Television Review: Ladies Room (Mad Men, S1x02, 2007)
Ladies Room (S1x02)
Airdate: 26 July 2007
Written by: Matthew Weiner Directed by: Alan Taylor
Running Time: 47 minutes
If there remained any doubt among first-time viewers following the series premiere, Mad Men in its second episode, Ladies Room, makes it abundantly clear that the pace of its plot is going to be glacial. In some ways, this is to be expected from Matthew Weiner’s work. Based on his prior contributions to The Sopranos, he has always preferred quiet observation and character exposition to high-stakes drama and shocking displays of violence and sex. His new show would focus less on propulsive narrative and more on meticulously painting a world which is perhaps even more fascinating to today’s viewers. Unlike the realm of Italian-American organised crime, the world of 1960 Madison Avenue advertising is something that ceased to exist even before most of the target audience were born. For a contemporary viewer, it can look like an alien planet, and The Ladies Room serves as a deeply immersive, if deliberately slow, guided tour of its social customs.
The episode’s title immediately signals one of the fundamental aspects in which the Mad Men era differs from our own: the position of women in society. The ladies’ room, a traditionally female sanctuary, becomes a stage where private anxieties are briefly visible before being repressed again. The episode’s focus rests on two characters in vastly different situations, both nevertheless feeling the tight constraints of societal rules. The first is Betty Draper (January Jones). By the standards of the late 1950s and early 1960s, she should be the picture of contentment. Her husband, Don, is a successful and well-to-do business executive who has gifted her with two children, a picture-perfect house in the suburbs, and a lifestyle that would be the object of envy for most American women of the time. Yet, she is deeply, inexplicably unhappy. Whether this stems from her husband’s prolonged absences or his likely infidelities is less important here than its physical manifestation: a baffling numbness in her hands. This condition first surfaces in the ladies’ room of a fancy restaurant during a dinner with Roger Sterling and his wife Mona (played by Tricia Balsam, John Slattery’s real life wife). It later escalates catastrophically into a loss of control over her car, a moment of sheer terror that, thankfully, ends without serious injury—though the presence of her children in the back seat injects the scene with a chilling undercurrent of neglectful danger.
One of the triggers for this incident is a visit from Betty’s best friend and neighbour, Francine Hanson (Anne Dudek), who brings gossip about the arrival of Helen Bishop (Darby Stanchfield), a divorcee with a nine-year-old son, to the neighbourhood. For most of the neighbours, a single mother in their midst is a scandal, a living contradiction to their cherished traditional values. For Betty, however, Helen represents a terrifying possible future—a fate she too might experience if Don were ever out of the picture. This fear, internalised and unspoken, feeds directly into her psychosomatic collapse. The medical establishment, as portrayed, is of little help. Physicians dismiss it as non-neurological, leading Don to commit Betty to therapy. Despite the post-war popularity of psychoanalysis in Middle America, Betty views this as a shameful admission of failure. The episode’s most quietly devastating revelation comes at its close: her psychoanalyst, Dr. Arnold Wayne (Andy Umberger), blatantly breaches confidentiality, secretly informing Don about the content of their sessions. This betrayal underscores the complete lack of agency afforded to women, even in a space ostensibly designed for their healing; her mind and its troubles remain the property of her husband.
Simultaneously, the episode follows Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) through her first weeks at Sterling Cooper. Her challenges are of a different, yet equally oppressive, nature. As a young woman in the office, she is seen less as a professional and more as a target for sexual conquest by her male colleagues. Peggy must deal with not only the constant, lecherous gazing of the executives but also the pointed enmity of office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), who chastises her for her naivety and works diligently to preserve her own status as queen bee of the secretarial pool. Peggy’s precarious position is highlighted by the absence of Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), away on his Niagara Falls honeymoon but still sending her a provocatively personal postcard. In one of the episode’s key sequences, Peggy glimpses one possible future for herself in the ladies’ room, where she witnesses a woman crying at the mirror, utterly ignored by Joan. Later, Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis), who presents himself as one of the office’s more enlightened and less sexist men, offers Peggy a tour of the various departments—a pretext he uses to make a pass at her. Peggy deftly rejects him by inventing another office lover, whom Paul mistakenly assumes to be Don. The episode concludes with Peggy re-entering the ladies’ room. Standing before the same mirror where she saw the weeping woman, she consciously steels herself, adjusts her expression, and decides to keep her composure. It is a small, powerful moment that signals her nascent resilience and her determination to survive, and perhaps even thrive, within this hostile atmosphere.
As a counterpoint to these women bound by familial and professional limitations, the episode offers Midge Daniels (Rosemarie DeWitt), Don’s bohemian lover. Revealed to be an artist, her unconventionality is reflected in an openly polyamorous lifestyle. She unashamedly accepts gifts from other lovers, much to Don’s chagrin. His jealousy here is richly ironic, exposing his own hypocrisy and the double standards of the time: he is deeply affected by her infidelity despite being a serial adulterer himself. Midge represents a path not taken, a flicker of alternative female existence that is available only on the fringes of society.
Beyond its central gender critique, Ladies Room seeds other important narrative elements. The opening restaurant scene is particularly telling for what it reveals about Don—or rather, for what it reveals he refuses to reveal. His abrupt shutdown of any discussion about his early past signals a profound mystery that will, of course, become the central enigma of the series.
The episode also introduces Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse), the firm’s eccentric founding partner. Cooper appreciates the creative lack of discipline among his male employees, yet he is fiercely conservative in politics, insisting the firm support Richard Nixon in the upcoming presidential election. This juxtaposition highlights a recurring theme: the permissive, ‘mad’ culture of advertising exists comfortably within a framework of traditional, right-wing American values.
If the episode has a significant flaw, it lies in a rare misstep in the series’ otherwise meticulous recreation of the past: the use of ‘The Great Divide’, a 1996 song by The Cardigans, over the end credits. The choice is jarringly anachronistic. For a show that prides itself on immersive period detail, this needle drop feels unnecessary and disruptive, briefly shattering the carefully maintained illusion of 1960.
Ladies Room is a nice example of slow-burn character study. The first season of Mad Men doesn’t have much of a plot and instead excels in “superb and fascinating recreation of the past and fascinating characters. This episode epitomises that approach. It forgoes event in favour of depth, using its languid pace to excavate the quiet despair and simmering resilience of its women. It confirms that Mad Men is less interested in what its characters do than in who they are—and, more importantly, who the society of 1960 allows them to be. The glacial pace is not a deficit but the very source of its power, allowing us to feel the weight of the era’s constraints as acutely as Betty feels the numbness in her hands.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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