Mad Men 6-12: The Quality of Mercy

Called it! I called Bob Benson as a con man.

Ok, that's stretching the truth a bit. The closest I came to guessing Bob's secret was to note that the actor playing him, James Wolk, had previously starred as the ultimate con man - a man leading a double life - in the cancelled 2010 TV drama "Lone Star," and to wonder if BB was a character in the same vein. Sure enough, there's a reason Wolk keeps getting cast in these roles: he's good at playing the charming, plausible faker.

But in retrospect, we all should have called it (to be fair, about half the internets did). There were plenty of little hints along the way. His inconsistent stories about his family. His ambiguous relationship with the equally shady-if-charming Manolo. The self-help tapes he listens to to on the sly, again inconsistent with someone of his claimed posh background. And of course his over-eagerness to please. All this time I've been wondering if he was supposed to be Pete 2.0, and it turns out that he's actually Don 2.0 - or rather, Dick Whitman in the process of becoming Don.

And Pete once again finds himself first to discover the impostor's secret. Only this time he's choosing to handle the situation differently, having learned his lesson from his failed attempt to unseat Don years ago. "I have learned not to tangle with your kind of animal," he tells a perplexed Bob. (I, thinking he was talking about homosexuals, was equally flummoxed at first.) Pete abandons his efforts to eject Bob, apparently believing that he can better use his leverage by keeping the man where he can see him and, presumably, control him. That complacent look in Pete's eye, in his very last scene, says it all: he's got Chevy, and he thinks he's got Bob where he wants him. I'm not so sure, though, that this strategy will work out any better for him, especially after seeing Bob show his teeth in this episode. That line about his "waning admiration" for Pete, and the warning to "watch what you say," was chilling - almost as chilling as his immediate transition to artificial hearty congratulations. True, this was before Pete found out he was a fraud, but the fact is that Bob's already a much smoother operator than Pete - something Pete grudgingly recognizes - and may not stay subordinate for long.

No question Bob's certainly got a good model for ruthlessness in Don 1.0. Don starts and finishes this episode in a sorry-looking state, curled up in fetal position, still looking emotionally drained and estranged from everyone who should be closest to him. Yet none of that prevented him from working with cruel and masterful efficiency to gain the upper hand over Ted Choaugh. I commented last week that Ted's paranoia about Don being intent on undermining him seemed unfounded, but it appears that he may have been right and I wrong. (though I did predict that Don wouldn't stand by their bargain!) Don may have been acting to save the firm, yet - as with his good samaritan act on behalf of the Rosens' son last week - I can't help suspecting him of ulterior, baser motives: in this case, to establish dominance over Ted, and subconsciously to disrupt the connection he perceives between Ted and Peggy. While Don's never been romantically interested in Peggy, it's clear that he's never totally gotten over her leaving him for Ted, and something of those feelings had to have been revived by the sight of the two of them bonding (at the movies, no less - Don's turf!) and flirting in the office. Don doesn't like being supplanted, and reacts accordingly. And Peggy rightly calls him on it.

Not that Don isn't right, too. That he, of all people, should admonish Ted for not thinking with his brain, is pretty rich; yet the fact is that unlike Ted, Don's amours never had a direct negative impact on his work. (Unless you count promoting Megan, but she at least turned out to have a natural talent for the ad business.) I have to admit some dissatisfaction with this particular storyline, and not just because I like Ted. Ted and Peggy's openly giddy flirting and giggling, and Ted's complete lack of self-awareness, felt overdone to the point of being unconvincing. And perhaps it's just Don's MO or natural genius to be able to tune out most of what's going on at the firm and then tune in at just the right moments to land the killer blow. But these sudden turnarounds aren't entirely convincing, either, at least to me.

Finally, I don't have a whole lot to say about the other big narrative arc of the episode - Sally's interview and trial night at boarding school - except that it confirmed that (1) she's finally had enough of Don's BS, (2) she can hold her own in a hazing, as I expected she would, and (3) what she craves right now isn't sexual attention but someone to protect her sexual innocence (pretty much exactly what her father failed to provide her). And so Glen to the rescue as her unlikely white knight. Lord knows those are in short supply in the world of "Mad Men" - so enjoy yours while you can, Sally.

