Favors (S6x11)
Airdate: 9 June 2013
Written by: Semi Chellas & Matthew Weiner Directed by: Jennifer Getzinger
Running Time: 48 minutes
One of the more audacious tricks Matthew Weiner and his writers pulled during Mad Men's run was their steadfast refusal to obey the unspoken rules of Prestige Television. Most series operating within the so-called Golden Age model would carefully calibrate their narrative bombs, saving the seismic developments for the final or penultimate episode of a season—those slots where viewers have been trained to expect the earth to shift beneath their feet. Weiner, however, took a perverse delight in upsetting this arithmetic. The most consequential moments often arrived when we least expected them, buried in the middle of a run or, in the case of Favours—the eleventh episode of the sixth season—positioned with almost maddening precision as the antepenultimate offering. When you sit down to watch this particular instalment, there's a palpable sense of something coiling, tightening, preparing to strike. The episode wears a deceptive face, suggesting that its primary concerns will be the usual agency politics, the jockeying for position between Don Draper and Ted Chaough, the friction of a newly merged firm still finding its feet. But beneath this surface churns something far more dangerous, a current that will ultimately sweep away everything Don has carefully constructed.
The script, written by Semi Chellas and Weiner himself, unfolds in September 1968, that annus horribilis of American history when the centre seemed to be holding less and less firmly. The opening movements of Favours deliberately misdirect us toward professional concerns. Sterling Cooper & Partners remains a powder keg of competing egos, and the episode initially suggests we're witnessing another round of the Don versus Ted heavyweight bout. There's a brewing crisis involving two competing clients—Sunkist, which Roger has been courting, and Ocean Spray, which Ted and Jim Cutler have brought to the table. The conflict of interest is obvious, potentially catastrophic, and Ted wastes no time in pinning blame on Don for failing to read the requisite memos. It's a petty squabble, the sort of office territorial pissing match that Mad Men has always rendered with anthropological precision, and it serves as effective camouflage for the episode's true preoccupations.
Running parallel to this corporate theatre is Pete Campbell's increasingly unravelling domestic situation, which provides the episode with its most darkly comic strain. Pete's mother, Dorothy, has become the charge of a nurse named Manolo Colón (Andres Faucher). When Manolo accompanies Dorothy to Pete's office, the encounter sets off a chain reaction of mortification and misunderstanding. Dorothy, in the fog of her dementia, mistakes Peggy for Pete's wife and begins prattling about a child the pair supposedly had together. The moment lands like a gut punch for Peggy, for reasons the audience understands far better than Dorothy ever could—that carefully concealed secret of the child she gave up, the life she buried to build her career. But Dorothy isn't finished. She expresses enthusiastic appreciation for Manolo's more intimate services, making it abundantly clear that he satisfies needs that extend well beyond the medical.
The revelation comes spilling out during a business lunch, after Peggy has taken on enough drink to loosen her tongue. She lets slip Dorothy's confession to Ted and Pete, and Pete's reaction is predictably volcanic. He immediately constructs a narrative in which Manolo is a predator, a pervert who has taken advantage of a confused old woman, and he determines to confront Bob Benson—the enigmatic accounts man who recommended Manolo in the first place. What follows is one of the episode's most queasily brilliant scenes, a confrontation that pivots on a dime into something entirely unexpected. Bob appears to make a homosexual pass at Pete, his proposition unmistakable. Pete reels back, more aghast than perhaps he's ever been, which is saying something for a man who has witnessed his share of the twentieth century's hidden perversities. He fires Manolo by proxy, but the encounter leaves a residue of ambiguity that the episode refuses to tidy away.
But all of this, however entertaining, serves as prelude to the episode's devastating centre. The Vietnam War hangs over Favours like a thunderhead, colouring every interaction with the threat of imminent death. Mitchell Rosen (Hudson Thames), son of Don's neighbours and confidants Arnold and Sylvia, has returned from studies in riot-plagued Paris only to plunge headlong into anti-establishment politics. His protest—mailing back his draft card—has earned him 1-A status, which in the brutal mathematics of 1968 means he could be shipped off to the jungle at any moment. Don, burdened by guilt over his affair with Sylvia and haunted by his own memories of Korea, decides he must intervene. His attempts to leverage connections with General Motors executives during a meeting are clumsy, almost embarrassing in their transparency, and it's Ted who ultimately provides the solution. Through a friend, Ted secures Mitchell a spot in the Air National Guard—a posting that will keep him safely stateside. It's an act of genuine altruism that simultaneously shifts the office power balance in Ted's favour, a twofer that demonstrates exactly why he's been positioned as Don 2.0 throughout this season.
