“Why would you deny yourself something you want?” – Joy
“The Jet Set” is the eleventh episode of Mad Men Season 2. What’s new and what’s happening?
- Don and Pete are in Los Angeles for the aerospace convention. However, things will quickly take a strange turn when the Viscount Monteforte d’Alsace (“call me Willy”), played by Philippe Brenninkmeyer, introduces himself to Don at the hotel and tells him that a young woman, Joy (Laura Ramsey), wants to meet him.
- This is the first episode where we see Roger and Jane together after Roger left his wife, Mona, for Don’s at-the-time “new girl” secretary. They’re deep into head-over-heels territory now, with Jane writing poetry for her new love. “You make wine taste sweeter,” she orates to him. Soon after, Roger proposes and Jane giddily accepts.
- Kurt (Edin Gali), of the Kurt and Smitty tandem, invites Peggy to go to a Bob Dylan concert with her (and it just so happens that I’m writing this piece in 2025 just as the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is getting lots of buzz).
- Before Don goes on his walkabout of sorts – from Sterling Cooper and his life as Don Draper – he and Pete sit in on a lecture at the aerospace convention about M.I.R.V.s (Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles). Or, in English: much more powerful and agile nukes than had existed previously.
- Don bumps into Joy at the hotel lounge and she invites him to go with her to Palm Springs. It’s one of the most surprising and delightfully baffling moments in the series when Don, on instinct, bails out of his life to head off into the California desert with her (leaving Pete, the convention, Sterling Cooper, not to mention Betty and the kids behind for a spell). “You want to get your things?” she asks him when he gets into her convertible. “No,” he responds.
- After passing out from heat exhaustion upon arrival at a Palm Springs pad (that would likely go for several million in modern dollars), Don quickly blends in with this strange international band of vagabonds. This tracks as we already know that Don is adept at shedding one identity for another, chameleon-like. “We’re nomads together,” Joy tells him. And soon enough, Don will also discover that Willy is Joy’s father.
- Joy invites Don to come with her and her coterie to the Bahamas, but we understand it’s really an invitation for Don to completely abandon his life in New York – his family in Ossining, Sterling Cooper, all of it – and reinvent himself as a strong, silent type among this band of wealthy wandering eccentrics. She even teases him with the notion that he can sleep with whomever he likes. “I’m not possessive,” she tells him.
- The episode ends on a mysterious note, with Don making a phone call from the house in Palm Springs the next morning. He refers to himself as Dick Whitman and says, “I’ll see you soon” (more on this below).
Mad Men, “The Jet Set”: the advertising side of the show
- Duck Phillips reminds Roger Sterling (and us) that he’s coming up on being at Sterling Cooper for two years and wants “to know what your plans are.” Roger deftly and coldly pushes back on Duck, saying “I’m at a loss” when trying to think of any accomplishments that would equate with the head of accounts being bumped up to a partnership. When Roger finally tells Duck, “I’d find a way to make it rain,” that statement will eventually propel a series of events that upends Sterling Cooper and changes many lives in the process.
- For all of Pete’s protestations about wanting to get into the pool in LA, it’s clear that he’s taking his job of landing new business for Sterling Cooper seriously. One of the big fish he’s looking to reel in: American Aviation and Rocketdyne.
- Later in the episode, Duck meets his former colleague, Saint John Powell, from the UK-based Puttnam, Powell, and Lowe. Duck’s ambition and pride, ginned up (so to speak) from his disappointing meeting with Roger, push him to reveal to the PP&L partner that Roger’s financial position from his pending divorce has opened up a golden opportunity for the British firm to sweep in and acquire Sterling Cooper. “His wife’s lawyer isn’t going to leave them a pot to piss in,” Duck tells him, and then shortly thereafter downs a martini during the meeting, breaking his sobriety.
- More on Duck’s machinations: his deal terms include a demand for himself to be president of the newly formed New York branch of PP&L, with the requirement that “creative has to report to me or the whole thing falls through.”
- Duck brings the offer back to Roger and Bert Cooper, and it helps him greatly that Don isn’t around to push back against it (as he surely would have). “On the table will be mountains of money, international prestige,” he promises. “There he is,” Burt says. “There’s the man I heard so much about.” He laughs when he says it, but we understand that it’s anything but a compliment. Even so, the Sterling Cooper partners take the offer seriously.
