The Suitcase

The episode focuses almost entirely on the characters of Don Draper and Peggy Olson. A deadline is looming over a campaign for the suitcase manufacturer Samsonite, and Don rejects all of the creative department's ideas. Most of the staff plans to watch the May 25, 1965,[3] Ali vs. Liston fight that night, except for Peggy who has plans for a romantic birthday dinner with her boyfriend Mark. Duck Phillips calls her to gift her the creative director job at the ad agency he intends to start. She acts flattered, but turns him down. Meanwhile, Don receives a message from Stephanie, Anna Draper's niece, that he should call her back immediately. He puts off calling and decides to forgo the boxing match to continue working on the Samsonite campaign.

Don stops Peggy from leaving to go over her new ideas for the campaign. He criticizes all of them and wants to keep working, forcing her to call Mark to tell him she will be late. When she finally tries to cancel their dinner, Mark reveals he has invited Peggy's family and roommate along as a surprise. Don allows Peggy to leave, but refuses to feel guilty for making her work on her birthday.

Peggy decides to stay and calls Mark to cancel again. Peggy's mother berates her over the phone for treating Mark like this, and Mark, equally annoyed, breaks up with Peggy with her family listening. Peggy returns to Don's office where they end up in an argument over the lack of credit Don gave Peggy for her idea on the award-winning Glo-Coat campaign and his lack of appreciation for her work in general. The conversation causes Peggy to storm off to cry in the ladies' room. Later, Don calls her back into his office to listen to a tape he has found for Roger Sterling's memoirs where Roger discusses his, Burt Cooper's, Ida Blankenship's pasts. The two laugh over the embarrassing revelations about their co-workers and go out for a meal.

Over dinner, and later drinks, the two intimately discuss their lives. They learn that they both saw their fathers die in front of them when they were young, and Don admits he never knew his mother. Peggy tells Don that people in the office believe she slept with him to get her job. She also divulges that her mother believes he fathered her baby owing to Don's visiting Peggy in the hospital shortly after the child was born. Don asks if she knows who the father was. Peggy replies, "Of course" but does not reveal that it was Pete Campbell or what happened to the baby. They listen to Cassius Clay's quick victory in the boxing match.

When they return to the office, Duck Phillips shows up after trying to call Peggy to discuss his new business. He is drunk, and as Peggy leads Duck out, Don sees them. Duck tells a shocked Don he and Peggy were in love, but ultimately she is "just another whore". Don drunkenly swings at Duck, who overpowers him. Peggy gets rid of Duck, and admits to Don that she and Duck had an affair. He tells Peggy she doesn't owe him an explanation and asks for another drink.

Don intends to finally call Stephanie back, but instead falls asleep in Peggy's lap. He awakes in the middle of the night with Peggy asleep beside him, and sees a vision of Anna smiling with a suitcase. The next morning, he calls Stephanie and receives the news he was expecting: that Anna passed away. He breaks down sobbing in front of Peggy, referring to Anna as the only person who really knew him. Peggy responds that "that's not true."

Peggy curls up in her office to go back asleep and is woken up by the rest of the staff in the morning. She goes to Don's office to find that he has developed an idea for the suitcase campaign based on the Ali vs. Liston knock-out photo. Peggy is skeptical about his idea, but then reassures him that it is good. Don takes her hand in his for a moment, and the two exchange looks before she leaves. The episode ends with Simon and Garfunkel's "Bleecker Street" playing as the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office begins its day.

The Ali vs. Liston bout was a rematch of a February 1964 fight (at which point Muhammad Ali was still called Cassius Clay). The 1965 fight is noted for Ali's so-called "phantom punch", that knocked out Sonny Liston, as well as for a photo of Ali standing over a fallen Liston, one of the most famous photos in sports history. There were speculations at the time that Liston took a fall on orders from the Mafia.[3] Another sports reference in the episode is found in Peggy's original pitch for the Samsonite ad, featuring football player Joe Namath. Namath, a burgeoning player at the time, would later become a highly sought-after product endorser.[5]

The episode solved a mystery from a previous episode: Roger Sterling's reference to a Dr. Lyle Evans. The name caused much speculation among reviewers, and a spike in Google Searches for the name.[6] Rather than a real-life person, Dr. Evans turned out to be a doctor who once performed an unnecessary orchiectomy on Bert Cooper.[5]

The episode ends with the song "Bleecker Street" from Simon & Garfunkel's 1964 album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M..[7]

Jon Hamm (left) and Elisabeth Moss (right) both received critical acclaim for their performances

On its original American broadcast on September 5, 2010, on AMC, the episode was viewed by 2.17 million people.[8]

The episode received universal praise from television critics and is considered by many to be the series' greatest episode. The A.V. Club critic Emily VanDerWerff called it "one of the best episodes the show has ever done", writing that a scene toward the end between Peggy and a tearful Don was "enormously moving".[9] Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly called the episode "a knock-out", and commented on the "remarkable intimacy" of the scenes between Don and Peggy.[10] The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik, after some initial deliberation, concluded that it was "a great episode". He pointed out how it made him care about the fates of both Peggy and Don in a way he had not for a long time.[11]

Jennifer Smith at CNN found some of the scenes in the episode among "the most powerful of the entire series". She implied that the performances of both Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss were Emmy Award material.[12] William Bradley, reviewing the episode for The Huffington Post, also mentioned the Emmy Awards. He called Hamm's performance "fantastic", believing it was "time for him to win the Emmy as best actor". Moss he found "even more of a revelation...as a young woman coming of age".[3] Entertainment Weekly's Karen Valby called it her "favorite Mad Men episode of all time", highlighting the performances of the two main actors.[13]

Actors Moss and Aaron Staton chose "The Suitcase" as their favorite episode of Mad Men so far. Moss said of the episode, "It's the greatest material I've ever had the privilege of acting." Hamm said, "I've never ever worked on something and felt the way I felt after we shot the episode in Season 4 called 'The Suitcase'. That one ... I can't even put it into words."[14]

For its 65th anniversary, TV Guide picked it as the seventh-best episode of the 21st century.[15] The Writers Guild Foundation listed the screenplay as one of the best in 2010s film and television, and the episode was described as "a great example of two unlikely characters opening up with each other and finding a weird, unexpected solace. Where Don carelessly goes to bed with, dates or marries the next pretty girl, here with Peggy, he shares something slightly more special and transformative: his feelings."[16]

• "The Suitcase" at AMC
• "The Suitcase" at IMDb