A Guy Watching Mad Men: Hero Takes A Fall (S6/E11 “Favors”)

tumblr_mo6gk5YNEz1spk90oo1_500

I’m just going to go ahead and come out and say this: I knew about you, Bob Benson.

And you know what? Good for bob Benson. Go on with your bad self rubbing up on Pete’s leg and telling him how you feel. Can you just explain the whole Manolo thing to me? Is he supposed to offer some weird comic relief in an otherwise greying world? Is there any possibility that Manolo gets his own spinoff show? And also how did this season become so much about Bob Benson? He’s this weird nobody that you think is full of these ulterior motives, but then we catch him listening to some record to help up his game, rocking a sweet pair of shorts, or giving Ginsberg a seriously good pep talk, and suddenly we’re all Team Bob Benson. He’s the guy that’s been waiting to make a move, and last night he did — only it was on Pete.

And while Bob rubbing his leg up against Pete’s isn’t exactly the biggest part of last night’s episode, it does give us more and more reason to believe that the last two episodes of the season will be all about fallout from things that led up to last night’s episode, but “Favors” was the straw that brok the camel’s back: Peggy and Pete being weird an flirty, Peggy calling up Stan and offering him up favors if he’d come check on a mouse caught in a trap, Ted’s family life crumbling/Ted offering up a truce with Don, Don helping out Sylvia and Arnold’s son from going directly to ‘Nam, and then Don getting some thank you sex from Sylvia. For some reason it feels as if nothing good can come out of any of those things.

Did I mention that Sally walked in on Don with his pants down with Sylvia below him? I didn’t, but only because I’m not sure that will have any impact going forward on the storyline since Sally seems to have a knack for walking in on people in the middle of things (remember Roger getting the blowjob from Megan’s mom?), and I think that from Sylvia’s reaction that it will be her that comes clean about the affair. My guess is that Sylvia will tell her husband about the “little things” that she’s been lying about, and that will set off the chain reaction.

But where do we go from here? Pete is obviously in a really sorry state, and things don’t seem to be getting better. His downward spiral has gone from funny to sad and uncomfortable (going home to an empty cereal box? Downright sad times right there), while Roger almost seems too upbeat and funny (even for him) to the point where you’re thinking that he’s going to get hit by a car, have a fatal heart attack, or something along those lines. And Don? At this point that guy is a total lost cause. Everything he does and is about is bad and wrong, but it used to be like at least he was grounded a little bit in reality, and suddenly now he’s the one saying about Sylvia and Arnold’s son can’t go to Canada because, “He can’t spend the rest of his life on the run.”  Don is obviously long gone. He was running from reality, and now he’s just straight up on another planet.

But the most important I have to ask about this week’s episode of Mad Men isn’t about Don or any Draper: Was that a poster of Moshe Dayan on his wall? Interesting choice…

Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on TwitterFacebookGoogle +, our Tumblr, and sign up for our mailing list.