Random observations:

-Once again, Don shows himself to be a truly terrible father. When Betty calls him about Sally, you can see him stiffen, worried she's spilled the beans; his relief when he realizes she hasn't, and is just avoiding him, is palpable. He doesn't care if she visits or not, and he's only too eager to pack her off to boarding school, to pay anything to get her out of his guilty consciousness. And people think *Betty* is a bad parent? Sally's right: Don hasn't given her anything.

-Betty, for her part, is engaging in one of her occasional efforts to reach out to Sally. Sure, she's probably primarily excited at the thought of Sally attending a prestigious school with the children of other important people: notice how she herself behaved as if *she* were in an interview (which she undoubtedly was), and nailed it. But she also seemed genuinely curious as to why Sally's decided to go this route, and perturbed rather than triumphant when Sally makes it clear she's renounced her father. This is the Betty I like, and am glad we're seeing more of this season.

-Glen's friend to Sally: "Are you frigid?" No, just Nordic. Also, traumatized by watching my dad having sex with his neighbor and my dad's business partner getting blown by my stepmother's mother.

-Is there some kind of "South Park" in-joke going on among the Mad Men writers? Only instead of killing Kenny at or near the end of an episode, they pretend to kill him off at or near the beginning. That's twice now they've done that. Poor Ken survives, but not before getting the full Cheney hunting experience. At least he's rocking the eye patch.

-That was a great eyeroll from Megan as she passed the phone call from Harry over to Don. She hasn’t forgotten Harry’s grossness over "Zou bisou bisou."

-Rosemary's Baby, really? That ad sounded more creepy than funny. Not to mention horribly un-PC, but well, I guess we're still in the '60s. Don does a pretty passable crybaby, maybe because that's exactly how he's feeling right now.

-Line/exchange of the week:
“You’ve finally found a hooker that takes traveler’s checks?”
(Harry, in an undertone) “Why did I tell you about that.”

-Runner-up: Roger to Kenny - "Shiver me timbers!" followed by "I'd listen to the Cyclops."

-Honorable mention “Crocodile tears!” Bert, as always, has Pete's number.

Mad Men 6-11: Favors

Well, sheee-it. Just how many primal scenes does poor Sally Draper need to witness, anyway? First it's Roger Sterling and Megan's mom; now it's her own father and the lady from downstairs. And this time she's old enough to understand exactly what's going on.

That jaw-dropping moment was enough to put the title of the episode, "Favors," in a different and thoroughly dirty light. In the world of "Mad Men," there are no true favors, at least in the sense of having no strings attached. Whether it's Don extending himself to save the Rosens' son from the draft, Ted helping him, Bob Benson finding Pete the perfect caretaker for his increasingly addled mother, or Peggy seeking male assistance to dispose of a dying rat, every favor has its price. And with the exception of Ted, the price nearly always involves sex, though the real price is a heaping dose of shame. Ok, in Peggy's case it's no more than mild momentary embarrassment - but then she didn't actually give or receive any favors.

And speaking of sex and shame: all right, Internet, you were right about Bob Benson, the man responsible for the other jaw-dropping moment of the night. For a moment there, when the camera panned to his expression (extremely well played by James Wolk) as Pete was dismissing the charming Manolo as a "degenerate," I thought "aha, Bob is clearly gay" and assumed the writers would leave it at that. But no, we then got to witness Bob quite unmistakably coming on to Pete despite the equally unmistakable negative signal from Pete on his feelings about all things gay. There is no rational explanation for this move. It appears that Bob doesn't want to be Pete after all - he just wants Pete, period. Or does he? I'd still entertain the possibility he's trying to pull a Talented Mr. Ripley, only let's face it, Pete is no Dickie Greenleaf/Jude Law. Which just brings back the question: why Pete Campbell? Does Bob see how lonely and insecure he is, and does he see in that a vulnerability he can exploit? Or is the vulnerability simply what's appealing to him? We still don't know, and thus Bob Benson continues to be a man of mystery.

