Episode 1: Who Looks the Most Ridiculous at Don's Surprise Birthday Party?

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And, we're back. Did you wake up this morning humming "Zou Bisou Bisou"? Are you pissed that Betty Francis was totally missing in action? Were visions of Trudy's questionable party dress haunting your dreams last night?

The first episode of Mad Men Season 5 opens up with some ad guys we don't know from some ad company we don't care about, throwing water bombs on civil rights protestors outside. Worry not: Within two minutes, we see Don shirtless. But right before that, we see Sally Draper, slumbering in a retro yellow comforter set. She knocks on Don and Megan's door in their apparent mansion-apartment, and when he opens it we see Megan's butt crack. Welcome to Season Five!

After a day presumably spent at the Statue of Liberty, Don drops Sally, Gene, and New Bobby (he's been replaced by another actor—again) off at Betty's. What the hell kind of castle are Betty and Henry living in? Have we relocated from the 'burbs to Transylvania? That thing is straight out of The Addams Family. As the kids hop out of the car, Don tells them: "Give Morticia and Lurch my love."

Next up: Pete, who apparently lives in Connecticut now. It seems like there might be trouble in suburban paradise, because he's walking around with either dandruff or spit up on his shoulder, or both, and he starts shit talking Trudy to someone else on the train. "There was a time when she wouldn't leave the house in a robe," he says. This is coming from the man covered in spit up.

Speaking of babies, we see our second butt of the episode when Joan's son is introduced. As a reminder, this is Joan's son with Roger, not Greg, but nobody knows that just yet. It's unclear whether motherhood annoys Joan, or whether her own mother is just annoying the hell out of her, because she seems discontent. The scene ends with her taking a nap.

And now, back to the office. In true Sterling Cooper Draper Price fashion, everyone is late to the status meeting. Except for Bert Cooper. For reasons unknown, all of the secretaries now sit about 30 feet away from the person they work for. When Don and Megan arrive—yes, they arrive together—they go into his office. Megan is sporting a less-prissy hairdo and a polka dot blouse, which Don orders her to open. She does, and we've now officially seen every cleavage and crack that Megan owns.

In case it slipped your mind, Megan is a copywriter now—arguably one of the best perks of marrying the boss. Peggy kind of visibly hates working with her, but that doesn't stop Megan from inviting her to a surprise birthday party she's throwing for Don. Megan says the party's gonna be a real rager, or in her words, "Everyone's gonna go home from this and they're gonna have sex." Well, it's 1966, so a key party's probably not out of the question, if that's what she means.

Peggy, Ken, and Stan head into the Heinz meeting, where Peggy pitches an idea revolving around a "bean ballet." Most of the Heinz people look tremendously confused. Stan hums a waltz tune the entire time as Peggy describes the delicate movement of these beans. Her smugness has increased a millionfold, but it's probably a defense mechanism to deal with Megan. Confronting the question we're all begging to know, one of the Heinz guys asks, "How do they get the beans to do that? They can't just get lucky." Peggy goes into the technical photography skills required to make beans look like graceful ballerines, and the Heinz guy asks: "You ever see beans up close? They're slimy." Even Don can't save this one.

Elsewhere in the office, Pete trips over absolutely nothing and gets a bloody nose. He's pissed because while Roger was stealing a glance at his secretary's cleavage, he also stole a glance at Pete's calendar. Roger uses that intel to crash Pete's Mohawk Airlines meeting. (They're courting them again, because American Airlines is still not happening—yet.) He's still bummed about this when he gets home, and Trudy calls him out for being so late. She reminds him that he has "an acre of land, a wife, and a child."

And now, we're at DON'S BIRTHDAY PARTY. Spoiler alert: It's not a key party. That whole thing about "people going home and having sex" was about the French song and dance that Megan does for Don. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Before the party even starts, Roger and Jane totally blow the surprise by bickering outside of the Draper's door. It's worth noting that in Season 5, Roger appears to hate Jane. Inside, we see that Abe is still around, and that Harry has gotten noticeably svelte. He presents Don with a walking stick, to which Roger adds: "Oh look, he got you a cane."

Peggy is wearing a cute yellow dress, although it would have been in her favor to spend less time on getting dressed and more time learning some better dance moves. She makes a passive-aggressive comment to Don about having to work on the Heinz campaign over the weekend, which Megan later bites her in the ass for. Pete is wearing a plaid blazer, presumably to camouflage the spit up. And hell's bells Trudy, what are you wearing?

