I just replayed the teacher-Don scene and I really didn’t see him as hitting on her or acting untoward in any way. He was just making conversation about her teaching schedule and his family summer non-vacation plans, and kind of out of the blue she was all over his ass with accusations of drinking and philandering. I genuinely shared his mystification at her accusations.
I’m starting to think she’s a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
I think the cuckoo for cocoa puffs was pretty well telegraphed by the over-identifying with Sally’s grief, and the drunken phone call. Chick’s crazy. Lotsa crazy. Crazy enough to start throwing unfounded accusations, or at least unfounded implications, around, methinks.
Wouldn’t it be kinda funny if Don got in *real *trouble for the one chick he didn’t screw?
I didn’t take Bert Cooper’s remark to be blackmail. Or not quite, anyway as Don is already reaching for the contract to sign as he makes it. I took as Cooper merely wanting to demonstrate after the fact to Don that he’d known his secret all along and therefore in the circumstances he deserves Don’s loyalty. And also an elegant demonstration that Cooper has all manner of interesting aces up his sleeve.
I thought Peggy & Duck’s sex scene was kind of sad because it seemed like both of them were thinking more about Don Draper than each other there.
Also, I agree that the teacher seems bad news. Her accusations seemed distinctly based on wishful thinking on her part and indeed seemed to be clumsy come ons, but yes, so off that he’d be well advised to steer well clear.
Washing machine. Season one, I believe.
Promethea, as has been said - Don knew that Cooper knew, because Pete blew his cover way back when and Cooper basically said “Who cares?!”
Looks like another case of Chekhov’s Gun to me.
I remember the episode and the moment but did Don ever find out for sure that Pete followed up with his threat to go running to Cooper? I remember the ‘who cares?’ but not how the aftermath was played between Don & Pete. I sort of assumed that Don reckoned Pete had backed down as there was no comeback. I may be forgetting a scene though.
Don was there in Bert’s office when Pete exposed his “true” identity. He heard Bert say “who cares?”
Ah, many thanks - memory playing tricks.
I had been thinking thus: Duck thought that Don and Peggy had a personal relationship that was behind Peggy’s rise at S-C. Ergo, if Don had her, Duck had to have her too.
That maybe Duck was a Don substitute for Peggy is something I hadn’t thought of. Interesting.
It’s confusing. I’m getting mixed signals.
I’m starting to get the impression in that “sign the contract” meeting that Cooper somehow knew Don’s secret well before Pete came ever running up with it.
Based on his panicked response in the original Pete-Cooper-Don “he’s not who he says he is” confrontation Don didn’t know that he knew, but Cooper is kinda-sorta acting like this is something he knew even before that, and in that context his blase “who cares” response to Pete’s original accusation makes more sense now.
I think our Coop is quite worldy-wise. I bet he’s seen it all. I don’t imagine anything shocks him anymore, and that’s why he’s so blase. In addition to the fact that if it makes him more money, he’s ok with it. Whatever it is.
It’s been awhile since I saw the episode where Pete tries to expose Don- but now that it’s brought up that Cooper might have known all along, do you think Don knew that he knew? He called Pete’s bluff when he threatened him, was he secure in the knowledge that Bert already knew his secret?
Exactly. He’s been playing it cool since Don was in diapers (or something). Whatever it took to keep Don happy, including not giving a damn about a squealed secret from whiny little Pete, or at least pretending not to care until it suited him.
Well, if Cooper did know about Don’s past prior to Pete’s blackmail, that leaves the question of “How did Cooper know?”. It’s not as though people were running credit and background checks as part of the job interview process in the mid 1950s or whenever Don was hired at Sterling Cooper.
Which may mean more flashbacks detailing how Don went from selling used cars to working at Sterling Cooper. Something I’d be very interested to know.
As part of the interview process, no. But as Don was rising through the ranks, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bert had him checked out at some point. (private investigator, perhaps.) Bert seems too canny to give someone that much power without seeing what kind of skeletons he had in his closet.
Here’s my .02 on what’s going on, for what it’s worth:
I don’t think there’s a lot of entitlement going around. Rather, I think most of these characters are driven by insecurity.
Pete Campbell has been made to feel like a failure by his father and stepfather. His frantic attempts to beat his peers and make something of himself are an attempt to prove his father wrong. He’s tightly bound to Don because Don is a new father figure to him, and one who appreciates his talents. His relationship with Don is actually making him a better person.
Peggy is a woman in a man’s world, and she knows it. She wants to move up the ladder, but she doesn’t know how to play the game. She’s constantly a fish out of water, and unsure of how to proceed most of the time. Where other people would make smooth moves to seek out raises, Peggy tries to use sincerity and directness, and discovers it just comes across as whining. Her tryst with Duck may be more of the same thing, or it may the naive girl thinking he’s sincere, in which case I think she’s about to learn a hard lesson.
Don’s iron control and outward confidence is a shield to hide the hillbilly within. He lives in constant fear of reverting back to the person he used to be. He’s always fighting the urge to run away, to stop the charade, to be who he really is. That’s why he has such self-destructive tendencies. He knows he’s a phony, but he likes the phony Don Draper better than the real person. But he’s more comfortable as the other person, because he doesn’t have to act all the time.
This last episode was primarily about that conflict. It was brought to a head by the contract business. By signing, he was making a commitment - both to the firm, and to being ‘Don Draper’. That conflicted with his need to always keep one foot out the door, ready to run away. He wasn’t going to sign, and he had rationalized an excuse to keep himself free under the guise of ‘negotating from strength’.
But then the incident with the idiot draft dodger couple, the reaction of the schoolteacher to his mild conversation, the subordinate treatment he got from Conrad Hilton, and finally Bert Cooper’s reminding him of who he ‘really is’ pushed him over the line, and he realized that signing the contract was itself protection against him running away and becoming the person he loathed. He WAS reverting during the episode - losing his control and blasting Peggy, storming out on Betty, letting his guard down and being his old self with a couple of punks - and getting rolled because of it. His defenses were dropping, and the contract helped shore those defenses up again.
Conrad Hilton was interesting. On the one hand, he treated Don like a subordinate, sitting at his desk and talking down to him. But then he also showed Don that even the most powerful people can have weaknesses and strangeness about them, so perhaps Don wasn’t so different, skeletons and all. Finally, he also treated him as somewhat of an equal previously. All of this probably made Don’s head spin and played his two personas against each other.
This is why I love this show. The writing is incredibly deep, and every scene is dripping with meaning and subtext. The Sopranos was the same way.
BTW, I assumed from the cryptic conversation Hilton was having with Don that Hilton was talking about having a mistress. But he was actually talking about cheating on his advertising agency by having Don work on the campaigns for the New York hotels. (I didn’t realize this myself but picked it up from someplace. I think the AV Club entry on the show.)
Someday when this is all done, I’m going to have to get the discs and start all over knowing what I know now.
And unlike a lot of other TV dramas, Mad Men will hold together.
Sam Stone, I think you nailed it.
I noticed some people called Don’s tiorade at Paggy out-of-nowhere. TO Peggy it seemed to be out of nowhere, but wee know why Don did it. He was just talking to Roger Cooper who was trying to cajole him none to politley to sign the contract and Don was pissed off. Then Peggy, comes in under pretense of something else and asks about Hitlon Hotels. Bad timing. Not that it excuses Don, but the tirade has a source.
I don’t know if I want to thank you or blame you for giving me a fan fic idea* in which Bert Cooper calls Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin to check out Don Draper.
*Not that I could write fic in the Mad Men 'verse; if I tried I’d get so distracted by the research that no dialogue would ever hit the page.