The Inheritance (S2x10)
Airdate: 5 October 2008
Written by: Lisa Albert, Marti Noxon and Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Andrew Bernstein
Running Time: 48 minutes
Following the momentous, office-upending events of ?Six Month Leave*, the subsequent instalment, The Inheritance, feels deliberately subdued. In typical Mad Men fashion, the episode favours slow, methodical character exposition over grand plot developments, allowing the lingering aftershocks of the previous week to settle into the background. Yet, to dismiss it as mere narrative marking time would be to misunderstand its purpose. “The Inheritance” is an episode profoundly concerned with change, but of a peculiarly intimate and inexorable kind. The changes it charts are the grand, historical processes of ageing, decay, familial obligation, and societal shift that occur just beyond the immediate sightlines of its characters. It is a piece of television that holds a mirror to the slow erosion of certainties, both personal and national, and while it is often beautifully observed, it ultimately suffers from a frustrating lack of thematic focus, burying its most potent insights under a meandering pace and a scattering of undercooked subplots.
The most dramatic event within the episode’s confines is a family crisis that temporarily reunites Don and Betty Draper. When Betty receives word that her father, Gene, has suffered a stroke, Don volunteers to accompany her to her childhood home, the two agreeing to maintain the facade of a functioning marriage for the sake of appearances. This sets the stage for the episode’s most powerful and uncomfortable sequences. Upon arrival, Betty learns that Gene has been suffering minor strokes for some time, resulting in a creeping dementia. His condition is rendered with painful clarity when he mistakes Betty for his late wife, Ruth, and in a moment of profound awkwardness, attempts to grope her. This violation, born of confusion rather than malice, forces Betty into a wrenching confrontation with her father’s deterioration and her own role within the family history. Her conversation with the longtime family maid, Viola (a wonderfully grounded Aloma Wright), who advises her to focus on her husband and children, underscores the traditional scripts that Betty feels both compelled by and trapped within. The enforced proximity with Don—sharing a bedroom, with Don sleeping on the floor—leads to a moment of strained, desperate intimacy. Betty initiates sex, a complex act that seems equal parts comfort, habit, and a fleeting attempt to grasp the ghost of their former union. Yet, upon their return home, she firmly re-establishes the boundary, insisting they remain separate.
While her children are away, Betty’s quiet despair finds a strange echo in the form of Glen Bishop, the unsettling neighbourhood boy who harbours a crush on her. Discovering him hiding in the family’s playhouse after he has run away from home, Betty is presented with a figure of adolescent misery, unhappy with his father, his new stepmother, and feeling ignored by his own mother, Helen. The scene walks a fine line. Betty, in her own emotionally vulnerable state, might be momentarily impressed by this boy’s dramatic, self-deluded gesture. However, the episode wisely has her do the unequivocally correct thing: she calls Helen Bishop to collect him. This leads to a subtle moment of reconciliation between the two women, a small grace note of adult responsibility amidst the surrounding dysfunction. Yet, this subplot, while thematically linked to ideas of neglected children and failed paternal figures, feels somewhat contrived and tonally adrift, an example of the episode’s occasional lack of discipline.
Parallel familial strife afflicts Pete Campbell, whose narrative provides a counterpoint to the Drapers’. Trudy’s inability to conceive and her desire to adopt meets with Pete’s reluctance and his mother’s outright hostility. The formidable Mrs. Campbell threatens disinheritance should they pursue adoption, a bluff Pete and his brother, Bud (Ritch Hutchman), are forced to call when they confront her with the dire financial mess left by their late father. This storyline efficiently explores the Campbells’ toxic dynastic politics, where children are viewed as heirs to a legacy (or debt) rather than individuals. Pete’s attendance at Harry Crane’s baby shower—a scene the episode oddly underutilises—serves as a piece of symbolic irony, highlighting the familial fulfilment that eludes him due to pride and patriarchal pressure.
The professional sphere at Sterling Cooper offers little respite. Don, learning of a major aerospace convention in Pasadena, seizes on it as an opportunity to forge connections with industry figures and, more importantly, the congressmen who could direct lucrative government contracts. He dispatches Pete and Paul Kinsey on this mission. For Paul, the assignment represents a thrilling, all-expenses-paid jet trip to the futuristic promised land of California, and a perfect excuse to avoid accompanying his Black girlfriend, Sheila, on a voting registration drive in Mississippi. This dichotomy is where the episode finds its most coherent thematic thread. Paul embodies the dual, often hypocritical, faces of Kennedy’s “New Frontier”: the glamorous, technologically optimistic space-age future, and the gritty, dangerous struggle for civil rights unfolding in the present. In a last-minute decision, drained by the familial drama and craving escape, Don decides to go to California himself, displacing a bitterly disappointed Paul. This pivot forces Paul off the sidelines and onto the bus to Mississippi, a neat, if slightly schematic, narrative irony that ties his personal cowardice to a larger historical reckoning.
The episode, a writing debut for Marti Noxon (previously famed for her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who co-wrote with Lisa and Matthew Gilbert, is undeniably well-crafted and superbly acted. January Jones and Jon Hamm go through the Draper sequences with a heartbreaking, repressed precision. However, it suffers from a lack of clear, driving focus. Its various elements—Betty’s paternal crisis, Pete’s inheritance drama, Paul’s moral quandary—feel like distinct short stories bundled together, connected more by the vague theme of “legacy” than by any compelling narrative interplay. The attempts at symbolic irony, such as Gene’s dementia-addled distrust of Don (“You don’t have people”), which inadvertently hits upon the truth of Don’s rootless, fraudulent identity, are potent but feel isolated, buried by the slow pace.
The episode is saved from being merely a collection of vignettes by its magnificent final beat. As Don flies to California, leaving his fractured life behind for the sun-drenched promise of the West, the soundtrack swells with The Tornados’ 1962 instrumental “Telstar.” The choice is inspired. With its futuristic, otherworldly electronic melody, the song perfectly captures the optimistic, forward-thrusting spirit of the age—a spirit Don is desperately trying to latch onto. It symbolises the brave new world of satellites and jets, a clean technological future that seems to offer an escape from the messy, decaying inheritances of the past. In this moment, The Inheritance crystallises its central tension: the relentless pull of the future against the dead weight of the past. It’s a brilliant, evocative conclusion that almost, but not quite, compensates for the meandering journey that precedes it.
Ultimately, The Inheritance is a respectable, often thoughtful entry in the Mad Men canon, but it stands as an example of the show’s occasional tendency to prioritise mood and character nuance over narrative momentum and tight thematic cohesion. It deals with profound material—ageing, dementia, infertility, financial ruin, racial awakening—but spreads its attention so thinly that none of these threads achieves the devastating impact of the series’ very best episodes.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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