Southland has been renewed!

I really didn't think it was going to happen.

YAY.

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!

Yay! Now as long as wishes are coming true, could they maybe have Cooper and Sherman say at least a couple of words to each other in a scene at some point?

I just realized that the train guy's wife is Rory!

It is! Nice to see her.

Mad Men! Let's parse!

1. Rory Gilmore!

2. The title of the episode: "Lady Lazarus." Sylvia Plath's posthumous collection of poetry, Ariel was published in the U.S. in 1966 ('65 in the UK). This is one of the most famous poems, and one of the most powerful. This is the second Weiner-scripted episode that takes its title from an important poem (the other being the Frank O'Hara "Meditations in an Emergency").

It ends famously, ominously with: Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware/ Beware. / Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.

But despite that Phoenix O'Vengeance imagery, it is also about dying again and being revived in a cycle and despite every resurrection being still trapped, still valued not for who she is but what she can be rendered into (soap, gold).

So pertinent to all the women on the show, really. Also, the publication of Ariel is a signal event in the burgeoning Feminist movement. Giving a rageful voice to growing discontent.

3. The Holocaust. The imagery in "Lady Lazarus" of death camps. Ginsberg's backstory. Bernard Malamud's "The Fixer" is not about the Holocaust but is deeply concerned with Jewish identity and outsider status.

4. We've noted before that Pete is weirdly/ineptly recreating himself in Don's image. And now he's having an affair with a woman named Beth (Betty!), who is trapped in the suburbs, neurotic and unstable, styles her hair in a flip and wears a shirtwaist dress. Oh, Pete, you magnificent weasel.

5. Cool Whip. It's fake. It's not the thing that it seems to be. It's a poor simulation of the real thing. You eat it in a kitchen that's really a laboratory and fake enjoying it with the woman who is not your wife. It gives you no sustenance. It's ersatz and empty.

6. The Beatles! Funny meta joke at the beginning noting how it's impossible to get Beatles songs, then ending with a real one. "Tomorrow Never Knows" - their first dark journey into psychedelia. Unsettling and dissonant. Not the perky Beatles the clients want. "Surrender to the void." "Feel like dying." The whole Revolver album works as a backdrop for this episode. "For No One" - a woman leaving a marriage. "Norwegian Wood" - an affair. Don can't even bear to listen to the whole song. He's not ready for what the world is becoming. He doesn't belong.

7. Don and Megan. Dang, he's trying. He's trying not to make the same mistakes he made with Betty. Taking some responsibility for what happened to her. How many successful marriages do you think there were between successful actresses and Manhattan executives in the sixties? I'm going to guess: zero. These are incompatible worlds. Either she fails and becomes what Joan pegged her as: dilettante second wife. Or she succeeds and is gone, gone, gone all the time. Don really was never happier than when he and Megan rescued the Heinz account. That gave him an image of something he really loved. And he's lost it now.

8. Don and Peggy. That fight they had after the failed pitch was more like a husband and wife fight than a work fight. The fight that Don didn't have with Megan.

9. Pete and suicide. They keep pointing to it and referring to it in episode after episode. Don's line about rather blowing his brains out than live in the suburbs. References to Pete's rifle that he still has. The suicide clause of the life insurance policy.

[link]

the use of “Tomorrow Never Knows” on “Mad Men” is likely one of the only times that a Beatles track has been used in a TV show, music and advertising executives say.

Huh. I just realized where I think this season is going with all the suicide motif.

Just a guess but: I think Beth Dawes (Alexis Bledel) will commit suicide.

Hec, I don't think you need to whitefont guesses, unless you're spoiled. There's been a lot about murder too and the suburbs. She could go after Pete's wife.