But back to Sally: while the plot mechanics that led her to walk in on Don and Sylvia were pretty labored (the doorman's jangling keys serving as the stand-in for Chekhov's shotgun), it was intriguing to see that storyline in the context of her friendship with Second Base Girl. Second Base Girl may talk a bigger game than she plays, but she seemed pretty normal in her overt interest in the cute older boy. By comparison, Sally's reaction wasn't abnormal - for every girl of that age like Second Base Girl, there are at least five who are a lot shyer, or at least less brazen - but I couldn't help wondering if her relative lack of interest in thinking sexually about the Rosens' son wasn't at least partly rooted in her first traumatic encounter with adult sex. (For those of you who forgot or missed the episode, last season Sally walked in on Megan's mother giving head to a blissed-out Roger.) One can only imagine how she feels about sex now - a dirty, tarnished act between dirty, tarnished adults. The most disgusting aspect of the incident, for me, was that Don's greatest fear was clearly that Sally would tell, and the effect her discovery would have on him - not the scarring effect it would have on her. That non-explanation he tried to give her through the door was so lame it made me cringe. That's Don Draper, father of the year, "comforting" everyone other than his own family, doing more for his mistress' kid than his own. And while I'd like to think his assistance to Rosen, Jr. was as much out of regard for Arnold as for Sylvia, you just know that his true ulterior motive, whether or not he was conscious of it, was to get back into Sylvia's pants.

Amid the high drama raised by Sally and Bob Benson, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that this was a very Pete-centric episode. Personally, I'm always happy to see Pete get more screen time. Yes, he's a selfish, slimy weasel, but he's also a fascinatingly sad, complicated, contradictory little man, and the fact that he so desperately fears being pitied only makes me, well, pity him. Especially since the flip side is that the only thing he fears more than being pitied is being unloved and unappreciated, a point his mother quite cruelly uses against him in her dementia. If this episode had an alternate title, it should have been "Bad Parents," with Mama Campbell just edging out Don Draper for worst parent of the year. We've seen before how little love there ever was between her and her younger son, but if we had any doubt, she erased it tonight. Pete, no less than Don, owes a good part of his messed-up attitude towards women to his mother. That said, I did love his moments with Peggy at the post-Ocean Spray celebratory dinner, even if there was something a bit heartbreaking about his half-envious, half-affectionate recognition of her success and the fact that she, better than anyone else, really knows him. (Although does she really, anymore?) I also liked that he was able to pick up on the connection between her and Ted - without being jealous or possessive in response - and that Peggy didn't deny it.

As for Ted Chaough, his narrative arc, while interesting in itself, felt a little out of sync with the others'. Perhaps that was deliberate, as he's clearly the outsider who lacks the long history of relationships that the other characters have with each other. (Another moment I loved from the post-Ocean Spray dinner was Ted's inquiring look at Pete and Peggy when he returned to the table: like Pete, he senses something between the other man and woman, but he doesn't have the knowledge and back story that they do.) He's so obsessed with Don and the idea that Don's trying to beat him - something his wife picks up on without even being in the office - he doesn't realize that Don simply isn't paying attention to him, or for that matter to the business, most of the time. Forget about reading memos, Don doesn't even seem to know when any of his meetings are! Consequently, it's doubtful whether the bargain he strikes with Ted will yield the latter the desired results. Too bad, as I have to say I'm getting to like Ted quite a bit; so far this season he seems like the most normal and decent man on the show, though admittedly that's not saying much. It's telling that the last shot we see of him is his coming home to his family; the look on his face as he picks up his younger son couldn't be a sharper contrast to the last shot of Don, turning away from his daughter's door with a look of shame and defeat. Don knows he's failed immeasurably and irrevocably as a father; Ted still has a chance to redeem himself.

Finally, for an episode that had some very dark threads, it was also a remarkably funny episode, particularly in all interactions involving Peggy. Elisabeth Moss is a bit understated as an actress, but this worked to great comic effect in all her scenes, from her receiving and relaying Pete's mom's raptures on the "physical satisfactions" of love and the "fire in her loins," to her adventures with the rat and her attempt to coax Stan into a booty-for-rat-disposal call. I hope the final shot of her new cat doesn't portend her turning into a crazy cat lady - hearkening back to her mother's advice on companionship (talk about bad parenting, again) a couple of seasons ago - but I have faith that she'll continue to be the coolest cat lady in Manhattan.

Line of the week: This was actually a great episode for two-liners. Some of my favorites -

Peggy: I had a really strange conversation with your mother.
Pete: There's no other kind.

Ted (petulantly): I don't want his juice. I want my juice.
Cutler: It's all your juice.
Ted: Tell him that! (ok, technically that's a three-liner)

Peggy (realizing Stan's not alone): You can bring her.
Stan: I'd be dead by morning.

Least subtle line of the week: Mrs. Campbell, in mistaking Peggy for Trudy, telling her they should stay together "for the sake of the child you have together." Dum da-dum! Runner-up: Megan to Don, ostensibly about the Rosens' son - "He can't spend the rest of his life on the run." Gee, really? Who's learned (or hasn't learned) that lesson already on this show?

