The Doorway (S6x01/S6x02)
Airdate: 7 April 2013
Written by: Matthew Weiner Directed by: Scott Hornbacher
Running Time: 86 minutes
When A Little Kiss opened Mad Men's fifth season in 2012, it became the most-watched instalment of the entire series. Hardly surprising, then, that the producers attempted to replicate this triumph a year later by deploying the same format: a feature-length premiere subsequently cleaved in two for syndication purposes. The result is "The Doorway," a two-hour curtain-raiser that shares its predecessor's ambition and scope, though not quite its flawless execution.
The episode opens with Don Draper in what most people of his era—and plenty even now—would consider paradise: a Hawaiian holiday. He and Megan have been invited as guests of SCDP client Sheraton Hotels, and Don appears genuinely content, a rarity for this perpetually restless soul. Yet a chance encounter with PFC Dinkins (Patrick Matel), a young soldier on R&R from Vietnam, stirs memories of Don's own traumatic past. Recognising something of his younger self in this frightened boy, Don agrees to give the bride away at a wedding her parents cannot attend—an intimate moment Megan captures from a distance with her camera. The idyll is bookended by a grim incident at the door of the Drapers' apartment building: their doorman Jonesy (Ray Abruzzo) collapses from a heart attack just as Don and Megan are leaving for the airport. He is saved by the timely intervention of Dr. Arnold Rosen (Brian Markinson), a surgeon who happens to reside in the same building. Upon their return, Don finds Jonesy recovered and, impressed by Rosen's competence, strikes up a friendship with his neighbour.
Back in New York, Roger Sterling receives word that his elderly mother has died at ninety-one. He initially appears to accept this philosophically, noting her advanced age and the inevitability of the event. Yet the memorial service proves a minefield of awkward encounters. His daughter Margaret, openly leered at by the ever-lecherous Harry Crane, wishes to exploit Roger's connections to help her husband launch a refrigeration business. Don, having missed lunch due to the ceremony, becomes thoroughly intoxicated and vomits into an umbrella stand. Whilst his reunion with ex-wife Jane proceeds amicably, Mona's appearance with her new husband—uninvited—causes Roger to lose his temper entirely and order everyone out.
Meanwhile, Peggy Olson is flourishing at CGC following her departure from SCDP. The agency faces a crisis courtesy of the Vietnam War: their Koss headphones campaign, built around Shakespeare's "Lend me your ears" and scheduled for the next Super Bowl, lies in ruins after a comedian on The Tonight Show jokes about American soldiers collecting ears from dead Viet Cong guerrillas. Working on New Year's Day 1968 and chatting with Stan Rizzo—still at SCDP—over the telephone, Peggy experiences a flash of inspiration and devises an alternative slogan, deeply impressing her boss Ted Chaough.
Betty Francis's storyline introduces Sandy (Kerris Dorsey), a fifteen-year-old violinist staying with the family after her mother's recent death. Sandy informs the Francises of her Juilliard ambitions, only to confess to Betty later that she was rejected and now intends to abandon school for a hippie commune in Greenwich Village. When Sandy vanishes, Betty tracks her down and discovers she has pawned her violin to fund a journey to California. Betty returns home and shocks everyone by dyeing her hair a deep brunette.
The Drapers host a New Year's celebration with the Rosens, and the evening passes so pleasantly that the guests entirely forget to mark midnight. Dr. Rosen is summoned to hospital, and Don assists him with his skis—New York having been hit by an unexpected blizzard. The episode concludes with the revelation that Don is conducting an affair with Rosen's wife Sylvia (Linda Cardellini).
The Doorway is unusual for Mad Men in its partial Hawaiian location filming. This opening also, uncharacteristically, establishes the episode's—and likely the entire season's—prevailing tone and recurring motif: the fear of mortality. Hawaii is initially presented as paradise, yet Don, ever the self-improver, reads Dante's Inferno on the beach. Hell surrounds him, most notably in Vietnam, which the characters experience indirectly: Peggy through a television gaffe apparently invented for the plot but inspired by documented American atrocities against civilians; Don more personally, as PFC Dinkins reminds him of his time as Dick Whitman. This segment carries tremendous weight for series history—Dinkins explaining that married men are less likely to die strikes a bitterly ironic note, given that Don owes his entire existence to the death of very married Lieutenant Draper.
The theme extends through Roger, who appears to have matured into philosophical acceptance of his mother's death as an inevitable event he reconciled himself to decades ago. Yet this proves a façade. Roger is as uncertain as ever, adopting a very modern, very 1960s approach to his anxieties by visiting a therapist. Ultimately, the death of his shoeshiner—who, having no family, bequeathed his belongings to his favourite customer—finally causes Roger to break into tears.
The episode also launches the season's narrative at the very beginning of 1968, the most turbulent year in American history, showing how drastic cultural changes appeared to older generations rather than indulging in typical Boomer nostalgia. Senior SCDP staff complain that Stan Rizzo and his younger team, beyond growing beards and hair, now fill the office with the smell of marijuana. Yet the more damning portrait comes from Betty, who discovers that Sandy's utopian counterculture commune is in fact a dilapidated building without running water, populated by deeply unhappy people whose survival strategies hover perilously close to crime, violence and sexual exploitation.
The New York squat serves as this episode's equivalent of hell, in sharp contrast to the Hawaiian paradise—the latter enhanced by generous fan service of Jessica Paré in bikinis and strategically draped nudity. This detail receives a charming self-referential nod when party guests view slide photographs and comment on Paré's appearance.
The Doorway is good piece of television, though certain details prevent it from achieving classic status. One is the awkward introduction of Bob Benson (James Wolk), an upcoming and overly ambitious accounts executive who feels grafted onto proceedings rather than organically emerging from them. More problematic is a scene in which Betty suggests to Henry Francis, whilst in bed together, that they might "spice up" their sex life if Henry were to rape Sandy, with Betty offering to hold the girl's hands. Henry reacts with appropriate revulsion and horror. Whilst Betty has a history of erratic behaviour, this scene feels not merely out of character but actively contradictory to her conduct with Sandy, where she presented as friendly and almost maternal. If Matthew Weiner's intention was to illustrate how the older generation misunderstood the Sexual Revolution and its newly established boundaries, the execution by Weiner and director Scott Hornbacher proves clumsy and misjudged.
Nevertheless, The Doorway is an impressive, ambitious opening to Mad Men's penultimate season—flawed, certainly, but never less than compelling.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
IMDb link for Part I IMDb link for Part II
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