When you get beyond the cocktails and the costumes and the showy emotional breakdowns, what makes any given episode of Mad Men memorable is the dialogue. Matthew Weiner and his staff are particularly wonderful at crafting one-liners — funny quips, penetrating realizations, earth-shattering statements that cause time to stop and personalities to crumble. This season, we’re keeping track of which characters get each episode’s five best lines, assigning points to winners, and posting a cumulative leader board to determine Season 5’s pithiest mad man (or woman). The results of last night’s episode — an entirely depressing hour that also, by our count, featured the season’s pithiest script to date — are after the jump.
1. Roger: Who knows why people in history did good things? For all we know, Jesus was trying to get the loaves and fishes account.
2. Mona Sterling (to Roger): I thought you had married Jane because I had gotten old, and then I realized it was because you had.
3. Katherine Olson (to Peggy): If you’re lonely, get a cat. They live 13 years. Then you get another one, and another one. After that, then you’re done.
4. Emile Calvet (to Don): One day your daughter will spread her legs and fly away.
5. Joan (to Peggy): Men don’t take the time to end things. They ignore you until you insist on a declaration of hate.
Season 5 scoreboard
Roger Sterling: 18 Stan Rizzo: 7 Pete Campbell: 7 Megan Draper: 7 Joan Harris: 6 Michael Ginsberg: 5 Don Draper: 5 Bobby Draper: 5 Jane Sterling: 5 Teenage Rolling Stones fan: 4 Pauline Francis: 4 Mona Sterling: 4 Civil rights protester: 3 Katherine Olson: 3 Jenny Gunther: 2 Raymond Geiger: 2 Emile Calvet: 2 Lane Pryce: 1