Mad Men 6-10: A Tale of Two Cities

As someone who used to live in L.A., I'm always fascinated by "Mad Men"'s visits there without ever being quite satisfied with them. They generally center on Don and often presage, perhaps precipitate, some big change or epiphany in his life. Yet they have an air of gauzy unreality about them that can be a bit frustrating, at least to those who know California as a real place. To be fair, I think it's deliberate: inevitably, on these California trips, Don ends up detaching himself from his carefully constructed existence as Don Draper and assessing it with the eye of a dispassionate outsider - a feat that seems only made possible by the dreamlike strangeness of his surroundings.

So it was this time, except that Don seemed to exercise much less agency in the process than he has in the past. In an episode in which Megan advises him to "go for a swim," he ends up looking bemusedly on his own body floating face downwards in a pool in the Hollywood hills (or as an annoyingly smug Harry would put it, "THE Hills"). It's an image that evokes both "Sunset Boulevard" and The Great Gatsby, both tales of men who tried and failed to escape the sordid reality of their true identities. It's also a more passive (and more ominous) version of Don walking out into the Pacific Ocean, so many seasons ago, on a previous trip to Cali - an image that was also echoed (as the "previously on Mad Men" reel thoughtfully reminded us) more recently in Don's ad campaign for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Like that ad, his latest immersion could signal a rebirth; it could also signal, simply, death. After all, and surely not by coincidence, it follows a sequence in which he imagines first Megan telling him she's pregnant (and, as if we needed the underlining, that this is a "second chance"!), then the ghost of the soldier-bridegroom he met in Hawaii, now maimed and somber, announcing he's dead and hinting that Don is, too. Now I don't think Don is literally going to die anytime soon, but there does seem to be something dead or dying inside him, and count me skeptical that he's getting a second chance to come alive again. For some time now he's appeared checked out of his own life, oblivious to what's going on around him, including the fact that a coup is brewing right under his nose at the Frankenfirm he helped create.

Meanwhile, back in New York, there are actually two separate coups brewing - even if Pete Campbell, with his usual odd blend of perceptiveness and self-centered paranoia, conflates them as all part of one and the same. One is the takeover from within by the Cutler/Chaough half of the merger. True, it's mostly being driven by Cutler (aka bizarro-Roger), but it's tacitly approved, if also reined in, by Chaough. Some of Cutler's specific machinations remain a tad murky - for example, did he set up Bob Benson to fail with Manichewitz? - but his ultimate goal is pretty clearly to render Sterling, Cooper, et al. as partners in (literally) name only. It's interesting to see Ted as, if not the more principled, certainly the more prudent of the two, unwilling to toss any Sterling Cooper-ites if they retain any value to the firm as a whole.

Then there's Joan's quest to be a partner more than in just name -i.e., a partner with actual clout. She sees her chance with Avon-man and takes a huge risk in bypassing the firm's hierarchy to bring him in as her client. We don't know yet whether this will turn out to be a brilliant or foolhardy move on her part, though I tend to share Peggy's more pessimistic view (not because I think she has better judgment than Joan but because this is "Mad Men," when bad things seem to happen more often than good things). Regardless of who turns out to be right, Peggy and Joan's argument over Joan's handling of the situation was, for my money, the best written exchange by any characters so far this season. The Joan-Peggy dynamic has always been one of the most intriguing yet under-explored on the show, and it was remarkable how much suppressed tension, how many years of accumulated, complex feelings about each other's rise were packed into those few minutes. Kudos to Peggy for coming to Joan's rescue in the end, despite her disapproval of the latter's methods.

But poor Joan! I'm not sure Peggy knows about the deal with the devil (Jaguar); I actually don't think she does, though I may be having a memory lapse. Nonetheless, her insistence that she, Peggy, worked her way up without sleeping with anyone clearly stung Joan in the same way it would have if she had known about Jaguar - as evidenced in the double meaning behind Joan's withering, yet wounded, response: "Congratulations. You really are just like them." Joan may or may not be privately regretting her decision to sleep with gross Jaguar guy, but it seems to be at least partly fueling a sense that her partnership hasn't proved to be worth the price she paid for it. Callous comments by resentful colleagues, whether it's Harry, bitter over not having a partnership, or Pete, outraged at being left out of the Avon meeting, surely don't help.

