Man With a Plan (S6x07)
Airdate: 12 May 2013
Written by: Semi Chellas & Matthew Weiner Directed by: John Slattery
Running Time: 48 minutes
Whenever you settle in for the long haul with a prestige television drama you enter into an unspoken pact with the showrunners. You accept that not every episode can be a masterpiece, that even the most consistent series must occasionally falter. Yet knowing this intellectually does little to soften the blow when a genuinely brilliant episode is followed by something that feels, for want of a better word, pedestrian. Mad Men, for all its accolades and its frequently justified status as one of the finest dramas ever produced, was not immune to this phenomenon. Indeed, Season Six provides perhaps the most glaring example in the entire run of the series. For Immediate Release, which aired just one week prior, was a triumph—a propulsive, emotionally charged hour that reconfigured the show's entire landscape through the surprise merger of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough. It was the sort of episode that reminded you why you fell in love with the programme in the first place. And then came "Man With a Plan."
Written by Semi Chellas and series creator Matthew Weiner, and set in late May and early June of 1968, the episode finds the newly amalgamated agency stumbling through its infancy. The merger between SCDP and CGC has officially concluded, but the practicalities of integration prove far messier than the triumphant handshakes suggested. The staff must now share space, resources, and clients with people who, mere weeks earlier, were sworn adversaries. Office politics take on a literal dimension as executives jockey for position, territorial claims are staked over desk space, and even the allocation of chairs at meetings becomes a battleground. It is fertile territory for drama, yet the execution feels oddly perfunctory, as though the writers are working through a checklist of necessary plot developments rather than allowing the characters to breathe and discover their new circumstances organically.
The episode opens with Don in the lift of his apartment building, where he inadvertently overhears a domestic argument between his neighbours and friends, the Rosens. Dr. Arnold Rosen has accepted a surgical position in Minneapolis, having failed to secure the top-tier career he sought in New York City. His wife Sylvia is visibly devastated by the prospect of leaving Manhattan. Rather than recognising this moment as a warning—a glimpse of the destruction that infidelity wreaks upon marriages—Don interprets it as permission. Emboldened by the apparent fragility of the Rosens' union, he pursues his awkward, increasingly sordid affair with Sylvia with renewed determination.
Back at the office, the territorial skirmishes are in full swing. Ted Chaough has gathered the newly merged creative team to brainstorm a campaign for Fleischmann's margarine, a mundane assignment that nonetheless carries symbolic weight as the first shared test of the combined workforce. Don, however, is distracted. Sylvia telephones him, lonely and needy, and they arrange a rendezvous at a hotel. Following their encounter, Don instructs her to remain in the room and wait for his return—a demand she accepts with unsettling obedience. By the time Don drifts back to the office, time has elapsed, and Ted is understandably furious at his rival's unprofessional absence. The confrontation that follows is vintage Don Draper: rather than apologising or explaining, he invites Ted for a drink, ostensibly to settle their differences. Ted, less experienced in the hard-drinking culture of the old SCDP guard, rapidly becomes intoxicated and must abandon work for the remainder of the day. Don has successfully reasserted his dominance.
Ted, however, is not so easily diminished. When an urgent meeting with Mohawk Airlines demands immediate attention, and the weather has turned foul, he volunteers to fly Don there himself in his two-seater aircraft. The sequence is visually striking—Ted pilots the plane through pouring rain with evident skill and composure, while Don sits beside him, visibly uncomfortable and out of his element. It is a rare moment of genuine superiority for Ted, and the meeting proceeds successfully. Don returns to Manhattan in time for another assignation with Sylvia, but their encounter has shifted in tone. What follows is uncharacteristically "spicy" by Mad Men standards, with Don assuming a domineering posture that borders on the sadistic. It is a side of the character we have not previously witnessed, and while it is intended to suggest the depths of his psychological disturbance, it plays more like a gratuitous excursion into titillation.
