pepperlandgirl: I don’t recall Don being responsible for real Don’s death. Wasn’t real Don killed by enemy fire?
No, Dick Whitman accidentally dropped a lighter into gasoline, setting off explosives.
It wasn’t Don’s idea to fire Sal. He was willing to keep Sal’s secret and continue working with him. That hateful remark was actually odd, because he was almost kindly towards Sal on the plane home, immediately after he spotted Sal with the bellboy.
He has also kept Peggy’s secret, and encouraged her in her career. He hasn’t been vindictive toward Pete, who tried to blackmail him. He’s the only one who objected to taking the Jai Alai guy’s money.
I know it wasn’t his idea to fire Sal. He was still a dick (heh) about it. I’m not necessarily arguing that Don is evil or anything, just that he has had some really assholish moments that aren’t related to his clusterfuck of a love-life.
I only like Don relative to Pete & Betty. That said, I tend to see his behavior with Sal as less assholish than unenlightened & typical of hte time. As I recall it, Don did not know the details of what happened between Sal & the Lucky Strikes guy. I think that he assumed that Sal had made some untoward advance towards a client, or behaved inappropriately within the client’s view, and it was such behavior that precipitated the demand that he be fire. Thinking this, Don felt betrayed because, in his view, he had gone out on a limb for Sal to protect his secret, with the understanding that Sal would not do anything to embarrass or endanger the agency.
Was it FAIR of Don to make that assumption? Of course not. But I know this because I know more about gay people than an upper-middle-class straight white man of 1964 was going to.
That’s how I took it. I don’t think Don would be that judgmental if you had a fetish for one-legged orangutans as long as it doesn’t interfere with his career.
Bribing Betty’s psychiatrist was probably his lowest deed since that was 100% selfish and manipulative. The way he handled his kid brother was pretty shitty but giving him a huge amount of money for the early 1960s ($5,000 or thereabouts IIRC) when he knew the guy was working as a janitor was, I think, providing for his family as for hush money (because money = caring to him to a large degree), and he couldn’t have known the guy was suicidal. His horndoggery is inexcusable but- well, he paid the price for it.
I have a first season question: back when he was dating the bohemian chick he got a big bonus check and asked her to run away with him. Was he proposing she elope with him (maybe not elope as in marry but as in ‘hook up for a while’) and start a new life or was he just asking her to go with him on a spree? She seems his most serious romance so far, along with the teacher at least, but I think he was more emotionally connected to the bohemian.
I thought he asked her to take a trip to Paris eith him, but I’d have go go back and see it again go be sure.
- How old is Sally? In this episode I believe they said she was 10, but didn’t she finish 4th grade in 1963? And it’s now early 1965.
(Not likely to be a lesbian if she’s got the hots for Illya Kuryakin.)
- Faye is playing Don big time. Really big time. She probably actually is married. She’s already revealed how she fakes things to get people to talk.
And Don talked. Wow. But once he finds out he was being played, it’s going to get nasty.
OTOH, while Faye may think she is pretending to flirt with Don, she will course have a hard time separating the pretending from the reality.
Expect a major confrontation between Faye and Don when she threatens to hold over him the stuff he has revealed to her to get what she wants. But, of course, it will only backfire on her because she can’t pull the trigger. Maybe 2-3rd episode from the end of the season.
- Miss Blankenship can’t stay, Allison has to come back. Don has to apologize.
Which I think is going to be an upcoming theme. Don will apologize to Allison, Phoebe and then to Betty(!). And either Allison or Phoebe will be “the one” he opens up to. (I’m rooting for Phoebe to be “the one”, but that’s just my prejudice towards the actress.)
It all falls apart eventually and Don will regret it all.
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Betty is not a nice person. Never has been, never will be. She has always been a gossip, a relationship ruiner and a bird shooter. She also cheated on Don. She is in no way shape or form the victim of anything. Don’t think of her issues in relation to Don. She was like this from childhood.
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Don is not 100% evil. Well, sort of.
I keep pointing out over and over the dual nature of the character. There’s Don Draper: the cheating, heartless cad. Then there’s Dick Whiteman: the sympathetic, caring regular guy. The core of the show is how we viewers are constantly having to deal with despising and admiring two people in one role. That’s the biggest reason for enjoying the show. It’s a rollercoaster. One minute we love Dick, and the next minute we hate Don.
If you only see Don/Dick as evil, you are not watching Mad Men.
[Goof of the week: Watch the passing back and forth of the medical stuff between Phoebe and Billy.]
Phoebe? Billy?
Phoebe was the babysitter. Maybe Billy is a weird typo for Sally? I still don’t get “goof”.
There’s talk over at Slate that Sally has been getting her misinformation about sex from Glen, the creepy boy with the crush on all the female Drapers. (Glen [that’s the spelling at IMDb.] is played by Matthew Weiner’s son. Think about how messed up he’s going to be.)
Sally was checking out her friend to make sure she was sleeping before giving in to her Ilya feelings. That wasn’t a longing glance, that was an “I don’t want to get caught” glance.
