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The Secret History of the Mad Men Lawn-Mower Scene
It was cruel, it was shocking, and it ended with fan interpretations not even the filmmakers could have anticipated.
As much as the lawn-mower scene will live on out of context as an endlessly looped video of four happy employees being doused with innards, it’s worth remembering how it propelled forward the show’s longstanding concern with how the sudden eruption of world-altering bad news could linger. Seated beside Joan in the hospital waiting room is one of her colleagues, womanizing alcoholic genius adman Don Draper ( Jon Hamm), who had missed the accident because he was having a private meeting with hotel magnate Conrad Hilton (Chelcie Ross). By this point, Weiner says he and his writers had talked often about “how, frankly, all of this alcohol in the office was a problem.” Now they felt like the could tell a longform story in which “this balloon got inflated” in the first five episodes of the season and “would be popped” in “Guy Walks,” with Sterling Cooper’s insobriety culminating in a blood-soaked climax — “and the audience would sort of be left there.”
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