Meanwhile, Roger Sterling seizes the opportunity to fire Burt Peterson, a character who had previously been dismissed from SCDP only to find refuge at CGC. The redundancy is brutal and personal, a reminder that corporate mergers inevitably create casualties. Similar decisions must be made regarding other redundant staff members, and Bob Benson—a young clerk who joined SCDP months earlier and has been aggressively ingratiating himself with superiors through a relentless campaign of favours—appears destined for the chop. His salvation comes through happenstance: Joan suddenly falls ill with a cyst on her ovary, and Bob volunteers to escort her to hospital and deal with the bureaucracy on her behalf. Later, he visits her at home to enquire after her health, displaying a tenderness that seems at odds with his usual obsequiousness. Joan, impressed and grateful, intervenes during the staffing meeting to ensure Bob retains his position.
Following the Mohawk excursion, Sylvia informs Don that their affair is finished. He has no choice but to accept her decision, though the scene lacks the emotional weight one might expect from such a significant relationship's conclusion. It simply ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.
The episode's other major subplot concerns Pete Campbell, who finds himself facing a personal crisis that compounds his professional anxiety. His mother, Dorothy (Channing Chase), has developed dementia, resulting in behaviour that ranges from inconvenient to genuinely dangerous—she nearly burns down her own home. Pete is forced to house her temporarily, and one evening she wakes him with urgent news: "that Kennedy boy" has been shot. Pete dismisses this as delusion, snapping that it happened years ago. Simultaneously, Megan wakes to watch in horror as news breaks of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination following his victory in the California primary. The historical irony is heavy-handed, the dementia subplot existing primarily to facilitate a cheap narrative trick—the confusion between past and present trauma, with Dorothy's garbled warning serving as a grim punchline.
Directed by John Slattery, who also plays Roger Sterling, Man With a Plan is technically competent. The camerawork is assured, the period details immaculate, and the performances—particularly from Linda Cardellini as Sylvia—are committed. Yet the episode distinguishes itself primarily through fan service rather than genuine dramatic substance. The return of Burt Peterson, however brief, allows Roger Sterling to deliver his signature dismissal twice over, and one suspects Slattery enjoyed directing himself in the scene. The extended sequences featuring Cardellini in various states of undress—underwear, lingerie, nude beneath the sheets—feel similarly calculated, offering titillation just as the Don-Sylvia relationship takes its bizarre BDSM turn. Cardellini earned an Emmy nomination for her work in this episode, and deservedly so; she brings vulnerability and complexity to scenes that might otherwise have felt merely exploitative.
Then there is the curious case of Bob Benson, the mysterious, one-dimensional yet strangely ubiquitous side character who has hovered around the margins of Season Six like some corporate phantom. Here, the writers seem to acknowledge the absurdity of his presence—he resembles nothing so much as Nikki and Paolo from Lost, characters introduced late in a series' run who feel alien to the established world. Yet rather than eliminating him, Weiner and Chellas opt for a different form of fan service: revealing that, at least for this episode, Bob is precisely what he appears to be—a physically attractive embodiment of the "Nice Guy" archetype, whose helpfulness is apparently genuine rather than manipulative.
Man With a Plan is not a terrible piece of television. It moves the necessary pieces across the board, establishes the new power dynamics at the merged agency, and closes the chapter on Don's affair with Sylvia. But it does so with a workmanlike efficiency that feels beneath Mad Men's usual standards. The RFK assassination, one of the most traumatic moments of 1968, is relegated to an afterthought, perhaps because the writers recognised that after the emotional devastation of the season's earlier episodes, another historical tragedy might numb the audience. Or perhaps, like the Boomers who lived through that annus horribilis, Weiner and his team simply found themselves unable to process yet another Kennedy death with the gravity it deserved. Whatever the reason, the result is an episode that ticks boxes rather than transcending them—a placeholder between the brilliance of what came before and the promise of what might follow.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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