This was the first episode of the the season that I really loved.
I like the others, but they were all increasingly building on the theme that Don is a drunk has-been sad-sack.
Here we got to see Don playing Machiavelli. And he completely owns his competitor. Beautiful.
Plus we got to see more of the Betty story. Granted, Betty is disliked and for good reason. But I enjoy seeing how her family disintegrates. It’s not just Don’s fault anymore, she is furthering herself as a cruel mother. Fun. I loved the scene where she was talking with the child psychiatrist and it subtly takes a turn to her with (and needing) a psychiatrist. I look forward to seeing how Sally grows up.
God, is Henry becoming a more sympathetic character? He’s nearly always the voice of reason to Betty’s cruel domineering. I can’t quite like him since he stole Don’s home (not that Don didn’t deserve it) but he always seems like the one mature and balanced voice in the room.
Sally was great in this episode. She’s growing up. Not in the bright, cheerful, flowery way of the 50s - she’s got some real darkness and demons. I love it.
Roger and the Japanese was fun. Pete telling him off was perfect. I was on pins and needles for a moment after Roger charged him; Don completely dead-panning “He’s right” and then exiting was the perfect reproach to Roger’s slipping standing in the firm.
This was probably the first episode of the season I’ve really enjoyed. Can’t wait until next Sunday!
There’s a big difference, though, between this show and Sopranos – the crimes committed on Mad Men are largely ones that are common in everyday life. Whereas, Tony Soprano and his crew were disgusting murderers, thieves, and whatnot. I enjoyed the show, but I take satisfaction in the belief that the final blackout meant that Tony, Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. all got their disgusting heads blown off. I don’t feel that way about anyone on Mad Men.
That said EVERYTHING about Betty’s relationship with her kids, especially Sally. Her smacking the shit out of her earlier in the episode almost made me not to watch the show ever again. If Henry doesn’t realize what a psycho hose beast he’s married by now, he’s dumber than a bag of hammers.
And YAY for Pete standing up and telling Roger off.
He was creepy last season, but he’s really turned into a sympathetic character this season. Maybe it’s just a result of being in close proximity to Betty Draper all the time; it’s hard not to seem reasonable and good-natured in that kind of company.
He still creeps me out. Don has done some skeevy things, but hitting on a pregnant, married woman while waiting for his date at a wedding seems to be in its own league of skeevy behavior.
The absolute triumph of this show is that it gets people to defend Don Draper. Don Draper is one of the worst human beings ever to be made the star of a television show. I know America loves bad boys, especially when they’re criminally handsome and have flair, but this is getting ridiculous. Don is a horrible person. Henry, at least from what we’ve been shown, is wonderful. He seems to genuinely love Betty, raised a great kid, is a great step-dad, and handles a wife who is out of her mind in a way that Don Draper never could. And yet people hate him and love Don. It’s a marvel.
The other triumph of the show is that it succeeds in being about an advertising office without being able to show any advertising. The reason for this is obvious once you think about it. It’s very hard to do good advertising. It’s almost impossible to do great advertising. It’s absolutely impossible to do great advertising today that would be great in the 1960s, an era about which nobody remembers any reality.
What advertising has Don Draper - who we are repeatedly told is a “genius” - ever created? There was the Kodak Carousel, which was stolen from real life, and the Lucky Strike “it’s toasted” line, which was stolen from real life. Weiner got a huge amount of flak for doing that, and rightly so. This year we had the floor cleaner tv commercial, which was believably awful for 60s television. Two problems with that. First, you can never convince me that Don Draper would write a commercial about a little boy stuck in jail. Second, can you try to imagine enjoying the creative process that went into making that? Too real and too ugly.
What Weiner learned from hard experience is that he has to write about everything but the final product. The second season was a long series of ad pitches that failed. Remember that? Every idea was bad and every one that made it to a pitch got shot down. The third season was about how needing money to run the firm killed the creativity. This season is about winning clients and behind-the-scenes pranks (like Peggy and the supermarket riot).
Wow. An ad show with no advertising, featuring a genius who does nothing but harm other people. And they’re making that work. That’s genius. Or magic. All misdirection and a showy trick at the end that makes you go “ah” even so.
Well, that’s the trick in storytelling, isn’t it? In any story about a great artist, you’re never going to be able to come up with in-world art that’s better than real-world art. If you did, you’d just make that, wouldn’t you?
And paraphrasing Ebert, a show’s not really what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it.
You know, I’d say Don Draper is a somewhat better man than, just to pick a name, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and a much better man than Dexter Morgan or Vince Mackey. He’s committed fewer murders than any of them.
I’d also say he’s a better man than Al Swearengen, Brother Justin Crowe, and Tony Soprano. Don Draper: Loathsome Human Being But Certainly Not the Worst on Television.
I vehemently disagree that people hate Henry. IMO he is a middle-aged man who is willing to compromise on compatibility issues because he is wildly attracted to Betty, his trophy wife of sorts. The sex is good (I would hope) so he’s willing to overlook her batshit insanity. I don’t hate him, I pity him (both for needing a trophy wife, and for the one he happened to get).
I also do not like Don. I enjoy watching him when he is having a creative moment, but there’s no doubt he is a selfish, juvenile scumbag. Much like Tony Soprano, you come to appreciate the lead character’s better qualities even though you never forget their worse ones.
My point, and I think Pepper’s too, was that there are a good number of series protagonists who have done much worse things than Don. (And I was kidding when I listed Gibbs.) Compared to JR Ewing, for instance, Don’s an angel. I read most of Don’s bad behavior coming from compulsivity and self-loathing rather than malice.
Don Draper is a sleaze and often an asshole so far as his marital and sexual relationships go, no doubt about it. But apart from that (a huge exclusion, I know), is there anything particularly immoral about him? He’s a war deserter, but I find it hard to care about that, and he was quite cold to his brother as well, but presumably only because of the necessities of those war-desertion circumstances. He’s occasionally been unduly harsh to his work underlings, but I can’t right now recall any instance which stamps him as remarkably cruel. Is there anything else I’m forgetting?
He is responsible for the death of the real Don Draper, though I don’t believe you could characterize it as murder. His so-called “coldness” to his brother resulted in the man’s suicide (paying off your only living relative to never speak to you again is bad. Paying off the brother who has been waiting his whole life to find you again after the world believed you to be dead is worse). Also, he spearheaded the theft of property, employees, and clients from Sterling Cooper Draper, and just masterminded what is probably the financial ruin of another firm and didn’t even gain anything concrete in return (just the possibility of getting Honda’s automobile division maybe).
He was not only “unduly harsh” to Sal when he fired him, he was unnecessarily cruel about it, willingly sacrificing Sal’s entire livelihood and career because Sal was queer and he knows how “those people” are.
So besides those things and the handful of things you mentioned, he’s a stand up guy.
Don Draper’s coldness to his brother is, to me, actually the thing I found most cruel of him in the entire series, but I don’t think it fair to actually consider him morally culpable for the suicide (indeed, I believe he was quite distraught over it).
