Season 2: Episode 11: "The Jet Set"
or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mexican Food"
Season 2: Episode 11
“The Jet Set”
Written by Matthew Weiner
Directed by Phil Abraham
Setting: September 1962
My best friend briefly got into Mad Men after moving to a new city. He saw the success I had hosting Mad Men trivia nights and thought it might be possible to host his own if he started watching the show I held in such high regard.
He made it right up until “The Jet Set” before calling to say “I cannot care about this man’s problems anymore” and dropping the show.
It is an unfortunate truth that many great TV shows have a period that fans tell new watchers they have to “make it through” to be rewarded by some of the best TV episodes of all time. If my buddy had said he was dropping the show during Season 4, I would have said he was insane.
For Season 2, I get it. This is Mad Men’s malaise season and no one wants to be told “It gets better, trust me” after the 10th episode of more malaise. I do wish he had stuck around until at least this episode. “The Jet Set” is impossible to look away from. It has the feeling of a half remembered nightmare taking place just before the alarm goes off.
Not a dream where you are being chased or tormented, but one where nothing feels real and you just can’t seem to wake up no matter how inevitable waking up feels.
When you think about what the episode is saying about life in the 1960s, it is terrifying. This goofy and almost surreal episode is a nightmare that Don has to wake himself wake up from. The terrifying thing about the nightmare is that the people in it tell him that this is a good dream.
“The Jet Set” sees Don Draper abandon a work trip to California to eat Mexican food for the first time with a strange group of unemployed, free love drifting “nomads” who have ignored the duties of life for the pleasures of living in the moment.
Don is spurred to do this after sitting through a presentation that details a potential U.S. plan to nuke the Soviet Union.
The man who doesn’t believe in tomorrow now sees how horrifying tomorrow can actually be. He escapes to a place where time does not exist and finds no meaning there. While avoiding a horrific future, Don is instead reminded of a tragic past.
He thinks he is better than these selfish people who ignore their families. In a bizarre scene, the eccentric Viscount Monteforte reveals that he is the father of Don’s new lover Joy.
He reveals this while sitting on the foot of their bed and coming onto Don himself.
In this group of nomads who speak often but say nothing, Don is reminded of growing up without a childhood.
Don Draper escapes to a Neverland where no one really grows up and it is there that he comes face to face with Dick Whitman. He even meets a neglected boy who looks like a young version of himself. That experience is what pushes him to finally see how flawed this lifestyle is and leave it.
He leaves the nomads to be himself for once, to be Dick Whitman around his best friend Anna Draper.
I do take some issue with the decision to see Anna seeming impulsive. I know that Don isn’t the best decision maker but Anna is his best friend and I feel like Don would have taken the California trip as an excuse to see her anyway.
Anna Draper’s scenes are “THE GOOD STUFF” of Season 2. She is a breath of fresh air after a season of the Barretts and Father Gill but it does seem bumpy getting there with a long teased introduction feeling impulsive. Again, Don is not in a good headspace though so I understand why he doesn’t think these things through. He’s lucky not to be drenched in sweat and collapsing in every other scene.
In what is otherwise a surreal nightmare of an episode, Peggy actually has a sweet and meaningful story after being stuck with the most boring and stiff supporting plots of the season. She believes new employee Kurt is asking her on a date to see Bob Dylan until he bluntly reveals that he is a homosexual. While feeling as if she always picks the wrong guys, Peggy is accepting of who Kurt is and he opens her up with a new haircut. Peggy has made a male friend who isn’t try to sleep with her and this understanding that comes with a genuine moment of friendship empowers her.
Peggy learns through doing. Being shown affection and kindness by someone who wants nothing in return is one of her most important lessons. We can want more than what we’re told we should want. This also serves as sweet moment where a heterosexual character (who has likely never spoken with an openly gay person) is immediately accepting. One wishes this friendship had continued but, as Mad Men often does to its LGBTQ characters, Kurt’s story is never given any closure. He is not brought along to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce after Sterling Cooper is sold at the end of Season 3. In Season 4, Peggy is then given a new LGBTQ friend Joyce who also eventually fades out of the show with little attention.
“The Jet Set” is a lesson in accepting who you are and showing that truth to others. Kurt appears to be one of the only earnestly happy characters in the episode because he has no qualms about living his truth.
Pete spends the episode acting like he’s Don around L.A. pool girls and soon realizes that it isn’t enough to just pretend. Only Don can be Don, the jet set nomads saw that and scooped him up. Pete was a bug on the windshield to them. The irony is that Don is not really Don and for that reason, he could never join the nomads in their quest to live on the wind (and avoid paying taxes).
We are going to see Don happy for once and that happiness comes from living the truth.
A truth apparent by the smile on his face when a friend calls him Dick.