Things you notice after watching the entire Mad Men series a bunch of times
- Sal, always working overtime to appear the manly man to his colleagues (we know that he’s sadly and tragically in the closet in corporate 1960s New York), is seen in a meeting casually leafing through a Playboy magazine. Another way to look at this: a person in a business meeting is casually leafing through a Playboy magazine. Sidenote to this: I recall being at my grandparents’ home in Florida in the 1980s and seeing a friend of theirs casually and publicly leafing through a Playboy magazine. So it happened, people.
- Kurt tells Peggy, “neighbors,” with regard to how he will go about finding her apartment out in Brooklyn. This in a way touches on one of the enduring mysteries of Mad Men: how Pete found Peggy’s apartment in Brooklyn on her first day of work back in the Season 1 pilot episode, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”
- Seeing Don Draper standing by a pool in LA, smoking his cigarette in full suit and hat, is always striking. The fish out of water factor is strong with this one.
- Don thinks he sees Betty at the hotel lounge in LA, and it’s one of a number of times when Mad Men takes on a dreamy quality.
- The house that Joy takes Don to in Palm Springs is in Altadena, California in real life, and has been used in the filming of many TV shows and movies.
- The look on Sal’s face when a) Kurt openly and freely admits that he’s gay b) we see how everyone reacts to it is both outstanding acting by Bryan Batt and an absolute gut punch to witness.
- When Don stares into his glass of Campari while in the pool in Palm Springs, we get the impression that he’s trying to stare into his life and where it might be headed next.
Mad Men, “The Jet Set”: odds and ends
- When the topic of Paul participating in civil rights activism with his girlfriend, Sheila, comes up, Harry Crane says: “I don’t know why people keep stirring up trouble. It’s bad for business.” So Harry isn’t a progressive champion of the people, as it turns out.
- Many of the Los Angeles-based scenes are filmed in Altadena, California, just north of Pasadena – a city I lived in for many years. Also: the Draper residence in Ossining, New York is located in real life in a very cute neighborhood in South Pasadena. I’d take walks and find a way to swing by that block once in a while back in the day.
- It’s rare and fun when Don jokes about anything. When Pete tells him excitedly, “I just saw Tony Curtis in the men’s room,” Don replies, “Handing out towels?” This then elicits a classic, “A thing like that,” from Pete.
- Roger meets with his divorce lawyer, George, wherein we learn that getting divorced in New York state in the early 1960s wasn’t so easy. This comes back into play late in Season 3 with regard to Don and Betty splitting up.
- We learn, via Roger’s conversation with Duck, that Don has a 12.5% partnership share in Sterling Cooper.
- Don tells Joy that he’s never in his life had Mexican food without any trace that this is an unusual thing. This reminds me that in growing up on Long Island, New York, even by the early 1990s there were few if any Mexican food options outside of Taco Bell.
- Joy is reading The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, a classic of the Lost Generation of writers. At the end of the episode, Don casually rips out the last page to write down Anna Draper’s address (though we don’t know where Don is headed next until the following episode, “The Mountain King”).
- In one of the lighter moments of the episode, Kurt cuts Peggy’s hair before they head off to the Bob Dylan concert. “You have old style,” he tells her, and he’s right.
Mad Men, “The Jet Set”: fun quotes
- “I have to keep you in line or I’ll lose you.” – Roger
- “It’s a different life for single men.” – Sal
- “You will go with me.” – Kurt
- “There’s not gonna be any swimming.” – Don to Pete
- “I’m Joy.” – Joy
- “I think you’re happy to see me.” – Joy
- “It’s medicinal.” – Greta
- “My muscles are remembering their skills.” – Viscount Monteforte d’Alsace (“call me Willy”)
- “I’m homosexual… I make love with the men, not the women.” – Kurt
- “I like sex.” – Joy
- “You’re drinking sad.” – Kurt
- “Let them open the kimono.” – Bert
Some stats and info about Mad Men, “The Jet Set”
TV SHOW – Mad Men
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 2, Episode 11
AIRED ON – October 12th, 2008
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FX
GENRE – Drama, Relationship Shows, Office Culture, Period Shows
CREATED BY – Mathew Weiner
CAST – Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, Aaron Staton, Rich Sommer, John Slattery, Kiernan Shipka, Robert Morse, Christopher Stanley, Jessica Pare, Jay R. Ferguson, Michael Gladis, Bryan Batt, Alison Brie, Jared Harris, Kevin Rahm, Mason Cotton, Ben Feldman, Mark Moses, Anne Dudek, Maggie Siff, Joel Murray, Harry Hamlin, Talia Balsam, James Wolk