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"Mad Men usually returns to us with a sharply shifted tone&amp;#8212;remember the mod, color-block offices of the season-four premiere after season three&amp;#39;s long winter of dimness? But for all its tan Pete Campbells and slouchy Peggy hats, the season-seven starter couldn&amp;#39;t shake season six&amp;#39;s sinister vibes. (Say that seven times fast&amp;#8212;if you get it right, you get to attend Roger&amp;#39;s hippie orgy.)\nPinterestFacebookLast season&amp;#39;s action hit such dark notes, I eventually felt like we had to put a death watch on several characters. And exactly one episode into a new chapter, I feel a renewed certainty that someone&amp;#39;s about to get it. The obvious candidate is Megan&amp;#8212;not just because of her new, isolated bungalow in the Hollywood hills, but also because she&amp;#39;s being styled and shot like someone who&amp;#39;s about to be violently ripped off-screen. Never get invested in a character who&amp;#39;s suddenly looking their angelic, gorgeous best and occasionally walking in slow motion. (I didn&amp;#39;t buy this grisly Megan/Sharon Tate conspiracy theory at first&amp;#8212;but now, I don&amp;#39;t know.)\nPinterestFacebookMeanwhile, everybody else seems to be struggling hard, and alone. There&amp;#39;s this fantastic flight pattern happening: All the characters are inheriting other characters&amp;#39; places. Joan is fighting to make a name for herself with the same ballsy tactics Peggy once used; Peggy, with her barely concealed derision for her new boss, is a perfect workplace Don. Pete Campbell is more of a season-four Don, finding empty redemption in the West Coast sunshine&amp;#8212;while back in New York City, the formerly benevolent Kenny Cosgrove is snapping and whining like a dog, or, rather, like a classic Pete Campbell. And though Roger and Don are always kinda parallel, Rog reminds me of another Don, one we&amp;#39;ve seen many times throughout the series: the man totally adrift, trying anything to have warm bodies to come home to, occasionally being pulled out of his hazy world to sit, unapologetically, across from his family members.\nDon, of course, is still just Don&amp;#8212;a not-new and not-old Don who, metaphorically and geographically, gets closer to the ledge every day. He&amp;#39;s more depressed about his estrangement from Madison Avenue than he is about the distance between him and Megan. The man who used to trade on his work-genius status everywhere he went is now sending in his taglines via Freddy Rumsen&amp;#8212;just to get a whiff of secondhand validation.\nPinterestFacebookIt&amp;#39;s a stressful experience, watching a TV show where everyone has desperation in their eyes. And what makes it so stressful is that your brain immediately tries to reason everyone out of their corners&amp;#8212;and your brain concludes that only something frighteningly massive could shake so many people at once. I&amp;#39;m not a fan of this final season being split into two seven-ep chunks, spaced one year apart. What I think it promises, though, is that things will move more quickly and forcefully in these seven episodes than we&amp;#39;re accustomed to. I doubt Matthew Weiner will send things humming along uneasily all spring&amp;#8212;he wants us to be hungry for those final seven. It&amp;#39;s time for action.\nWeiner also gave us a little gift last night: another surprise &amp;#39;90s-flavored guest star. Plucking ladies from the stuff we still own on VHS&amp;#8212;Alexis Bledel, Larisa Oleynik, Linda Cardellini&amp;#8212;is one of the few schticks the series allows itself. And at the end of last night&amp;#39;s episode, we got Party of Five/Scream queen Neve Campbell, whose widow character had a meet-cute with Don on a plane. She was so instantly engaging, I immediately wanted to copy the Mad Men version of the classic Neve haircut. (Think roots at 35,000 feet.) While her run-in with Don seemed like an open-and-shut air encounter, this Q&amp;amp;A Vulture did with her suggests she might be back.\nAfter an hour of everyone&amp;#39;s furrowed brows, we definitely earned that casting treat. And at this rate, maybe the series will end on Don running off with Rachel Leigh Cook."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/story/mad-men-season-7-premiere-reca>