Of course Joan's not the only one of the "and Partners" who's feeling insecure about her status. Exhibit A: Pete Campbell, whose enraged, vicious subtext-laden comment about the Avon man ("oh, I bet you're making him very happy") elicits an equally cutting retort from Joan ("It's better than being screwed by you") but is really more reflective of his panic at the increasing tenuousness of his own position than lack of respect for Joan. While Pete's never been above doing weaselly underhanded things (like pimping out Joan) to get ahead, there is a part of him that's always believed that people should be rewarded for working hard and playing by certain rules, and been continually exasperated when following that course doesn't yield the expected results. "It's a revolt," he sputters impotently at Ted Chaough, unable to accept the latter's glib shrugging off of Joan's power-grab ("Possession is nine-tenths of the law"). Revolt, upheaval of the existing order, is indeed in the air, as the footage of the post-DNC Chiago riots pointedly remind us. In the end, at least nationally, it was more or less quashed - temporarily - by the election of Richard Nixon. Whether it's similarly subdued within the world of SC&P remains to be seen.

Random observations:

-This episode was directed by John Slattery (aka Roger Sterling), who once again shows a great eye and sense of pacing, and isn't too vain to allow his character to get punched in the balls. Though not before getting in what had to be a record number of height jokes at poor little Danny.

-The title of the episode, "A Tale of Two Cities," appears to refer to New York and L.A. But one could make a pretty good argument for Chicago, in which events both mirror and trigger the unrest that afflicts our characters.

-This week's hallucinations and/or revelations brought to you by...hashish! "Mad Men" may be going a little too often to the drug-tripping well this season, but it does generally fit in with the hazy uncertainty, the search for escape that we associate with the late '60s. Still, when you've got Pete Campbell smoking a joint, you know shit is hitting the fan.

-Is it just me, or did Joan seem initially disappointed that Avon man was treating their first lunch as a business meeting rather than a date? But being Joan, she recovered almost instantaneously, enough to perceive it as something better than a date.

-Is Ginsberg having a total meltdown? He's been slowly unraveling this past season, but this was the first episode where he seemed really unhinged. He apparently has a similar political compass to Abe (Peggy's ex), but even less control over his feelings. Something about Bob Benson's attempt to calm him down was weirdly hilarious.

-Every week, a new mystery about Bob Benson. What on earth was that recording he was listening to? It sounded like something in the self-help genre. Also of note, he did not answer Ginsberg's question about his sexuality (though I personally think that's just the writers messing with us).

-Could Megan be having an affair? She seemed strangely distant in her interactions with Don this episode, even when Don was clearly making an effort to rekindle their marriage. I also found it telling that in trying to convince her to come to L.A. with him, he referred to Disneyland (trying to recpature the past, the "beginning of things," as Dr. Faye might have said), while she responded by joking that that was where she made the biggest mistake of her life. Maybe it wasn't a joke.

-Not much screen time for Stan, but that's because he was so adroit at making his exit from awkward situations - whether it was Ginsberg going off on someone ("This is my stop," "I can't watch this") or Pete stealing his joint.

-Line of the week: Cutler to Bob Benson - "Why are you always down here? Go back upstairs!"

-Runner-up: Roger on him and Don as conquistadors: "I'm Vasco de Gama, you're - some other Mexican guy."

"Before Midnight": Third time's a bittersweet charm

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

directed by Richard Linklater
starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

GRADE: B+

Review coming soon - this one needs time to sink in. All I can say right now is that while the film is very good, it also made me sad. (This is not to imply anything about the ending or even the general tone - it's just a reflection of my own, particularly personal relationship with the entire series.)

Mad Men 6-9: The Better Half

Because I'm coming so late to this week's episode (I was away from home Sunday night, and for some reason my DVR failed to record the original broadcast), I'll just offer ten quick thoughts:

1. In form, less strange than last week's episode-on-speed, but in substance, arguably even stranger. Don and Betty hooking up? Joan and Bob Benson going to the beach together? Peggy stabbing Abe with a bayonet? Way bigger wtf moments than Ken Cosgrove tap-dancing.

2. Didn't really care for the Don and Betty hookup - telegraphed the moment the miraculously hot-again Betty pulled her head out of that car - but their postcoital conversation was worth it. These occasional flashes of insight Betty has are all the more welcome for being so few and far between. But then she knows Don Draper like no one else does, and now that she's no longer in his thrall, he no longer has any power over her.

