dressing gown beside the bellhop. Don’s subsequent, quietly delivered advice to “limit your exposure” is a masterclass in subtext. Is it homophobia? A pragmatic warning from one secret-keeper to another? Or a ruthless calculation to protect a valuable asset? The scene works precisely because it refuses to clarify, resting on Jon Hamm’s inscrutable delivery and the show’s understanding that Don’s own precarious identity is the ultimate guarantor of Sal’s secret.
This theme of secrets and manufactured identities culminates in the episode’s closing moments. Returning home, Don tells his daughter Sally the story of her birth, specifically how he drove her mother to the hospital through a storm. It’s a tender, paternal moment, yet it’s undercut by the viewer’s knowledge of the sordid affairs and traumatic birth narratives that haunt the episode. Don is crafting a palatable family myth, a sanitised origin story starkly opposed to the brutal truth of his own. The episode thus comes full circle, contrasting the stories we tell with the realities we endure.
Out of Town is peppered with the series’ trademark subtle details, but one stands out for its audacious subtext. In Bert Cooper’s office, Lane Pryce admires a framed print: Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, a famous example of Japanese shunga and, more specifically, tentacle erotica. For a series that largely eschewed the explicit sexuality of its cable contemporaries, this is a wonderfully eccentric and risqué visual gag. It perfectly encapsulates Bert’s esoteric interests and the show’s willingness to flirt with taboo in the most refined manner possible. It’s a detail that rewards the attentive viewer, suggesting a world of deviance lurking beneath the polished surface of Madison Avenue.
Out of Town is a proficient but unspectacular season premiere. Its primary function is transitional: to navigate the audience from the unresolved tension of Season 2 into the new corporate and personal landscapes of 1963. While Salvatore Romano’s storyline provides the instalment with its most meaningful character progression, other elements—the disposable conflict with Burt Peterson, the predictable manoeuvring between Pete and Ken—feel like routine pieces being moved on the board. The episode lacks the conceptual boldness of the season two finale, even as it avoids that finale’s structural pitfalls. It is, in essence, a well-made piece of television machinery, reliable and insightful in moments, yet never quite reaching for the profound melancholy or savage irony that defines Mad Men at its best. It assures the audience that the world of Sterling Cooper persists, but one is left hoping the ensuing season will provide more compelling calamities than those offered here.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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