Mad Men Season 5 running thread

Did I say I felt bad for Roger Sterling? Zeke12 explained his point giving reasons for actual compassion. RickStain basically said he felt bad that Pete Campbell had to deal with such a great life.

I don't feel bad for any of them. I like them all as characters. But the higher-up men at Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce have all the negativity in the world coming to them, with a borderline exception of Lane Pryce.

 

And he can't be happy with all that. Would you trade lives with Pete Campbell, knowing you had to *be* Pete Campbell?

 

I cannot think of one redeeming quality Pete Campbell has going for him. Has Pete ever helped someone out when he did not have to?

Roger, Don, Peggy and the others all have at one time or another.

And I am really, really starting to like Cosgrove.

 

I think it's probably a testament to Kartheiser that people do feel sympathetic toward Pete.

As the show plays out, I wonder if that was Weiner's intention.

My reading, as of now, remains that it is not.

 

Cosgrove's the most balanced, well-adjusted male in the piece, and he's worn it well, from Season One, on.

 

Stan Rizzo is another balanced, well-adjusted man.

 

Someone brought this up to me, after his narration:

Because of how well-adjusted he is, he has always felt like he existed outside the show. Which, of course, made him the perfect person to deliver something like a voiceover narration.

But what if Cosgrove is narrating the whole thing? If the show is his version of Sterling's Gold?

 

Did anyone else mis-hear Cosgrove's narration at the end and hear the name of the character as "Cole"? That got me excited for a minute, since Cole was the name of that actor's character in "L.A. Noire."

 

This is a great discussion. Regardless if Pete is likable or not, it speaks to great character development. If you hate him, it's not because he's annoying or stupid like, say, Lori Grimes from The Walking Dead. You hate him because he's a sniveling little shithead.

I have no idea if I like Pete or not. It was awesome to see Lane give it to him and I didn't feel bad because he had it coming for being a prick. But I felt bad for him in the elevator scene with Don. I think he was crying not because of humiliation of an asskicking, rather a feeling of inadequacy.

 

Pete Campbell is the kid in middle school who went from being getting picked on by the cool kids to getting to hang with the cool kids. Maybe it was because he suddenly got good at a sport, or had a hot sister or had parents with easy access to the liquor cabinet. So in order to fit in, he starts picking on the same kids that we was lumped into as a part of the year before. Except he has to be a little bit more of a prick to prove that he's one of the "cool kids," and it never really works because while he might get to hang out with the cool kids because of other circumstances, he won't ever get to be a cool kid. So he's kind of stuck wanting to fit in somewhere - anywhere - and not being able to.

You can feel empathy for a character like him without feeling sympathy. They are two different things.

And in terms of Pete's rifle - I suspect that Weiner is exactly the type of person to introduce the literal version of Chekov's Gun into the series with no intention to follow through on it, just to prove a point about the expectations of TV viewers and how they don't match up with what happens in real life.

 

I believe three of those four people will be run over by lawn mowers.



That's lawn mowers. Good for a laugh at any get-together.

 

One reason that Pete is sympathetic is because Kartheiser makes him so charismatic.

Another reason is because he's a walking personification of insecurity - and since we all have our insecurities, there is some projecting going on by the audience. In a way, more than anyone else on the show, he's the audience's proxy. Not the whoring and the raping and the smallness of some of his work backstabbing, but the impetus behind all of that. We can relate.

Another reason is that Peggy seems to like him. Even after what happened between them, she doesn't seem to resent him at all. They've had some quiet moments through the years after that where I think we know that he seems to treat her with respect. We like Peggy. Therefore, we like Pete, just a little bit.

This is the first time I've heard the "Pete is going to die" thing. I remember it was big-time with Roger a few seasons back. To my memory, this show has never killed off a character. It's not "LOST" or "The Sopranos." Would seem pretty soap operatic, no? I've always thought of Pete's gun as some kind of Weiner metaphor that I haven't quite thought through.

P.S. The Charles Whitman discussion was pretty cool. I didn't even catch Don correcting the name. My wife had to point it out to me: "That's his name, too." I racked my brain trying to figure out where else I had seen a Charles Whitman discussion in a TV show or movie. It finally came to me. "Full Metal Jacket."