3. Duck Phillips returns! Gotta give the guy credit, he seems to be professionally indestructible - takes a licking (or, in his case, a shitting) and keeps on ticking. I can't help liking the guy for some reason, despite everything.

4. Poor Peggy. I would say Abe was a huge jerk for the way he dumped her - but then it's hard to blame a guy for being cruel to a girlfriend who just stabbed him in the gut. At least he was honest about what he couldn't stomach (har, har) about her. And truthfully, that writing's been on the wall for a while now.

5. Poor Megan is about to lose her soap opera gig...but possibly regain her husband? Too early to tell, though it would be a nice twist if it was his fling with Betty that made him return to his marriage. This is Don, though: it probably won't last.

6. What is up with Joan and Bob Benson? For that matter, what is up with Bob Benson? I don't get a sinister vibe from him, but he's also coming off as a bit too good to be true. When he met with Pete and mentioned gossip, I thought for a moment he was going to say something about Joan and Roger. Thankfully, he didn't. However, it's worth noting that the actor who plays him, James Wolk, previously played the ultimate con man on the short-lived TV series "Lone Star."

7. As other recappers have pointed out, so I can't really take any credit for this observation, there's a lot of play with doubling and duality - appropriate for an episode titled "The Better Half." Megan playing twins, Roger trying (and failing) to be both father and grandfather, and of course Peggy's resistance to choosing between Don and Ted, culminating in seeing both of their doors shutting on her. And while Ted shows more integrity - in a way - in turning Peggy down, I couldn't help remembering the famous Don Draper line, "It will shock you how much this never happened."

8. Relatedly, a lot of echoes of the past, another favorite MM theme: Don cheating on his current wife with his ex-wife, Henry witnessing another man hitting on Betty just as he did when she was married to Don, Bob Benson brown-nosing like a mini-Pete Campbell.

9. Also a lot of sirens in this episode: sounding the alarm for our characters, or simply signaling the growing unrest in late '60s New York?

10. Line of the week: oh, without a doubt, "I'm Bobby Five!" (Meta joke alert: in case you haven't noticed, there's been a different child actor playing Bobby just about every season of MM.) Runner-up, courtesy of Roger's daughter - "Don Draper, father of the year." It's all about that tone of utter disdain.

The Narrator's the Thing: "The Great Gatsby," "Stories We Tell," and "What Maisie Knew"

Please check back for what I hope will be a brilliant and insightful commentary on narrative voice and perspective in the following three movies:

THE GREAT GATSBY

directed by Baz Luhrmann
starring Leonardo di Caprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher

GRADE: B


STORIES WE TELL

directed by Sarah Polley

GRADE: B+


WHAT MAISIE KNEW

directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel
(loosely) based on the novel by Henry James
starring Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan, Alexander Skarsgaard, Joanna Vanderham, and Onata Aprile as Maisie

GRADE: B+/A-

"Star Trek Into Darkness": Boldly going where it's gone before

STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS

Directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring Chris Pine, Zach Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Bruce Greenwood, Peter Weller, Alice Eve

As summer entertainment, "Into Darkness" is a lot of fun. As a signpost for the future of “Star Trek,” however, it’s not clear where it’s pointing. Two installments in, J.J. Abrams’ series is starting to feel less like a reinvention and more like a remix. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it suggests less room to grow, which is what the series needs most in the long term.

When the first, rebooted “Star Trek” came out in 2009, it felt like an infusion of much-needed new life into a moribund franchise. True, Abrams, by his own admission more of a “Star Wars” man, cranked out a movie that seemed more like a "Star Wars" movie: heavy on the action, derring-do, and blowing up planets, light on the Trek-topian reflection and idealism. Still, he (mostly) managed to retain fan goodwill through wink-and-nod references to the original show and film series, a significant role for Trek icon Leonard Nimoy, and savvy casting of up-and-coming young actors who demonstrated a fresh, confident take on their beloved characters and an appealing chemistry with each other. I haven’t seen the movie since its initial release and have heard that it hasn’t aged well, but at the time it seemed to crack open a door to limitless possibilities for the crew of the Enterprise.

