Mad Men: THE SUITCASE Is Full Of Peggy’s Baggage

One of the best stories I’ve ever watched on screen has been Mad Men. At the peak of prestige television, this show nimbly trod the fine balance between authenticity and morality by viewing the 1960s through a post-millennium gaze. It didn’t hurt that everyone looked good. The set and costumes were as instrumental in moving the story as were its dialogues and scenes. Its detailed plots and nuanced characters are fodder for so much cultural insight, even a decade and a half after its airing.

Mad Men fandoms

The Mad Men subreddit is a uniquely great forum. It’s well moderated and the community is highly engaged. This was one of my posts on that sub. I wanted to explore the thought again in greater detail on my blog in case any of my readers here enjoyed the show too. Drop me a comment if this is you! And if you’ve never seen the show, consider this your spoiler alert.

Mad Men‘s Season 4, Episode 7 – THE SUITCASE is a Mad Men fan favourite for so many reasons. But a recent rewatch made me rethink its focus. Ostensibly it is about a very big event in Don’s life (as is everything on this show). The Don-Anna drama is the main attraction. But the episode’s quieter, more nuanced notes point to Peggy. Specifically, THE SUITCASE is full of Peggy’s baggage. Is that a bit too on the nose? This story is set in advertising, after all.

‘The Suitcase’ is Peggy’s baggage
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The Suitcase

We see Peggy through the course of a single day, mostly in the second half. She’s simmering with professional resentment. She’s struggling with birthday woes. And as with all such dates, family, love interest and patriarchy collude to make her feel like shit. Peggy sees three men naked that night. And in that seeing, she faces the messy loose ends stuffed down her psyche. No wonder the next morning opens in a very different world. Different Don yes, but also different Peggy and a very different relationship between the two of them. And this is the defining duo of the Mad Men universe.

Mark, the messy makeup case

First, there’s Peggy’s boyfriend Mark. If you ever wondered what she saw in him, this is the episode where she wonders along with you. Mark throws Peggy a surprise birthday dinner. The surprise? Her stuffy Catholic family whom Mark has never met are also at what Peggy thinks will be a romantic dinner. We cringe on her behalf and nearly sigh in relief when she doesn’t make it.

All things have to come to a head and they do with the Olsen family and their nonconformist daughter. Peggy also realises that Mark doesn’t know her at all. She has seen his true nature and his desires and they are not a match at all. Peggy’s trajectory is of a woman among the Mad Men and that means letting go of the original Ms.Olsen’s choices.

Duck, the dank diaper bag

If that pressure valve wasn’t enough release, a little later in the night, along comes Duck like the bad penny he’s always been. Drunk and foul-mouthed is a bad way to encounter an ex but imagine that late in the night in your workplace! It wouldn’t be Mad Men without a lot of messy sex and drunken shenanigans in the workplace.

Duck tries to woo her back, then he tries to shit in the wrong office. He calls her a whore, and faces off with a similarly drunk Don in a fistfight. Do the men even know why they’re fighting? Along the way, he announces that he has killed 17 men in Okinawa before disintegrating into the messiest of hot stinking messes. You may as well get it all out while it’s coming up, Peggy.

Don, the deep duffel

And finally, our master cad, the man of supreme mystery, Don Draper. Which of his numerous lovers or multitudinous admiring colleagues ever actually gets to see the real man behind that mask? Peggy does and even then only the briefest of glances. This episode shows him in his most vulnerable moment with her.

It surpasses the time when she bailed him and Bobbie out of jail. This night evens the ground between Don and Peggy. It is the closing parentheses to their quiet relationship that began when he showed up at her hospital. That has a birth and this has a death. Neither is shown. It’s the kind of symmetry you’d expect in Peggy’s work and also as a reflection of Don. A satisfying milestone in one of Mad Men‘s most important narrative arcs.

Peggy’s clean-up

There is a lot of self-examination that Peggy is doing in THE SUITCASE. She voices each musing in dialogue but as if to herself.

“He does not know me and that’s not my fault.”,

“It was a confusing time for me. I don’t know why I was with him.”

“I had the idea but you won the Clio”,

Thus, several of her confusions, inner conflicts, and buried resentments surface. Along with them, her deepest convictions and loyalties are revealed. Towards Don yes, but also towards a different life than what she has been told she should want.

There’s even a nice little side-by-side with Trudy who is who she was supposed to have been – married to Pete, pregnant, chirpy wifely bliss. They literally walk out together and Pete’s heart stops but you don’t know which one of the women causes it. And that sentiment seems to be part of Peggy’s cherished treasures in her mind. The baggage she chooses to carry.

Relationship, Desire and Work – the holy trifecta that makes up life, Peggy meets them all in an episode called THE SUITCASE.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~

If you’re a Mad Men fan, drop a comment! And do check out my other Mad Men posts here.