The Crash (S6x08)
Airdate: 19 May 2013
Written by: Jason Grotte & Matthew Weiner Directed by: Michael Uppendahl
Running Time: 48 minutes
Mad Men, throughout its seven-season run, occasionally indulged in moments of bold experimentation that set it apart from its television contemporaries. These creative risks were never arbitrary; they emerged organically from the show's central preoccupation with a nation in flux—the United States of the 1960s, caught in the painful interregnum between a vanishing social order and an uncertain future. Matthew Weiner's series excelled at capturing that peculiar moment when the old certainties had crumbled but the new ones hadn't yet taken root. Yet artistic ambition doesn't guarantee success, and occasionally even prestige television's most celebrated offerings stumble. The Crash, the eighth episode of Season 6, stands as perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon—a self-consciously "trippy" instalment that was marketed as the "most 1960s" episode yet produced, only to leave critics largely unmoved despite the technical excellence that had made Mad Men the gold standard of quality drama.
The episode unfolds over a June weekend in 1968, its title deriving from a literal automotive disaster that opens the hour. Ken Cosgrove, the agency's perpetually beleaguered account man, finds himself joyriding in a Chevrolet Impala with General Motors executives who have made certain he's thoroughly intoxicated. The inevitable occurs: the car crashes, leaving Ken with a leg injury severe enough to necessitate a cane for his subsequent office appearances. It's a darkly comic moment that establishes the episode's chaotic tone while serving as metaphor for the corporate recklessness that permeates the advertising world.
The misfortunes compound rapidly. Frank Gleason, one of the partners in the newly merged agency, has succumbed to cancer, devastating his colleagues and forcing Ted Chaough to attend funeral services at precisely the worst moment. The timing couldn't be more catastrophic for the business: GM, displaying the casual brutality of corporate America, has demanded complete advertising campaigns for their new Chevrolet model despite its 1970 launch date remaining distant on the horizon. The creative team, led by Don, faces an impossible deadline requiring a full weekend of intensive labour. The solution arrives in the form of Dr. Shelly Hecht (Rick Zieff), who administers "vitamin" injections laced with amphetamines to Don and his staff. Jim Cutler has arranged this pharmaceutical intervention, betting that chemical enhancement will unlock the creativity and energy necessary to satisfy their demanding automotive client.
The wonder drug fails to deliver the promised creative breakthrough, instead transforming the office into a carnival of increasingly erratic behaviour. Don, already compromised by a persistent cough and the emotional wreckage of his breakup with Sylvia, descends into a particularly pathetic spiral. His attempts to rekindle that failed romance prove humiliating, while his professional focus fragments into obsessive searching for an elusive "perfect pitch." His attention drifts toward Moira (Christine Garver), a new secretary, even as he finds himself pursued by Wendy (Alexa Nikolas), a tarot-reading hippie girl. Wendy's presence in the office remains one of the episode's more inexplicable elements—she simply appears among the creative team, reading the I Ching and dispensing cryptic wisdom to the increasingly unhinged advertising executives.
Interwoven with this pharmaceutical chaos are flashbacks to Don's childhood in a Depression-era brothel. Young Dick Whitman, feverish and ill, faces banishment to the cellar by his stepmother Abigail, who fears the prostitutes might catch his infection. Aimee Swenson (Megan Ferguson), one of the working women, takes pity on the boy, allowing him to recover in her bed and nursing him with soup. When he has sufficiently recovered, she initiates him into sexual experience. The consequences prove devastating: Mack Johnson (Morgan Rusler), the brothel's proprietor, casts Aimee into the streets, and when Abigail discovers what transpired between her stepson and the prostitute, she subjects the boy to a savage beating. This buried memory surfaces to inspire Don's advertising solution—he dispatches Peggy and the team to unearth a late-1950s soup commercial from the archives, convinced he can retrofit it for Chevrolet's campaign.