Four years later, those possibilities feel more circumscribed. Don’t get me wrong, just about everything that made the first movie worth watching is still around. The actors—Chris Pine as Kirk, Zach Quinto as Spock, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Karl Urban as Bones, Simon Pegg as Scotty, John Cho as Sulu, Anton Yelchin as Chekhov—click, clack, jangle and make up as engagingly as ever; Nimoy pops up for another key, if brief and awkwardly inserted appearance; and the alterna-Trek universe still has more of a “Star Wars” vibe that’s tempered by a plethora of artfully embedded Trek references. In fact, at a broader level, the political overtones and ultimate moral messaging of “Into Darkness” comes closer to a Trekkian sensibility than anything from the first movie.

What’s missing is the sense of newness, and the attendant exhilaration, that animated the first movie. It doesn’t help that the plot of “Into Darkness” is fundamentally a reworking of a story that will be familiar to much of the audience. I can’t say much more without giving too much away, except that the movie starts off with Kirk once again breaking the rules and getting punished for it, only to be given a chance at redemption when a mysterious, ruthless, and frighteningly powerful adversary named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) commits a double act of terrorism and then goes to hide out at the fringes of Klingon (i.e., enemy) territory. Kirk and his crew are dispatched by the Federation - specifically, Robocop! (Peter Weller, here playing an admiral) - to hunt down Harrison, only to discover that neither he nor their mission is quite what they thought.

In the action, suspense, and visual effects departments, “Into Darkness” is perfectly competent, no more, no less. The plot is serviceable, with the usual manageable quota of silliness and suspension of disbelief. Like its predecessor, the film’s real strength lies in the interactions among its characters. The Kirk-Spock dynamic in particular never gets old, and Pine and Quinto continue to sparkle playing their respective differences off each other, as well as the mutual frustration that merely highlights their blooming bromance. The only downside is how pallid and uninteresting Spock’s romance with Uhura seems by comparison. In the supporting galley, Pegg and Urban add extra comic punch as the perpetually frazzled ship’s engineer and doctor, while Chekhov ups the ante by moonlighting for Scotty and donning a red shirt. (I won’t spoil whether the shirt proves to have any significance.) And as our heroes’ chief adversary, Cumberbatch cuts an impressive presence, projecting an icy hauteur and superhuman self-possession that keeps the audience continually guessing his motivations and his next move.

After a series of reversals—including one rather protracted emotional scene that would be a lot more moving if it weren’t so obviously going to be rendered immediately irrelevant—the movie builds to a pretty satisfying climax and resolution, once again leaving the door open to a vast range of possible future adventures for the Enterprise. Here’s hoping that in its next outing, Abrams et al. will take full advantage of that freedom. They don’t have to go where no man has gone before, but they should at least try to go where “Star Trek” hasn’t gone before. Because ultimately that's the best, and only, way for the franchise to live long and prosper.

GRADE: B

Mad Men 6-8: The Crash

Sometimes I wonder if the process of writing "Mad Men" bears any resemblance to the ad campaign work it loves to depict. Even if there isn't any, I have to think the show's writers must feel some kinship with the "creatives" at Sterling Cooper (aka, post-merger, the Alphabet Soup firm). I'm not sure, though, what that says about the profound weirdness of this week's episode. All I know is I now have a vision of the MM writers getting high as kites while casting about for that spark, that brilliant idea around which to build the episode, and deciding that they've hit upon it after writing down every idea and image that pops into their head. All 666 of them.

Ok, probably none of that is true, as I suspect the episode was carefully crafted and meticulously honed under the gimlet eye of Matthew Weiner - who's well known as a control freak and much more of a micro-manager than Don Draper ever was or will be. Nonetheless, the end result was (undoubtedly deliberately) so disorienting that I had to check to confirm that it wasn't directed by David Lynch. It wasn't. But it very well could have been, right from that jarring opening shot of a petrified Ken Cosgrove, trapped in a car full of lunatics, not so much steering as hurtling towards a terrifying crash, to just about everything that happened following the good doctor's "vitamin shots," which were more likely vitamins laced with a mother-lode of speed. It was impossible at any given moment to be certain whether anything we saw was "actually" occurring or was a product of Don's illness, the ill-advised booster, or some combination of both. Even the scenes that didn't include Don at all still felt distinctly surreal; in fact, some of the most unsettling moments were those involving the Draper kids and their midnight visitor/burglar, who came on like a nightmare version of Aunt Jemima. At that point I was fully prepared to accept that that whole storyline was Don's fever-dream, even though it turned out to have a more mundane - but still bizarre - explanation.

