This episode turns its attention to Roger Sterling (John Slattery), the character most emblematic of the show’s slick sixties Madison Avenue milieu.  The first half exposes the needy, boorish alcoholic behind Roger’s veneer of good looks and charm, as Roger invites himself over for dinner at his right-hand man Don Draper’s suburban home and winds up making a drunken pass at Don’s wife.  Mainly preoccupied with character and metaphor, Mad Men distinguished itself from its contemporaries with its willingness to set aside the demands of narrative in order to luxuriate in the atmosphere of the period setting.  Case in point: the final act of “Red in the Face,” a three-martini lunch after which Roger and Don (Jon Hamm) – finding the elevator out of order – have to trudge up twenty-three flights of stairs to get back to their office.  Their forced march concludes with a gross-out moment that I think is destined to achieve some kind of infamy in the annals of television.  Don’s smirk in the last shot confirms that the ad men’s misadventure has been a kind of payback for Roger’s earlier transgression, but what’s important – what Mad Men is all about – is not the sidewinder path of the story, but the rich, impressionistic sketch of a bygone ritual: the sybaritic business meal where men in vests, slumped down in red vinyl booths and enveloped in a cigarette haze, gulp down oysters and gin and crack sexist jokes.  Writer Bridget Bedard delivers a second daffy, sideways jab at masculine pride in a subplot where corporate weasel Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) finds his own ersatz charm wholly lacking as he tries to navigate the lunchtime line of a department store returns counter.  Both threads, which were among the best moments on television in 2007, consisted of little more than actors in three-piece suits standing around, talking, on notional sets.  A throwback to Rod Serling, and a polished rebuke to the expensive but mindless chaos of what now passes for drama on the networks.