'Mad Men' Watch: Despair and Fisticuffs "Mad Men" moved into August 1966 on Sunday night, in an episode titled "Signal 30," and continued to reflect the dark currents of the times. Last week it was the Richard Speck murders dominating the conversation; this week it was Charles Whitman's Aug. 1 University of Texas massacre that had people on edge, frightening a high school girl whom the increasingly depressed Pete had developed a crush on and later figuring in an argument about guns in the home. Pete was in favor. As the girl says, "Time feels like it's speeding up." Another historical tidbit also involved violent death: the crash of Braniff Flight 250 in Nebraska on Aug. 6. On a lighter note, England won its first World Cup championship, defeating Germany in the final on July 30 while Lane and other expats jumped up and down in a pub wearing silly hats. Was it possible to watch a soccer match broadcast from London in a Manhattan bar, live or close to live, in 1966? There was another event that week that I thought might appeal to the show's writers, particularly given the gloomy cast of the episode, but I didn't notice any mention of it: ground was broken on the World Trade Center on Aug. 5. Please let me know in the comments if I missed some embarrassingly obvious reference. The violence in the background was echoed on screen, primarily in an outbreak of office fisticuffs in which, to paraphrase Peggy, Lane beat the stuffing out of Pete. But we should back up. The dominant (and somewhat heavy) theme of the night was Pete's increasingly desperate unhappiness with his new suburban bliss in Cos Cob, Conn., mixed with the self-hatred and guilt he feels over his peccadilloes in the city. Watching the traffic-death scare film "Signal 30" in driver's ed class - he never had to own a car in New York - he fantasizes about a high school blonde sitting nearby; by the end of the episode, she's making out with a stud her own age who mistakes Pete for the teacher. The indignities cascade. Pete's attempts at amateur plumbing fail spectacularly during a dinner party held to impress Don; in a quieter moment at the dinner table, he manages to insult Don's wife. After a client meeting turns into a trip to a high-end brothel, where Pete and Roger sample the merchandise while Don waits at the bar, Pete lashes out at what he sees as Don's hypocrisy and earns himself a dressing down: "Roger is miserable. I didn't think you were. (That was followed by a nice exchange between Pete and a cabbie regarding the trip from Manhattan to Cos Cob: "You got to pay both ways." "I'm aware of that.") Finally there was the boardroom boxing match, when Lane blamed Pete, unfairly, for losing the account because of the brothel expedition and Pete replied that the client had no respect for Lane "because he thinks you're a homo." Pete was knocked down and his nose bloodied, but there was worse ahead. Midway through the episode he had told Don, sarcastically, "I have it all." Following his ignominious defeat, he boarded an elevator and in a weak moment - for him, and for the writers - blurted, "I have nothing, Don." If the whole story line seemed a little Cheeveresque, consider that "Signal 30" was the first episode of the series with a writer's credit for Frank Pierson, a "Mad Men" consulting producer who is a child of Westchester County - born in Chappaqua - and whose television writing career stretches back to 1959, on "Have Gun, Will Travel." He also wrote a little New York movie called "Dog Day Afternoon," for which he won an Oscar. The despair of Pete - not to mention the morbid images attached to Don, who was seen drawing a noose during a meeting and expressed a preference for blowing his brains out over going to Pete's house for dinner - was somewhat balanced by the fortitude of Ken Cosgrove, who got his first extended screen time of the season. Ken, whose closet rebellion against ad-man conformity includes living in Jackson Heights, Queens, had been keeping his fiction writing - a source of tension between him and Pete in past seasons - on the down low. But his wife brings it up at the dinner party, after which Ken is summoned to Roger's office and told to focus on his work. Ken agrees and tells Peggy that "Hargrove" - his authorial pseudonym - is dead. But the episode ends with Ken working on a new story, under a new pen name. He writes about Beethoven, and death, and we hear the story in voiceover as we watch Pete stoically enduring driver's ed. "It might have been living in the country that was making him cry," Ken wrote. It was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear. Fade to black, and the sound of a dripping faucet, followed momentarily by the "Ode to Joy" theme from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Freude, schoner gotterfunken? There's not much joy or spark of the gods in Cos Cob. Did the ending work? Is Pete's ad-man angst interesting enough to merit this much screen time? You tell us. Speculation and comment on all other matters is also welcome, such as how you felt about an episode with no Betty or Sally (or Mike Ginsburg).