Cut to Megan's song and dance. She announces to the entire party that she's going to give Don a present, which is her rendition of "Zou Bisou Bisou" in what looks like a blouse that she's passing off as a dress. Matthew Weiner is doing a good job at programming us to dislike her. Harry looks simultaneously repulsed and aroused, but that's all undermined by the fact that he's wearing Megan's friend's fuzzy boa. During her dance, Megan comes uncomfortably close to grabbing her own vagina.

Turns out, even with all that leg-throwing and vagina-grabbing, Don was not pleased with the surprise party. Get out? Dick Whitman, we mean, Don Draper, doesn't like surprises? Don tells her she shouldn't have wasted money on "things like that." She says it was her money, and he says that she shouldn't have used it to embarrass him. She sulks on the balcony for a while, and the two walk into the office on Monday barely speaking.

Pete calls a meeting of the partners, which is really just a meeting where he forces everyone to squeeze on his couch. The point of the meeting is to ask Roger for his office, since Pete's is, according to Harry, a "shithole with a support beam." (The same beam Pete recently fell into and caused the bloody nose.) Pete suggests they put it to a vote, and Roger suggests they take it outside. Neither happens, and ultimately, Roger bribes Harry with $1,100 to do an office tradesies with Pete. Another thing Harry does: Goes on and on about how he wants to have sex with Megan while she's standing right behind him. He spends the rest of the episode feverishly avoiding her at all costs.

Joan thinks her job is at risk, since there was an ambiguous ad in the Times for SCDP. She heads into the office, wearing a hot pink dress she definitely chose for the occasion and totes her baby around in a massive stroller. Everybody holds it except for Peggy, who is eventually forced to. Megan tries to beeline it when she spots Joan, but ends up having to talk to her, since the alternative was talking to Harry (who is still avoiding her). Did anyone else know that Megan hates Joan? This, apparently, is a pretty big subplot this season. Roger walks up to the group and goes, "So there's my baby," which everyone takes "baby" to mean "Joan" but it's actually quite literal. That is, after all, his baby.

Joan heads into Lane's office to see if she still has a job, and Lane tells her that "the books have practically been held together with spit" in her absence. She starts crying on the couch, and they become dangerously close to doing what every other man and woman do in an office while left alone on this show. To cheer her up, Lane reenacts Megan's dance almost better than Megan did it. (You can watch that here.) He explains to Joan that he while she was dancing, he saw Don's soul "leave his body."

Earlier in the episode, Lane finds a wallet left behind in a cab, and insists to the driver that he keep it and see to its return. This leads to a sexy phone conversation with the owner's "girl," which for once in this entire series does not mean secretary. It means mistress. The owner picks up the wallet from SCDP, slips Lane a twenty or something for his troubles, and then leaves. However, Lane has stolen the photo of the "girl," a woman named Delores. After it's all over with, we have no idea why any of this even happened.

In the room where all the creatives hang out, Megan scolds Peggy for the passive-aggressive remark she made to Don at the party about having to work over the weekend on her botched Heinz pitch. Megan is also annoyed that no one smiles at Sterling Cooper Draper Price. Really, she's mad that Don didn't want a surprise party. Nobody else is shedding tears for her because, well, she's married to Don. She leaves work early, and when Don hears of her departure, he takes off too.

Naturally, this leads to the first ridiculous sex scene of the season. Megan is cleaning up the apartment, clothed, when Don arrives, but then she immediately rips off her robe and proceeds to tidy up in her bra and underwear. She yells that he isn't allowed to look at her, though she's bending over with her butt in the air. She says she doesn't want an old person. This, we guess, is all it takes to rev Don's engine, and then they do it. Afterwards, she suggests that maybe it's a bad idea that they work together. Don says that he doesn't care about work, and that he wants her at work because he wants her, which she doesn't see as the insult that it sort of is. However, the next day they show up at work together like normal.

When they arrive, there are a bunch of "negroes"—as Roger puts it—in the lobby. They're there in response to the ad that billed SCDP as "an equal opportunity employer," which was meant as a joke about the Y&R water bombing incident. Lane informs them that they're only looking for secretaries, so half of the group leaves. And—that's it. The episode ends, and we saw no Betty Francis, though the previews for next week included a glimpse of Henry scolding her, so, there's that to look forward to.

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