Mad Men – Man With A Plan
It’s somewhat fitting that an episode built around repetition would borrow so heavily from the thematics of the hour that preceded it, but it doesn’t make it any less of a pain to write this review. Man With A Plan was the kind of episode that showed the screenwriters in the room clearly have one, probably up on a big board somewhere that they would have returned to again and again during the writing of this hour; doing what Ted termed an old fashioned technique, research. To mirror the plots core premise, the overpopulation of the company’s post-merger offices and the repetition and redundancies that come with such, the episode weaved in a number of references to episodes past; scaling from the blunt to the subtle. It’s no coincidence then that this is the episode where Pete’s mother is first shown to have some form of Alzheimer’s; she forgets but the show never does. Matt Weiner is the man with a plan and we best trust in it.
