Did you catch the return of Peggy's octopus in the 'Mad Men' finale?

By Fusion Staff  |  May 19, 2015 | 4:02pm
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If you’d been able to see through your tears over the end of Mad Men on Sunday night, you might have spotted a fun callback to an important moment for Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) from a few episodes back.

In “Lost Horizon,” Roger Sterling (John Slattery) gave Peggy The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, the erotic octopus illustration that originally belonged to their agency’s late founding partner Bert Cooper (Robert Morse), and suggested she stop worrying about making her male colleagues and clients feel at ease.

The way Olson marched into her new job at McCann Erickson with this striking scene of interspecies cunnilingus under her arm made an unapologetic feminist statement.

In the series finale, we saw the octopus once again, now hanging on the wall of Peggy’s new office. In keeping with the season — it’s October 1970 in the show’s timeline — she’s updated the illustration with Halloween decorations, two black cats and a skeleton.

That may sound like Peggy’s toned down the explicit content of the piece, perhaps to avoid making waves at McCann, but if anything, the placement of these otherwise innocuous cutouts makes the image even less safe for (literal) work. The cats and skeleton appear to be getting in on the action, as seen here over Stan’s (Jay R. Ferguson) hunky shoulder.

Peggy Olson, forever our queen, has doubled down on not giving a fuck.

[Thanks to Mad Men fan Marissa B. for bringing this to our attention.]

Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion’s Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.

 
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