I took the Prison Guard guy to be Grampa Gene. They talked in similar cadences, they even looked alike in my opinion. The guard was a man from a different world than Don. There’s also a bit of Dick in there to, connecting Gene with who Dick would have ended up like, if he hadn’t of become DON DRAPER.
Anyone else notice the play of the shadows on Betty at the end of the episode when she got up to take care of little Eugene in the middle of the night? She pauses just a moment before heading down the hall and the light makes stripes down her back. I think this ties into Don’s conversation with the prison guard (especially the line about the inmate baseball team playing the Yankees, and how everyone was wearing stripes.) The shadows on Betty were there to show us her own confinement.
Yep, I noticed that, too. This ep made me so sad for my mother. Six children in nine years, the being knocked out for labor, being trapped… She was much more than a housecat, but she was a smart woman who was stuck being a baby factory.
When Dennis (the guard) was pushing his wife down the hall, I think she was wearing a bathrobe. She would have been wearing clothes if she was leaving. (Betty had a lovely pink ensemble to match the little girl she was expecting!) Dennis’s wife had a harder birth than Betty & would be hospitalized a bit longer; they were probably going to the nursery to wave at their kid. (When Don imagined his own birth, his mother said she felt cold; she probably bled out. Dennis’s wife got a transfusion. Childbirth 1963 Style looks bad to us, but it was a step up from Childbirth Rural Poverty Style.)
Dennis was a guard a Sing Sing–a really tough guy. But Scotch & Stress made him into a Sensitive New Age Guy–before the type was named. He was embarrassed that he’d opened himself up to a stranger.
Looking at the comments in this thread I’m beginning to understand how Preachers get some much mileage from the Bible and hermeneutics. People can read so incredibly much into the briefest image or amount of information. It’s what makes interpretive and deconstructive criticism so much fun.
Wow - nice catch (you too, Niblet)…I wondered what the lengthy pause was all about.
Back when I lived in the northeast US, it was common to see that type of caterpillar hang down from a tree by a strand (not as thick as it appeared in the episode, but hey, artistic license/it’s a dream sequence, etc.)
Personally, I think Don is becoming smitten with Sally’s teacher, and there’s a long arc ahead. Maybe she’s the one who he tunes in/turns on/drops out with once the '60s hit full on.
Given Pete’s reaction after he hung up from his call with Duck, I don’t think he has a high opinion of Duck, but went along with the meeting in a “what the hell” attitude. So, he wasn’t really that interested, got insulted that Peggy was part of the deal, and then panicked that one of his few supporters (sort-of) – Don – might think he’d been schmoozing with Duck, who hates Don.
I actually think Pete knows that Duck is a screwup; Peggy might not.
However, I was wondering if the Cosgrove accounts comment was an indication that none of the Sterling-Cooper accounts are really all that spectacular – both Pete and Cosgrove got chaff. That would explain why they’d hired Duck as a rainmaker, and why they were so willing to sell out to the English.
Betty’s mom was also standing behind him, holding a bloody handkercheif to his back.
Pete things of Don as being like his real father. I’d say he has an almost tighter bond to him than Peggy does.
I think the birth scenes were fairly realistic for the times (early 60s); I remember my two youngest brothers being born, in 1961 and 1962; they didn’t let anyone visit but the father, and Dad was certainly not in the delivery room. :eek: When I was born in 1952, my Mom had a difficult labor (I was face down or face up, whatever it was, it was the opposite of an “easy” delivery), and the doctor eventually had to use forceps to help deliver me :eek: Of course, my Mom was totally knocked out and when they brought me in, the nurses had put a little bow in my hair (which I fortunately had a nice soft lot of), mostly to cover the indentation of the forceps, and my Mom looked at me and said, “oh, what a pretty baby, where’s my baby?” LOL The nurses explained, “This is your baby!” Yeah, she was out of it. I do know that for at least one of us she had “natural” child birth, i.e. no drugs, because he came too fast for them to give her the drugs!
I too am concerned for the new baby, as it seems that Betty may slide completely into post-partum depression. Oh it was definitely around at the time, but I doubt that doctors and others even identified it as such. That was a great scene between Don and Sally, she is a very insightful child.
I know there’s more to say, I just can’t remember what it was that I wanted to comment on. Damn growing old! Although I must admit that it beats the alternative. 
Good call on the stripes on Betty’s back, but did anyone notice the mirror when Don leaned over and kissed Betty? Symbolically, he comes into the picture, kisses her, then leaves. Could be something, could be nothing…
Really? But Pete was eager to turn Don in as a faker when he thought it would move him ahead, and he was really pissed off when Don abandoned him in California.
