You can watch the sneak peak here.
I loved this episode. I love Anna, and I love Don/Dick when he’s with Anna. The difference between the man who was painting Anna’s living room and the man who was schmoozing with hookers and Lane (btw, Lane!) was astounding. “I know everything about you and I still love you” – what a wonderful moment. I cried when he said goodbye to her…I hope that’s not the last time.
Joan in all of her many roles is quite the badass chameleon herself.
Joan as a mother! :eek::eek: Will Weiner actualy go there? I think that could effectively mean her exit from the series. I just can’t see Joan of all people trying to balance motherhood & her job at SCDP. What exactly is her Job now anyway? 
She seems to still be an office manager, but now has her own office and more responsiblities. Then again now that she actually wants to get pregnant she won’t and one of the other women (to whom pregnancy would be a diaster) on the show will get pregnant instead. Maybe a certain secretary that recently had unprotected sex with a certain partner.
Did it seem to anyone else that Joan was really reluctant to have her husband sew up her finger? How bad of a surgeon is he?
I think that rather than a measure of his skill as a surgeon, her reluctance showed her lack of confidence in him. Her crying I interpreted as meaning she was moved by how calm and capable he was when doing his job, and she felt badly for having underestimated him (interesting that right before that, she had corrected him for underestimating her).
I don’t think it’s at all surprising that Joan wants to have a child now. It’s clear she never planned to be a professional woman all of her life. She wanted to find the perfect man who could give her the perfect life. The next logical step is to have a baby. Now, it might not be smart to try for a baby right now, but if she decided she didn’t want a kid, which is crucial for The Perfect Life, she’d be admitting that somewhere, some how, something went very wrong.
I thought this episode was amazing. Even after three full seasons, I’m amazed how much they’re able to put into a single hour of television.
I seem to be in the minority here; for me, this episode managed to be less than the sum of its parts, somehow. Don & Lane, Dick and Anna, Doctor Rape–still a douche, still not in Vietnam–I loved all that, especially Don & Lane. But the episode as a whole seemed to fall flat. Perhaps it’s because I watched 4.02 again just before 4.03. I’ll give it another shot sometime this week and see how it strikes me.
BTW–anybody find Don putting the moves on Anna’s niece(?) incredibly skeevy, desperate, pathetic? Damn near gave me the jibblies before it all went off in a different direction entirely.
Good episode. Loved the bossa nova. So happy not to be troubled with Betty, her wimp newbie and those brats.
Lane actually came across as a human being. I could grow to like him.
Does anybody recall the Season-Episode group where Don’s dealings with Anna began and/or were clarified? I have only vague recall on it. A quick summary would do.
I teared up when Don couldn’t tell Anna what he knew. I mean, Don invented secrecy. And Anna is the one person he can be honest with. But his conflict and pain - and the camera catches it perfectly - over not being able to tell Anna the truth - wow.
It’s weepy-weep time.
She’s such a lovely, innocent character. Probably the only one Don loves without caveats. And now he knows something terrible.
More wow.
I’m still teary, Once she’s gone, who does he have left?
I had the exact same thought as you, GameHat. Don seemed to be in a better place this episode, but he still isn’t going anywhere that I want to see him wind up.
Great acting by Jon Hamm, and it was nice seeing Lane developed a bit, though I did expect him to do a cover of Jim Broadbent’s cover of Like a Virgin when he was with the prostitute. I also have an image of Don Draper as an old man telling his grandson “In my day you could have a call girl screw you without a condom and slap you around and it was twenty-five dollars!”
Bill Asher- the guy [what’s his name] wanted Don to meet at Brown Derby- was Elizabeth Montgomery’s husband at the time and producer of Bewitched. I wonder if namedropping him was some sort of homage. (He’s 89 but still alive.)
I thought Don hitting on Anna’s niece was a bit "ewww"y considering she’s a teenager and he’s known her since she was a kid. If sexual addiction is real then Don is a fictional character who has it.
Loved the floral card mix up and the ‘donkey dick’ joke.
I agree–not a good episode at all. Much less tightly put together. Almost amateurish in places.
Yes, skeevy and even out of character. With Allison he was really, really drunk. But what was the excuse here? You’re so young and beautiful? So what; Don’s never been so out of control. As Dick he’s just a dick. More pathetic than seductive.
I wish they wouldn’t make Dr. Greg the rapist all cute and nice. I keep expecting him to hit Joan during one of their arguments.
Joan and Greg talked about when he might have to go to Vietnam and he thought it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
They made a real point to tell us the year at the end of the episode (“Welcome to 1965”). Wasn’t early 1965 when US combat operations began in Vietnam? I predict that Joan will get knocked up just in time for her husband to get sent over to start patching up soldiers. Something will happen to him and she’ll end up a single mom. Some interesting story lines could be mined from that, I think.
I was laughing when Lane told Joan he was incorruptible to her charms! I’ll bet Joan had never even imagined any man anywhere ever NOT knocked for a loop by her statuesque awesomeness, much less saying it out loud.
I don’t see any problem with Joan having a child. It is the next step for her, in her mind: career girl, marry doctor, have child. If the husband does go to Viet Nam/gets killed, she’ll want to have his baby. And she’ll keep her job, she’ll have to make money. (She’ll have some kind of babysitter. I can’t see Joan as a grieving widow, no glamorous job, stuck with a baby in an apartment, washing diapers.)
Didn’t Anna say she had asked her niece to stick around for Don’s benefit? Granted, she (I hope) meant because she thought Don would find her to be interesting conversation and I would hope Don wouldn’t suspect that Anna’s whoring out her niece but Lord only knows what’s in Don’s mind.
To be a little fair, Don didn’t so much know her “since” she was a kid as much as he last knew her “as” a kid. She went from missing her front teeth to being a college co-ed with nothing in between. Still skeevy though.
By her statuesque awesomeness, no. But he certainly seemed to admire her chewing out the secretary for incompetence. 
After Dick stole Don’s identity, he moved east and took a job selling Cadillacs. Anna, who was trying to get her death benefits, tracked him down and got the full story out of him. They came to an arrangement in which Anna would let Dick keep Don’s identity in exchange for financial support. Dick bought Anna a house and Anna granted him a “divorce.” They became good friends and Dick would occasionally visit her in California. He sent her a book of poetry at the end of the first season. At the end of the second season, after Betty has kicked him out, he ditches a convention in Los Angeles to spend some time with her, during which he has another rebirth.
I couldn’t tell if Lane was thinking what I was thinking – “Twenty-five dollars! Damn, I’d better go see a doctor right now!.”
He had met her once or twice when she was a child. I don’t think he really “knows” her.
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People are complex. Even bad people spend most of their lives being good.
I loved that whole subplot. Usually, I’m very sympathetic with the hapless support staff, but I really enjoyed seeing that secretary get the sack. Now I feel bad for enjoying that so much.
I am soooo glad that this episode didn’t end with the cliche of Anna telling Don that she knows she’s dying despite the fact that her family is hiding it from her.
Thanks for the recap, acsenray. I toyed with the idea of rewatching the show when On Demand had a big batch of past episodes a few weeks back. But except for some isolated details like these you just cleared up for me, I don’t relish a lot of backtracking of most of the stories.
According to an inflation calculator I found, $25 in 1964 would be the equivalent of about $175 today. Probably still on the low end of what a similar type of call-girl would get today. Different times, I suppose?
I’m about ready for a Pete-centric B-plot in one of the next episodes. He had some shared spotlight time with Peggy & the ham client but I mean something with Trudy.