As for Don Draper. The metaphor the show uses all along is how the pursuit of the American Dream forces Don Draper to crush whatever remains of Dick Whitman. He does not really go back and forth between the personalities, although he sometimes rebels against Don and tries to run away from him. (He tried to run away with the bohemian and then the department store owner and there are all the California episodes.) But he never succeeds. He never will succeed. He can’t go back, because there is nothing real about that past anymore. The only reality is the present and the future it inevitably leads to. Don will become more Draperish with time. It won’t be pretty.
Ah, it must be Bobby. Somehow I had completely forgotten the nurse’s name.
I took that as given.
The interesting thing about Don is that this season, he’s really starting to seem old-fashioned. In prior seasons, he was the James Bond of the show, the timeless classic of manhood. He’s lost his timelessness.
It’s not nearly as straightforward as that, even. Don is also the advertising genius who is fun to watch – he tells off the people that should be told off, pulls shennanigans on people that deserve it, and calls Roger on his BS. Dick is also the weasel who blew up Don Draper and then stole his identity.
What did he reveal that could hurt him? And what does she want?
I agree that Miss Blankenship has to go, but I don’t think Allison would come back, even with an apology. She’s not the type of woman who can sleep with someone without attaching some meaning to it. Don doesn’t want to be her boyfriend; she’ll stay away.
My wife and I caught up on this show via Netflix on the last few months, after never watching it before. When Season Four started, we started watching those episodes even though we hadn’t yet watched all of Season Three. We finally watched the end of Season Three last night. (Which, by the way, was fascinating. We knew Don and Betty were divorced and that Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Price had taken off, but we didn’t know how it all was going to happen. We were sure the affair with the teacher was going to be the straw that led to the divorce.)
Anyway, we’re finding the intense hatrid Betty still possesses for Don (see her statements when Don brings the recently trimmed Sally home) a little unexplained. Certainly, she’s righteously upset about Don/Dick’s big lie and the affairs Don had that she knew were occurring, but at the end of Season Three, Betty got what she wanted. She got a divorce on her terms, a divorce she asked for because she wanted to drop Don for Henry.
I mean, I really, really dislike Betty’s character, so I may be missing out on something, but it seems to me that Betty’s intense feelings toward Don show that she was nowhere near as indifferent to him as she claimed to be at the end of Season Three when she asked for the divorce.
Anyone have any good explanations for me?
Let’s not also forget that Henry apparently handpicked Betty’s divorce attorney and steered her down an avenue (quickie divorce, immediate remarriage, no alimony, Don keeps the house, etc) that leaves her financially dependant on him. It’ll be interesting if Betty even realize just how badly she got screwed over in the divorce and how it’s too late for her to do anything about it.
This bothered me from the get-go. As nice as Henry seems relative to Betty (and, hell, even relative to Don), he’s also very controlling; and he’s manuevered Betty into a situation in which she has a lot less leverage and control over her own life than I would want her to have if she were, say, my sister.
I wonder if, on some level, she realizes that, and her reluctance to leave the house is part of it. If they move out and Don sells the house (pocketing all the money, as it is in his name alone and the divorce is clearly final), then she’s utterly dependent on him.
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She wasn’t indifferent toward him, regardless of what she might have said. She hated him.
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Even now she feels betrayed and shamed by Don. He ruined her perfect marriage. Regardless of whether she might be in a better position now, the fact is that she’s been tainted. She’s a divorcee. She has a failed marriage in her background and she’s reminded of it repeatedly, when she has to interact with Don or with Henry’s family. She can’t be Princess Grace with her Prince Rainier ever again.
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There isn’t anything unusual about this kind of intense hatred between members of a failed relationship. Even when there has been much less in terms of actual misbehaviour. It’s a failed marriage; it implies wasted time, wasted youth, wasted sex. To put it crudely, Don is a man whom she let put his dick inside her, and being reminded of that fact can quite frequently be revolting to any Betty when confronted with an ex.
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Aside from anything else, Betty is intensely self-centred and vindictive. She’ll find a way to punish Don regardless of any other rational considerations.
In getting divorced, Betty’s already way outside her comfort zone. She wouldn’t have done it without the “life raft” of Henry Francis whom she can depend on utterly. Not only is Betty not a modern woman, she’s not even Helen Bishop. That’s yet a few steps ahead of where she is.
Thanks, ascenray, for the response. The end of Season Three was just so jarring, because my wife and I expected Don to openly screw things up and to give Betty a clear justification for divorcing him.
I’m not saying Betty didn’t have ample reasons to want a divorce. The Don/Dick lie and the constant affairs qualify in any book. It’s just that my wife and I were expecting more in terms of the immediate push for the divorce. As a result, we ended up feeling like Betty was cheating on Don, in her way, every bit as much as Don cheated on her and that Don was almost the wronged party in the whole thing.
(Of course, poor Sally and Bobby are the ones really wronged. Well, maybe Carla too.)
As related note, I can’t decide whether to criticize the men in Betty’s life (her father and Don, primarily) for infantilizing her, or to congratulate them for recognizing the fact that she really does act like an infant.