The main theme of Mad Men Season 3 Episode 6 Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency is the old saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” In this case it’s the business plans of the British owners of Sterling Cooper.
Spoilers surely follow.
It is announced that emissaries from the London office are coming to call, which puts the entire office into paroxysms of anxiety. There have already been staff cuts for the first eight months of the British reign, so the conclusion is that bad news is coming from across the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, the young and likely doomed Sally Draper is having fits of terror, especially when it’s dark. It turns out, after coaxing, that Sally is very much afraid that little baby Gene is going to turn into Grandpa Gene. The same name has got her spooked. Beatty Draper is having none of that and seems to be increasingly impatient with her kids. At one point when her son complains about being bored, she advises him to bang his head against the wall. “Only boring people get bored,” she adds, no doubt adding to the years of therapy that are in his future.
Joan’s young doctor husband has some bad news. It seems that the Chief Residency at the hospital has gone to someone else. The result is that the only way he can become a surgeon, which is to say God on the medical hierarchy, is to move to Alabama. No one, especially a New Yorker, wants to do that, especially in 1963. So he will have to find some other, less divine specialty to be a doctor of. My suggestion is Oncology. It will be a growth industry; trust me.
Back at the office, the British visitors arrive, smooth, well dressed, well manicured, polite to a fault show up. They announce that the Englishman who had been overseeing the office will now oversee the office in Bombay. The poor man receives this bit of news with the same equanimity of news of being transferred to Hell.
The British also reveal one of those reorganizations of the Sterling Cooper office that switches around boxes, but does not actually change anything. The exception is that Mr. Sterling is not even on the organization chart. An oversight it is assured. Right.
There follows a celebration of both Joan’s departure into wife and future motherhood and the reorg. It is then that we learn a good lesson. It is not a good idea to drive a riding lawnmower through a business office while drunk with everyone else drunk as well. The subsequent dismemberment of the obnoxious and disliked British office manager results in all of the plans being scrapped, the move to Bombay being put off indefinitely.
Meanwhile, Don Draper is taking a meeting with none other than Conrad Hilton, of the Hilton Hotels, and incidentally the great grandfather of the notorious Paris Hilton. A chance meeting at the party Mr. Sterling gave for his daughter a few episodes back is creating a great many opportunities for Mr. Draper.
As an aside, congratulations are in order for the cast and crew of Mad Men for winning a pot full of Emmys for the second year in a row, Well deserved.
Source: Mad Men Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency, TV.Com
