In the Flesh: Mad Men s3e06 'Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency'

“That’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary's running you over with a lawn mower.” Absurdity is the word of the day in ‘Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency’, a mid-season showstopper in which Don, Joan, Roger, Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), and Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) attend their own funeral in the form of a top-down reorganization of their entire firm by their British owners Putnam Powell and Lowe, only to have the whole thing go sideways in a spray of garish red arterial blood. Perpetual screwup Lois (Crista Flanagan) drives a John Deere lawn mower straight over the left foot of Guy McKendrick (Jamie Thomas King), the handsome, charming prospective new overlord of the reformed Sterling Cooper, and just like that the entire plan for foreign rule is done and dusted. “He’ll never golf again,” says St. John Powell (Charles Shaughnessy) like he’s delivering news of a king’s death in battle. 

It’s only fitting that as a disappointed and struggling Joan leaves the agency she’s first served and then kept running for almost a decade, it spits up on her one last time. Her last moments with Don in the hospital waiting room are among the show’s funniest, as they try to reconcile the deadly seriousness of what happened with the bolt-from-the-blue ridiculousness of it, and Hamm and Hendricks have a chemistry so powerful you can understand why the writers only pair them up for fleeting scenes like this one. Let that tap go full-blast and nobody’s going to want to see anything else. The entire episode, in fact, is wall to wall with jokes and situational comedy, from Roger’s deadpan, “just when he’d gotten it in the door” upon learning of Guy’s foot’s amputation to Sally’s heartbreaking and hysterical fear of her baby brother, Gene, and the Barbie doll Betty gets her as a peace offering.

It’s a stroke of narrative genius to lay out this roadmap to the show’s future, seasons and seasons of potential storytelling as the characters we know struggle to adjust and avoid elimination under Guy’s new regime, and then to simply yank it all away. Mad Men, uniquely plotless, concerned with character and atmosphere, but never lacking in a feeling of forward momentum, is probably the only show of its time that could pull off something so bold, a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that ends with the spirit catching two to the back of the head and getting tossed in a compactor. I wish more shows would take risks like that, and as much as I’m fascinated by violent media and focused on it in my own career, I wish more serious adult art were sparing enough to make something like this such a legendary shock.