Mad Men recap: To have and to hold

This week's episode finds our heroes taking on new roles, both literally and symbolically

Megan and Don, on the town.
(Image credit: AMC)

Tonight's episode of Mad Men, "To Have and To Hold" — an episode that shares its name with the fictional soap opera on which Megan Draper stars — was, appropriately enough, an episode fixated on the roles people play. As Megan prepares for her first on-camera love scene, the team at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce makes a big bid for the Heinz ketchup account, with the collateral damage from both events taking Don and Megan's relationship to a new and alarming low.

"Everybody's scared there. Women crying in the ladies' room, men crying in the elevator," Don's secretary, Dawn, tells a friend, describing Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. And we've seen enough Mad Men to know that she's right. Behind closed doors, these characters' carefully constructed facades tend to fall apart — except for Don, who lacks both the courage and the strength of will to be honest with himself. We've spent so much time with Don Draper by now that it's easy to forget that, on some level, he's always playing a role. He's not even Don Draper — he's Dick Whitman, who constructed "Don Draper" to escape the parts of himself he didn't like. When Mel says he could cast Don in a soap opera, he doesn't realize how close he is to the mark; Don is an incredible performer, selling his colleagues, his clients, his wife, and his mistresses on a carefully fabricated version of himself.

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.