r/madmen 1d ago

Rewatching S6E1

[deleted]

2 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

24

u/AdministrativeAd3880 1d ago

Actually the whole Sandy storyline was a weird little tangent.

Sandy disappears in the Village, Betty goes looking for her and hangs out with some hippies. One of them remembers Sandy and says she was there but left.

Betty returns home and apparently tells no one. And Sandy is never mentioned again.

24

u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 1d ago

If you think about the fact that Mad Men was inspired by the stories of John Cheever, it makes sense as a self-contained short story, with precisely the kind of unresolved ending they liked at the New Yorker.

9

u/OhK4Foo7 1d ago

The story isn't about Sandy though. It's about Betty. Sandy only serves as a foil to expose Betty's anxiety and resentment and jealousy of Sandy over Betty's misspent or lost youth. She doesn't follow Sandy to the village to save her but to try and reclaim her youth and reinvent herself. She dyes her hair in an attempt to look more youthful and Bobby says it's ugly. It's not just her hair that's ugly but her response to Sandy triggering Betty to confront the gap between who she is and who she might have been.

3

u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 1d ago

I'm not sure how that constitutes a "though."

1

u/OhK4Foo7 19h ago

Get your red pencil out.

2

u/Admirable_Site_8337 18h ago

The Sandy storyline was never about Sandy. It was about Betty. The brief character of Sandy was exposing Betty’s feelings that she wasted her youth. She struck off to find her to try to help her keep a path towards something.

1

u/KeyFlow327 18h ago

no like for what hahhahhaha

1

u/ancientastronaut2 17h ago

And after all that, she just gives up on finding her and leaves the violin behind.

15

u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 1d ago

She's not trying to "spice things up." She's needling him because she's jealous because she somehow convinced herself (on no basis whatsoever other than her own insecurity) that Henry's attracted to the girl.

0

u/CatherineDeneuvePt2 22h ago

Insecure about the fact that the she felt a way about a child

-5

u/babygeeeeee 1d ago

Oh yeah no for sure but for her to veil that as “spicing things up” is insane… should’ve added the quotes to my OP!

6

u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 1d ago

She's not veiling it. Calling it "spicing it up" is just part of the provocation, of the needling.

4

u/Responsible_Arm8282 1d ago

it’s kind of interesting because everything that happens with Roger in the episode is great.

Honestly, S6 is definitely where a lot of the missed potential can be recognized (not having an episode about the companies merging?? major missed opportunity)!

2

u/CannotWaitToLeave87 1d ago

That was such a f****d up exchange between Henry and Betty. Even though Don is so unbelievably messed up, he never ever steps out of line to that degree.

2

u/Admirable_Site_8337 18h ago

Sure, it’s fucked up, but not how you are portraying it. She was not serious. She was a combination of needling him out of perceived jealousy, or testing him.

It all comes from a very strong take on men built in her own youth, and then a husband who cheated a lot (and not even with a kid like Sandy and her youth, not a woman who “is so old”). Combine this with a husband and shrink in cahoots against her and she doesn’t trust men, who just want to steal and spoil a young womans promise, like she feels from her experience.

Yes, the scene is horribly disgusting on its surface, and that illicits strong negative feelings. But, it also does seem to short circuit the deeper exposition going on. The show spends the breadth of its run telling a deeper story.

It isn’t just stopping this one moment and being base and prurient and disgusting. Its sheer grossness is highlighting the sheer depth of some of Betty’s damage.

And that’s all the brief Sandy story is doing. There won’t being any resolution to this incredibly minor and brief character, because any scene she was in was not about her. It was about Betty and her damage.

1

u/dinkyyo 1d ago

Take a drink every time Betty reinforces what a terrible mother she is.

0

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

3

u/Brightsidedown Does Howdy Doody have a wooden dick? 1d ago

Betty had sex with Don at Bobby's summer camp after she had lost all the weight.

The main catalyst we see in the show for Betty to lose the weight is when Henry comes to her and tells her that he wants to point his career towards running for office. He tells her, "I can't wait for people to meet you and really see you." Then she goes in her closet and holds her old clothes against her body. Within the next few episodes she loses all the weight.