Meanwhile, Peggy receives news from Stan Rizzo that his cousin, recently enlisted in the United States Navy, has been killed in Vietnam. This moment of shared vulnerability leads to an unexpected kiss between colleagues, though Peggy ultimately resists pursuing anything further. Her frustration mounts when Don, convinced he possesses brilliance he cannot articulate, leaves her grasping at smoke. She departs the office, only to witness Jim Cutler peeping voyeuristically at Stan and Wendy engaged in sexual congress. The revelation that Wendy is Frank Gleason's daughter—present in the office where her father once worked, now subject to the predatory gazes of his former colleagues—adds a layer of grotesque irony to the proceedings.
The episode's most genuinely disturbing sequence unfolds not in the drug-addled agency but in Don's Manhattan apartment. Betty has deposited the children there, but Megan must abandon them to attend a theatrical performance whose playwright might advance her acting career. Unable to reach Don, she entrusts Sally with babysitting duties, paying her for services rendered in the past. Sally proves catastrophically unprepared for the intrusion of a strange Black woman (Davenia McFadden), who claims to be their "grandmother Ida." Intimidated beyond the capacity to challenge this assertion, Sally allows "Ida" to ransack the apartment. When Don finally returns, he confronts a scene of domestic chaos: children traumatised, Megan distraught, Betty furious and police investigating. Don accepts full responsibility, realising he left the back door unsecured—an oversight that allowed the intruder entry. The episode concludes with a wordless elevator encounter between Don and Sylvia, followed by his return to the office where Don tells a disappointed Ted informs him that he will no longer work directly on the Chevrolet campaign, delivering the devastating assessment that the office "turns into a whorehouse every time we get the car."
Critical reception of The Crash split observers into opposing camps. Detractors dismissed it as gimmicky filler—"Mad Men on Drugs"—plot-light and self-indulgent, an unnecessary detour from the season's more compelling narratives. Defenders, adopting a more art-critical posture, championed it as a daring experiment in the spirit of 1960s cinema, formally adventurous and thematically appropriate to the era it sought to represent.
Yet this defence struggles against the evidence of Michael Uppendahl's direction, which proves surprisingly conventional. Apart from the flashback sequences—a narrative device Mad Men viewers had long since accepted as standard—the visual language adheres to the series' established grammar. The episode's more genuinely unconventional elements emerge from the script, co-written by Matthew Weiner and Jason Grote, a playwright whose video game work on BioShock perhaps informed the episode's hallucinatory qualities. Their screenplay attempts to dramatise the collapse of post-war advertising's institutional confidence, depicting an industry populated by individuals either terrified by emerging uncertainties or actively exploiting them. The treatment of Wendy exemplifies this approach: she exists first as object of desire before anyone acknowledges her youth or her bereavement. This dimension acquires additional discomfort through the casting of Alexa Nikolas, a former Disney child actor for whom Wendy represented her final screen role; Nikolas has since become a prominent activist against sexual abuse in the entertainment industry, lending retrospective unease to the episode's gaze.
The Crash also documents a largely forgotten aspect of American corporate culture—the widespread use of amphetamines to enhance productivity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Hecht clearly models himself on Dr. Harry Jacobson, the notorious "Dr. Feelgood" who supplied celebrity clients with pharmaceutical stimulation disguised as medical treatment. Unlike the series' earlier frank depictions of alcohol abuse, drug consumption remained largely off-screen, perhaps constrained by network concerns, perhaps because Weiner judged narcotics easier to associate with counterculture rebellion than corporate respectability. This historical excavation produces the episode's most genuinely entertaining moment: Ken Cosgrove, amphetamine coursing through his veins, launching into an impromptu tap dance that ranks among the series' most memorable comic interludes.
The Sally storyline, meanwhile, generates the episode's most visceral tension. Contemporary critics might dismiss the "Grandma Ida" sequence as racially problematic, yet it remains genuinely disturbing—an invasion of domestic sanctuary that exposes the fragility of the Draper family's constructed reality. The long-term ramifications for Don's relationships with both Sally and Megan promise serious narrative consequences that the series would subsequently explore.
As with most Mad Men instalments, The Crash ultimately relies on its performers, and Jon Hamm delivers committed work even when the material strains credibility. The result is an episode of undeniable quality that nevertheless fails to rank among the series' finest hours—an ambitious misfire that demonstrates how even the most accomplished television can confuse excess with profundity, and pharmaceutical chaos with genuine insight into the human condition.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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