Lots of differing views from our panel this week as Pete, Peggy and Allison move into the spotlight.

Ellen

Nothing good can last forever. Every week can’t be Get Drunk with Don and Lane and Watch Gamera Week, and this week’s episode “The Rejected” was, despite starring turns for Pete and Peggy, definitely the weakest of the season so far. I’m not much of a Pete fan, so I relished seeing him squirm around having to drop the Clearasil account he had worked so hard for, then the suspicion that Trudy was keeping her pregnancy from him. (His bitchy little shrug after challenging his father-in-law was, sigh, earned.) And “Peggy gets in a situation over her head” is a plotline with a good amount of mileage on it, this week including both artists and possibly the show’s first lesbian. (Played by Zosia Mamet, daughter of David. Can’t make it up!) But then we had to endure Allison’s resignation and Don’s cliched “What? We’re all adults” moment. Other stops at Obvioustown that came into play: Trudy asking Pete how he would know what being a father was like, and Don’s halting in the middle of the hallway to watch the crotchety old couple, painful symbols of the life he gave up. Pete and Peggy’s long moment through the glass front of SCDP, though: that was perfect.

Scott

I’m a tad shocked by the reactions here and elsewhere to “The Rejected” since, for my money, it’s my favorite season 4 episode so far by a mile. When the pre-show warning about brief nudity came up, I was prepared for more of Don’s tawdry whoremongering. Thankfully, we got a much-needed break from  sleaze, along with a generous side helping of Don’s shitty treatment of women being thrown back in his face for all to see. While it’s rare that a Mad Men episode isn’t filled with snappy comic moments, “The Rejected” was chock full of particularly good ones: Miss Blankenship’s redubbing the agency “Draper, Pryce, Sterling, Campbell… Misters”, Peggy’s curious head peeking into Don’s office and withdrawing at the very last second, Roger and Don getting out of a conference call with “Oh my God, there’s a fire,” Peggy’s discovery of Malcolm X a week after his assassination, much to Joey’s bemusement. Perhaps the tone was set by the direction of Mr. Sterling himself, John Slattery, whose tremendous debut behind the camera gave us not only a great episode overall, but also defining images of the gulf between Pete and Peggy (one a conformist suit and the other a blossoming bohemian) and Don’s urban isolation (a gorgeous wide shot of our hero [?] as a lonely figure dwarfed by the New York skyline, and an almost Lynchian final scene where he begins rethinking the bliss of solitude).  It’s hard to know what next week’s cryptically-titled “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” holds, but for the first time this season I’m not approaching it with dread.

Dennis

Behold, Ken Cosgrove is back! OK, so Ken Cosgrove was never my favorite character (really Matt Weiner, between him and Sal, this is the guy you thought we urgently needed to see?), but it’s another float from the Parade of Familiar Faces from Yesterseasons nonetheless. And most of the episode was spent with Don, Pete, and Peggy. It was good to see Allison finally flip out on Don, and Don try to type up an apology (see, he’s almost a good person) to her. I bet Alexa Alemanni was bummed that they brought her to the new agency only to turn around and have her leave the company a few episodes later. But hey, at least she got to make sweet sweet drunk not-love to Don Draper!

And speaking of non-love, it was nice to see Pete and Peggy have their little moments in the face of Trudy’s surprise pregnancy. I wonder how their secret kid is doing? Though, their final moment toward the end of the episode, with Pete planning to go to a fancy business lunch and Peggy dashing off with her new beatnik friends was a surprisingly blatant parallel for a show that usually relies so heavily on subtlety and subtext. At least the episode didn’t end with that moment. Instead we got the show’s coolest characters (especially since Bobby “There’s an Egg in My Bed” Draper was again missing from this episode), the old couple that live down the hall from Don. Don’t keep us in suspense. I want to know if she got the peaches!