uncomfortable conversations with a black man episode 4

#UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS WITH A BLACK MAN EPISODE 4 HOW TO#

Truthfully, it's how I would have reacted in an office setting when tragedy strikes across the nation, but if X project doesn't get done by Y p.m., I'm going to have an unhappy client on my hands. So the personal humiliation of singing a French song at your husband's birthday party is cause to storm out of the office, but a bunch of women dying in the worst way one can imagine is kind of just fine? Actually, that makes sense. Like everyone in that office, I was waiting to see what Megan's reaction would be. Speck had so many victims at once, he lost track (a fact that will later be lauded as a sign of virility by Pauline Francis), and this one girl managed to squirm under a bed, praying to be forgotten as her friend and roommate was raped and killed on the mattress above her.

And the sodomy cherry on top: the one out of nine that survived. As Megan ogles the photos Joyce brought in, Joyce couldn't be happier, telling her and us about the gory details - the knock at the door, the student nurses bound and locked in a room.

And the headlines are this: Richard Speck (who would go on to attempt suicide, fail, and intentionally grow man-boobs in order to make himself more desirable in prison) has just committed one of the more gruesomely misogynistic mass murders in the country's history.

#UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS WITH A BLACK MAN EPISODE 4 HOW TO#

The show gets this in under the wire before we know why it may not be so funny, and all the men are put on Awkwardness Alert in figuring out how to react to the headlines. Meanwhile, Stan is in the office wearing pantyhose around his head like a bank robber - a brilliantly handled bit with some physical comedy, in which Stan proves one can smoke a cigarette with pantyhose over one's head. Andrea stands within kissing distance of Don and calls him her 'bad penny.' He just keeps turning up! Don, despite being on his way to a delusional state, is still quick enough to back away and introduce Megan, whose French Canadian-ness this time around has, thank God, been whittled down to a word: 'Incroyable,' she says, after Andrea gets off at her floor. One of Don's old flames (he's a one-man menorah, this one), a freelance writer named Andrea, shows up in the elevator for a quick second, long enough to naturally mistake Megan and Don's body language for two strangers on a train. When the episode opens, Don is having a coughing fit in the elevator, and so Megan moves away with a smile, telling Don he sounds terrible. It reminded me of the end of season four, with everyone falling into his or her respective roles, and Don getting the dutiful-but-delightful companion he never had and his mother never was. On Sunday night, Don and Megan's relationship was significantly more normal this time around, even bland. So, who is this show really about? Who is the 'Mystery Date' we're promised in the title? With so many rich characters, this is bound to happen, but still I found it surprising. Anyway, this is the second episode in a row that isn't really about our leading man - or, rather, it is, but Don's inner turmoil ends up being a hell of a lot less rewarding than the actions Joan takes by the end of the show. Sound gross? It is, though not as gross as the Time magazine photo negatives Peggy's friend Joyce brings into the office ('not suitable for publication'). He is but the Kleenex upon which all the other plot mucus rests. Ah, but Don's psychical ailment is but a frame for the show, used to diagnose a much deeper ailment: American perversion. After all, Don is very ill with the flu and running a fever when the show opens (new character Michael Ginsberg, ever one of the light touch and 'regional accent,' offhandedly suggests he's contracted tuberculosis). I thought it might even be called 'Sick' (tabloid-tribute exclamation point optional). Sometimes the titles are overarching and thematic, as I thought might be the case when I checked just after watching this fourth episode of Mad Men's fifth season. If I Love Lucy's 'Lucy's Italian Movie' came out now, it might be called 'The One with the Grapes.' Certainly with better shows, better television, we've started to tune into the title as we would with a short story or a painting, looking for clues. To my mind, it was Friends, a show that put a patent on the phrase 'The one with.' But that could be generational bias. I don't know when we started paying such close attention to the episode titles of television shows. For all things Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, Silmarillion, and more.

Uncomfortable conversations with a black man episode 4