"Mad Men" has done both drugs and fever dreams before, the former, IMO, more successfully than the latter - I'll take Roger's acid trips any day over Don's fantasies of murdering a persistent paramour. But it's never let the border between reality and imagination become quite so porous, and for me, at least, the jury's still out on whether the technique was effective. Stylistically, it was interesting; substantively, I'm not convinced it had any real point, other than to underline the fact that Don's losing his grip on his conception of the world and his place in it. It's never a good thing when the plodding Dick Whitman flashbacks are the the pins holding an episode together, but that appeared to be the case here. We got further insight into Don's madonna-whore complex, and why he can't seem to let himself be loved, as I Ching girl could have told him. (Or did tell him; I wasn't sure she was real, either, though apparently she was the daughter of Ted Chaough's dead partner.)

The thing is, does anyone even care anymore why Don's attitude towards women and love - and by extension, all relationships - is so fucked up? At this point in the MM trajectory, the only way that shit stays interesting is if we see Don coming to understand his demons or better yet, fight them as he's seemed to do in the past, if fitfully. So far this season, however, he's just been wallowing helplessly in his fucked-upness, his inability to change in any fundamental way. We get it, but I think we've had enough by season 6, and all the Lynchian distractions in the world can't disguise that fact.

Tellingly, the best and most poignant moment in the episode - for me, anyway - didn't involve Don at all, but Stan (who's somehow gone from being one of the more annoying characters on MM to one of the more likable) confiding in Peggy about his cousin's death and Peggy gently telling him that she's had loss too, and knows that you can't dull the pain through drugs or sex. Sure, Stan fails to profit from her wisdom, but at least we haven't been watching him fail, and fail, and fail again. And Peggy, at least, doesn't seem to have fallen into the Don trap. True, she may yet repeat the mistake of getting too emotionally invested in her boss, if that little moment of intimacy with Ted Chaough - appropriately witnessed by Don in his state of, um, augmented reality - was any indicator. However, it hasn't yet become a habit that wearies. There's hope for her yet.

Random observations:

-Poor Ted Chaough (whom, like Stan, I'm beginning to like). Takes the weekend off to mourn a dead friend, like a normal person, only to have the inmates take over the asylum. As Ginsberg more or less put it.

-Speaking of Ginsberg, he sure doesn't need drugs to be strange...or to have lousy aim.

-Another Lynchian moment among many: Guy with glasses whose name I forget (the Roger Sterling to Ted Chaough's Don) spying on Stan and Wendy getting it on. Perhaps the second creepiest moment of the night, after the Draper kids' encounter with fake black grandma.

-Speaking of Roger, I'm disappointed we didn't get to see his reactions to the mysterious drug cocktail. And where was Joan? You know she wouldn't have stood for such goings-on.

-Although I continue to have little use for the Dick Whitman flashbacks, I did feel a twinge of real pity and discomfort for the poor kid. Mothered and then raped by his crush, and then punished for it by his - well, not real, but appointed mother. That would be more than enough to mess up up any kid for life. In a way, though, that's my problem with this storyline: it's too much, too heavy-handed with the symbolism, even for Mad Men.

-Just to be clear, while I'm getting sick of Don as a character, there's no question Jon Hamm's acting has been top-notch. He was especially good tonight, shifting convincingly from stalkerish/obsessive to completely drugged out (loved the timbre of his voice as he was going on about the timbre of his voice) to emptied-out nowhere man at the end, in the elevator with Sylvia.

-Episode highlight: What else but the magnificent Ken Cosgrove TAP DANCE? Preserved eternally through the wonders of GIF-making.

-Episode MVP: Ken comes close, but I have to give it to Stan, who managed to be hilarious (in his gloriously unfazed reaction to being stuck with an Exacto knife), piggish yet oddly seductive (in his move on Peggy), and touchingly vulnerable (in his heart-to-heart with her about his cousin).

-Best lines: a plethora of them this week, but top prize goes to little Bobby (for the second time this season after seasons of silence!) - "Are we Negroes?" Runner-up: Don washing his hands of Chevy - "Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse." And honorable mentions to Stan, for his delivery of what should have been (but oddly wasn't) a sleazy compliment to Peggy's ass, and the otherwise-absent Pete, for his disgusted response to the grunts' callousness towards a dead man: "He IS in a better place."

-Least subtle line of the week: A lot of contenders, as always, including Don's whorehouse comment, but let's hear it for Sally's last cut at Don - "Then I realized I didn't know anything about you." It hurts cuz it's true!