My mother went drug-free for the births of my brother and I, and when I was in high school I read an older edition of this book about natural childbirth. I remember the author arguing that women in labor should not be strapped down and forced to lie on their back if they’re more comfortable in another position. I mentioned to Mom that I was appalled that women in labor would be forcibly restrained, and she told me this story: When my brother was born, in 1983, he was facing the wrong way (breech birth or facing up instead of down, I don’t remember) and the most comfortable position for my mother was crouching on the floor. The nurse was extremely unhappy with this arrangement, but Mom was undrugged and insistent, so she got her way and the nurse held her hands under Mom to catch Lil’ Bro on the way out.
But twice, to Pete’s knowledge, his job was saved by Don. The first time was when Don fired him, Cooper overruled it and Roger told Pete that he only had his job back because Don fought for him. Although Don didn’t fight for him, Pete doesn’t know that. The second time was the failed blackmail attempt and then Pete knew that he had fucked up big time and that Don held his future in his hand.
Pete was pissed about being abandoned in California but immediately started wagging his tail when Don said that he only left him there because he trusted him and then praised his new contacts with the aerospace industry. It was that bone that no doubt turned Pete from Duck’s corner to Don’s.
Also, Pete felt like he got some warm fuzzies from Don after his father died. When he needed someone to talk to later, his first choice was Don (who unfortunately was in the middle of bigger things and told Pete to get lost). Pete seems to really look up to Don and craves his approval, moreso than from anyone else.
It’s interesting that Don Draper has achieved all that he has despite being a self-made man (literally, given the false identity), while Pete hasn’t achieved that much, despite coming from an old distinguished New York family.
I think it’s about the end of the aristocratic WASP ruling class and the rise of the meritocracy, albeit one still ruled by white guys like Don.
My brother and I weren’t home last night, but our parents were- they saw the episode before us. This morning when we were had just hit “play” on the DVR, our mom walked into the room and said to the unspoiled us, “Part of this episode is EXACTLY like how your grandmother said it was in real life,” meaning of course, the childbirth scenes. My grandmother had her children in the early 1950s, but apparently the 1960s were just as bad.
Thank you for explaining why the nurse was familiar!
I think the little actress who plays Sally did a really great job. Everything she said had Betty’s intonation and inflections.
She did do a great job- and I also was really touched by the scene where they bring the baby home and Betty, Francine(?) and the kids sit on the the couch and Sally scoots over so she can be close to her mother (who make Scarlett O’Hara look like Mrs. Cleaver).
Re everyone who thinks Pete is a loser I don’t really think he’s doing that bad a job. He covered for Don when Don flaked in CA, he’s adapted to the shared job, he seems to have developed some degree of loyalty to SC, and most importantly he does seem to have some decent ideas (his steel idea beat out Don’s with the client, his Nixon ad buy was strategically brilliant), and be more forward thinking than many there. Despite his family’s relative poverty his social connections are acknowledged as being very important, and he works those connections. He’s not a do nothing parasite.
My issues with Pete center around his egotism. He’s ambitious and has a sense of entitlement, which is not completely justified. Witness the difference in his reaction and Ken’s to the shared quasi-promotion. He practically threw a tantrum instead of being glad for the opportunity as Ken was.
But the best example of his attitude problem can be summed up in his reaction to Peggy’s revelation about their shared child. She tells him this secret, a burden she’s been carrying around alone, and he says, “Why did you tell me that?” It was all about him, of course. IOW, why didn’t you just keep on protecting me from this awful thing, that we did together, that you were shouldering alone? I found that comment selfish and childish, and can understand Peggy’s subsequent disgust with him. His life was not disrupted by their affair, hers was almost destroyed, and he was irritated that the balance of that weight shifted at all. He’s kind of a brat.
I thought when Peggy said to Don (I am probably paraphrasing a bit), “You have everything, and so much of it too.” Had a great reaction physical reaction from Don, his face betrayed so much, that he may think of himself as a fraud, even though he is a self-made man, really. It betrayed a fact that he cannot seem to be satisfied, or that Peggy is actually a bit naive. But Don may also realize he is being naive as well.
I think Don is slowly beginning to realize that he is in danger of becoming an anachronism. I am not sure he consciously recognizes it, but as the English dude mentioned, something’s happening. I really think this episode was as much about the coming generational/racial./gender clash of the mid and late 60’s as it was about Betty’s baby. What will eveyone’s role be in the coming sea change? Don is smart enough to see the signs all around him, yet he isn’t aware of what it actually is amounting to. He is in a fog as much as Betty.
Doesn’t this take place in 1963 this season? What a year for change, Kennedy gets shot, MLK Jr I have a Dream speech. That is why this show is great, this isn’t just about a different era where everyone smoked and drank, this is the calm before the storm.
Well, wouldn’t you be? I mean, look, here’s Pete, who’s been trying unsuccessfully to have children, and coming to the realization that it won’t happen, and at the same time trying to deal with the whole adoption question and his mother’s prejudices against adopted children, and Peggy just tells him out of nowhere that he DOES have a child, and it’s been put up for adoption. I think I’d be taken aback by the whole thing too.