In the Flesh: Mad Men s2e04 'Three Sundays'

“Get out, we’re… sleeping!” shouts Don, sprawled on top of Betty, as Bobby and Sally burst into their bedroom. Kids are everywhere in ‘Three Sundays’, the first episode of Mad Men to split its time between three separate storylines, a narrative move that would become a signature in later seasons. Sally takes her first trip to the office with Don, passing out drunk in the break room after getting into unattended liquor in a funny/not so funny echo of her father’s alcoholism. Roger’s daughter dithers about wedding plans. Peggy’s (Elizabeth Moss) sister Anita (Audrey Wasilewski) frets about and resents Peggy for the bastard child Peggy gave up for adoption after her traumatic surprise pregnancy. Even in the halls of Sterling Cooper, Roger (John Slattery) talks about the American Airlines pitch as a “stillborn baby” they still have to deliver after losing their man on the inside. 

Structured around the titular three-week run of Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday, and Easter Sunday — each one introduced by a printed devotional pamphlet acting as a kind of playbill — the episode opens with a dire ecclesiastical warning of damnation. Punishment and the desire for punishment recurs throughout. Anita, unhappy with her life as a housewife, chafes at her mother Katherine’s (Myra Turley) gentleness with Peggy and contrives to turn their parish’s new priest, Father John Gil (Colin Hanks), against her after he takes an interest in her over dinner. Her spiteful, cruel “confession”, used as cover to expose Peggy’s pregnancy, is a masterpiece of close facial acting, with Hanks, here only a voice and a silhouette, an able foil to Wasilewski’s trembling rage and only partially affected guilt. The way she enunciates, “...for I dread the loss of Heaven” during her Act of Contrition is a thing of beauty.

Elsewhere, Betty argues with Don over his refusal to punish their son Bobby (Aaron Hart) for his fibbing. “He needs a spanking,” she chides. “How else is he going to learn right from wrong?” But when Don finally explodes at him at the dinner table, all it does is shock the entire family into terrified silence. His hushed recounting to Betty later that night of his childhood fantasies of murdering his physically abusive father is one of the show’s rawest emotional moments. Mad Men was always an anomaly in the landscape of “bad man” prestige TV for its almost total lack of physical violence, and whenever it does appear it’s either tragic, outlandishly weird, or both. What does it say that all these frustrated, powerless women stuck inside the cage of domesticity are so hungry to see others brutalized or humiliated? Maybe it’s weakness, and the fear and frustration of knowing one’s self to be weak, and not strength from which the urge for violence first proceeds.