“At the Codfish Ball” is a lot about Sally growing up – it borrows its title from a famous Shirley Temple routine, after all. Glen’s return hammers this home as well. It’s his first appearance since “Tomorrowland,” an episode that fittingly seems another year older with each week of season five. He appears to be adjusting pretty well to adolescence; he had a girlfriend (if you can believe it) and has friends (if you can believe it), some close enough that he can joke about balling their sisters. Sally though, for all her efforts, seems a little less comfortable. She’s too old to eat anything else, but still too young to stomach the codfish. Seeing Roger Sterling get a blowjob is not for everyone. Nor is Manhattan at times.
The core of this episode at SCDP was Megan’s quick thinking to save the Heinz account. Her idea isn’t as objectively good as Peggy’s, but it fits the client’s image perfectly – cavemen, the Romans, the housewives and the Jetsons all eat Heinz. “Heinz beans: Some things never change.” And the idea isn’t what saved the account anyway, but rather, a cool head and a little conversation. Megan understands (if not exactly accepts) that Don has to take credit for the pitch, but thanks to a few smooth moves at the dinner table, she can claim a much more decisive victory afterward.
Peggy enthusiastically congratulates her and suggests she enjoy the high while it lasts; that this is as good as it gets for someone in Megan’s position in the advertising world. She reacts strangely and distastefully, and can barely offer a response. At first, I thought this was a little bit of forced awkwardness, and I didn’t buy it. Peggy was nothing but genuinely kind to her, and Megan knows well to navigate the business world as a woman (as she did without complaint to save Heinz). What put her off, it is later implied, is that this small victory really might be “as good as it gets.” For a once-aspiring actress who has reminded viewers that “This is only the beginning” at least twice this season, that thought has to be devastating.
Peggy, though, has a lot more on her mind this week. Abe forces a dinner date, and she worries he’s going to break up with her. Joan convinces her it’s a proposal dinner, and neither was exactly right. Abe asks her to move in with her. The scene isn’t wrought with tense conversation, and it moves straightforwardly, but Elisabeth Moss was just excellent. Her smile drops comically slowly. The new outfit Joan told her to find (especially in contrast to what she wore to work the next day) stood out perfectly. Charlie Hofheimer as Abe, who isn’t often given the chance to do much, puts in some really good work as well. Peggy’s mother doesn’t take the news well at all, though. But what on earth did Peggy expect? Peggy has convinced herself that living together and marriage are pretty much one in the same, in an effort to quash her own feelings about it. She still wants to be married, and that might come some day anyway. The mistake she made was projecting the notion that living together and marriage are the same onto her mother, naively expecting her to feel the same. “He will use you for practice,” she says.
Later, before the Cancer Society honors Don for “renouncing” cigarettes and publicly shaming Lucky Strike, Sally goes shopping with Megan’s family. She asks Don to attend the event, excited to be a part of her father’s life and the adult lifestyle that surrounds it. But before they leave the apartment that night, she has to make her grand entrance. Sally’s outfit is equal parts risqué for a 12-year-old and generally ridiculous. She looks like she was sent back in time from the space-age future, Heinz beans and all. Of course, Don tells her to lose the makeup and the go-go boots, and off they go.
The real coup of “Codfish Ball” surrounds the climactic ball itself. Sally learns a little more about how women function in their world. But her eagerness bites her, and as she explores, she walks in on Megan’s mom blowing Roger, her “date.” Megan and her father, meanwhile, argue over the life she leads. To her father, she has settled; not necessarily for Don, but for the ease that accompanies being his wife and working with him at the agency. What I really liked about this was that, at the very same moment he dissects the poor choices Megan has made in her life and rips her to pieces for it, his wife was blowing Roger Sterling. Judge not, lest ye be judged, the editing reinforces. Even Don has a rough night when an executive tells him nobody wants his business since the Lucky Strike editorial. And then, one by one, the sadsacks find their seats at the table again.
It’s almost a joke on Mad Men that every character ends every episode upset or saddened in some way, shape or form. But it’s not forced, and it’s not hackery. Where a show like Seinfeld made a name for itself interweaving plots and bringing its characters together over them at the end, Mad Men likes to keep them separate, yet bring its characters together in the end anyway. There they sit, right next to each other, wallowing in their own separate – at the same table, yet worlds apart.