The irony, of course, is that this favour, this act of mercy that saves a young man's life, becomes the instrument of Don's destruction. The mechanism of his downfall arrives in the form of his daughter Sally and her friend Julie (Cameron Protzmann), in the city to attend a Model United Nations conference. Betty, prudishly refusing to let them share a hotel with teenage boys, has them temporarily housed in Don’s apartment. They encounter Mitchell, and both girls are immediately smitten, sparking a rivalry that feels almost beneath the show's usual sophistication. Julie slips a love note into the Rosens' apartment, signing it with Sally's name, and Sally—desperate to prevent Mitchell from reading it—concocts a scheme to retrieve it. She tricks Jonesy, the doorman, into lending her the Rosens' keys and enters their apartment, only to walk in on Don and Sylvia in flagranti.
The aftermath is excruciating. Sally flees, and Don spends hours in a state of pure panic, chasing shadows, trying to contain the uncontainable. He returns home to find the Rosens at his dinner table, expressing their profound gratitude for his intervention regarding Mitchell. The scene is almost unbearable in its irony—Sally forced to sit through this display of neighbourly appreciation, knowing what she knows, seeing her father as she has never seen him before. When she retreats to her room and Don follows, the confrontation is brief but devastating. With tears in his eyes, he offers a pathetic explanation: he was merely "comforting Mrs. Rosen," it was "complicated." The episode with Sally and her single word of response—"OK"—delivered with a flatness that somehow contains multitudes of judgment.
The script's almost perverse genius lies in this structural irony: Don is punished for his one decent act of the season. The favour he does for Mitchell, the life he saves, becomes the very thing that threatens to destroy his marriage, his friendship with the Rosens, and—most painfully—his relationship with his eldest daughter, who now sees him clearly as the lecherous hypocrite he has always been. The only serious flaw in this construction is the mechanism itself. The teen romance subplot, the comedy of errors with the love note, the convenient timing of Sally's intrusion—all of it feels slightly too soapish, too mechanically plotted, allowing the attentive viewer to see the collision coming from some distance away.
Favours also serves as a history lesson for viewers who may not fully grasp the particular horrors of the Vietnam-era draft. Unlike the volunteer military of today, Vietnam was fought by citizen soldiers, many of them dragged into service against their will. The burden fell unevenly across American society; wealthy, connected parents deployed every trick, excuse, and favour available to ensure their sons either avoided service entirely or secured safe berths far from the fighting. The script's mention of the Air National Guard carries a specific historical charge, an unmistakable reference to how George W. Bush served during Vietnam—a detail that became explosively controversial during his 2004 presidential contest against combat veteran John Kerry. The episode suggests that even Mitchell, for all his performative idealism and anti-war posturing, will accept a morally questionable arrangement when his own skin is on the line. There's something almost natural about this acceptance, the show implies, something deeply human and therefore deeply troubling.
Against this darkness, Pete's maternal difficulties play almost as farce, though they yield one of the season's most important character revelations. Bob Benson, that mysterious figure who has been lurking at the edges of the narrative, is revealed as a man whose concept of "favours" extends to making everyone happy by any means necessary—including, apparently, offering his own body. The scene with Pete resists easy interpretation. Is Bob keeping Manolo on because he genuinely makes Dorothy happy? Is he expressing authentic sexual interest in Pete? Or is he attempting some form of oblique blackmail, trading silence for compliance? The ambiguity is deliberate, and it makes Bob one of the season's most fascinating creations.
The title's motif finds its most literal expression in a semi-comical subplot involving Peggy and a rat that has taken up residence in her dilapidated apartment. She calls Stan to remove the creature, even suggesting sex as payment for this masculine service. That Bob cannot come to her aid because he is sleeping with someone else adds another layer to the episode's examination of transactional intimacy.
Jennifer Getzinger's direction is assured throughout, though the rat-removal scene suffers from lighting so dim that less attentive viewers may struggle to determine with whom Peggy is speaking. The same scene contains a curious detail that has sparked considerable debate among fans: Stan apparently has a poster of Moshe Dayan on his wall. In the late 1960s, Dayan was arguably the most iconic Israeli figure in America and the world, but the notion of Stan Rizzo—apparently non-Jewish and definitively anti-war—as his great admirer feels slightly off. Various interpretations have been offered, from suggestions about Stan's hidden background to the more mundane theory that he's simply trying to impress pro-Israeli or Jewish women. The ambiguity feels appropriate for a character who remains somewhat opaque.
Ted Chaough emerges from this episode with his status as Don's superior successor firmly established. Where Don fumbles and schemes, Ted delivers. His family life, glimpsed briefly, mirrors how Don's appeared at the series' beginning—the handsome creative with the beautiful wife and the picture-perfect domestic arrangement. Whether Ted can maintain this facade where Don failed remains one of the season's lingering questions.
Despite the overly convenient melodrama of its final act, Favours is as a very strong episode, one that sets the stage for a genuinely interesting finale. It captures a turbulent year in American and world history with the precision that has always been the show's hallmark, while never losing sight of the personal catastrophes that matter more than the historical ones.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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