Untitled

I was looking for something to post today and came across this quote I’ve held onto for a while:

fuck the poets of the past, my friends.
there are no beautiful suicides
just cold corpses with shit in their pants
& the end of the gifts.

I have no idea who said it but I saw it on a PostSecret way back in the early days. Seeing it today made me think of our dearly departed Lane Pryce. Don told him to come up with “an elegant exit” presumably for his resignation but which Lane took literally.

He was gifted with numbers and certainly didn’t get the respect for A) creating SCDP (in what’s still the best season finale of the show) and B) keeping them afloat after Lucky Strike left. Yet the poem is right… Lane was scared (shitless) of what would happen to him. But whether he did it in the Jaguar, in his office, with Pete’s rifle or down the elevator shaft, death is nothing if not gruesome. They teased it out of us by showing Joan trying to get in his door, then showing Pete’s reaction to looking over the divider, and eventually we all wanted to see. Well, we got our wish.

Mad Men

I have to talk about this… Mad Men is getting crazy. Like really crazy. Last week Joan become a SCDP partner by whoring herself out for the company to win the Jaguar account. Don gave a rousing speech the week before explaining how their agency would be defined by their first car and yet he seemed unhappy after finding out they won the account. It’s all about the chase with him.

Of course, Peggy didn’t care about the Jaguar win either because she wasn’t assigned to it. This led to her taking job interviews and pulling Don aside to give her resignation(!). How could Peggy leave SCDP? Is she leaving the show entirely or will we follow her new life? The show started with Peggy joining SterlingCooper so how could she not continue in at least some part? Of course, we’ve seen many people come and go from the show and we’ve never followed anyone after they left the company so even though Peggy has been one of the central characters since Day 1, I don’t foresee any more movie theater handjobs.

Then this week we got the death that’s been hinted at all season: Lane(!). First, there was the mention early on that Pete kept a rifle at the office. Then, there was the time Don pushed for the elevator and it opened up to an empty shaft. Clear indicators that someone was going to expire at the office, Miss Blankenship-style.

Of course, we knew Lane had embezzled from the company and something was likely* going to happen but when Don forced his resignation I thought that would be the end of it. Instead, Lane jumped into the new Jaguar his wife bought him (with money they don’t have) and tried to kill himself. Ironically, the car they all know is shitty and still want to represent and sell to other people of course won’t start and Lane can’t even go out the way he wants. Instead, he heads to the office over the weekend and we see him typing a letter (Resignation letter? Suicide note?). Monday morning he’s late and Joan goes to unlock his office but there’s a desk in the way. She goes to Pete’s office right next door and tells him she thinks something is wrong. Pete hops on his couch to look over the divider and sees Lane hanging from a noose.

What’s really shocking about all this action is that there’s still one more episode left in the season. Either of the past two weeks could have been a season finale so I’m really expecting something huge to happen next Sunday. Everything is on the table and nobody is safe.

*I say “likely” because Mad Men doesn’t always go anywhere with their plot lines. Remember when Lane found that guy’s wallet and took the picture out of that girl? That never went anywhere. Then the season premiere where SCDP became an equal opportunity employer and hired Dawn who had exactly 1 episode (with Peggy) and hasn’t garnered any time since?