11.09.09 ‘SHUT THE DOOR. HAVE A SEAT’
“All those in favor of motorboating Joan?”
People who don’t watch or aren’t up to speed on “Mad Men”: kindly excuse yourselves. The grown-ups have an immensely satisfying season finale of a badass TV show to talk about it. I don’t want to go into any spoilers (we’ll save that for the comments), but let’s have a very quick run-down of Season 3, Episode 11 (”Shut the Door. Have a seat”) in a quick installment of Just the Badass Parts:
- Drinking whiskey from a jug
- Deadly horse-kick to the face with lingering close-up of the bloody hoofprinted face
- Americans and British turncoat sticking it to stuffy British suits
- The return of Christina Hendricks’s Joan
- Jon Hamm’s Don Draper kicking a door down
Any more than that and people who haven’t seen it yet will complain, but I’d like to offer up a round of e-high-fives to everyone else who watched and let out excited whoops like I did. Not that it didn’t come without some downers as well (I guess the kids are spending Christmas with the nanny?), but the whole episode was a tremendous conclusion that wrapped up Season 3’s emotional train wreck while sending the characters — and series — in a brave new direction. Cheers, Matthew Weiner. This is me raising a 3 o’clock whiskey to you. It’s gonna be a long nine months ’til your show is back.
More “Mad Men” links: excellent recaps from the AV Club and the SF Chronicle’s Tim Goodman; everything Don Draper said in Season 3; and this video from NY Mag of Roger Sterling’s quips from this season (so good to see him and Don patch things up).

To post all of the bad-ass parts of last night’s episode would require putting up a .pdf of the entire script; it was that good.
I also enjoyed the garden variety domestic abuse that Don periodically levels on Betty when she’s being a brat. We haven’t had a good dose of that since he threatened to “put her through that window” and then shoved her (it was self-defense).
Equally bad-ass, the brief cameo from the Chip N’ Dip.