Long Weekend: In Extremis
In extremis – the place beyond the breaking point, the ultimate unhappy destination – is not the part of the psyche anyone wants to visit. But in Season One’s Long Weekend, Roger has no choice. He has to go.
Roger doesn’t expect it, not at the end of another day of playtime. He’s drunk his usual weight in those clear liquors he favors, asked Joanie to join him for the Labor Day weekend, suffered an icy rejection, trawled Casting for her replacement, ridden one of the twins around for a while, stared into her “translucent” skin …
And now? The fun abruptly over, Roger finds himself staring into something very different.
He doesn’t like what he sees. We get a hint of this when a bedridden Roger asks Don about “energy”.
“Human energy,” he tries: he means the soul. Don, who happened to be on the other side of the office door when Roger’s heart seized up, is clearly the wrong guy to ask. “What do you want to hear,” Don says, unhappy with this territory himself.
Roger’s afraid of dying, sure. His fear leads him to cling to his love for Mona and Margaret. But he’s also angry: at his own weak heart, at having been told to do certain things, for years — drink the milk, eat the butter. Now that he’s done them, he learns too late that they were all the wrong things.
Joan, Carol, Betty and Don all experience unhappy discoveries in this episode – but Don, by virtue of his proximity to Roger, is the other casualty of that bad night. Roger’s swing close to death sends Don to his own extreme, and to Rachel Menken’s door.
“This is it,” he tells her. “This is all there is. And I feel like it’s slipping through my fingers like a handful of sand.”
It’s a hell of a pitch. It’s Don at his best — and worst. Which may end up being closer to the same thing than I ever considered, when I first started watching this show.
In extremis, we can lose what we believe, more fully embrace it, or go off the rails. I think I know what Roger believes at the end of Long Weekend, whether it stays with him or not. But what Don believes is both simpler and much darker than I realized, two years ago. “The universe is indifferent”: he really believes that.
What won’t a person who believes such a thing do?









