I’m with acsenray. If he wasn’t prepared to pick up everybody’s tab, he shouldn’t have invited Pegg’s entire entourage. It would certainly be gracious of the rest of the table to take care of their portion of the bill once the situation blew up, but if the boyfriend specified from the outset that it would be on him, he should follow through with that. If that’s the case, he’d be spending less than he had intended anyway (granted, with no reward). He does mention to Peggy that he’s into the dinner for $40; were they all having cocktails or something? I don’t think they ordered any food.
I did like his “Yes, I am that important” to the maitre d’ or whoever when he brought him the telephone for the umpteenth time.
It’s worth remembering that the inflation rate since those times is on the order of 10 times, so a $40 dinner then would cost today’s big spender close to $400. Not quite a “just appetizers” blast. Gas was in the 29c per gallon range, cigarettes 25c per pack, beer 20c, a modest but comfortable house $20,000. Shit happens.
In the scene between Peggy and Don at the bar after they left the diner, they’re talking about Peggy’s pregnancy (of course, without ever using the term). At one point Don asks “Do you know who it was?” and Peggy replied “of course”, then there’s another line or two, and then Peggy said something which I thought might have been her telling him it was Pete, but we played it back three times and we couldn’t make out what she said- it was just a couple words but it didn’t sound like “Pete Campbell”. Was it?
Also, I thought it was a great episode but I cringed at the Anna apparition. Don cleans up well after a night of being hammered, stumbling drunk with puke on his shirt. Loved how the tables turned with Don showing Peggy his great idea for the Samsonite ad and she rightly pointed out numerous problems with it, not the least of which was how to do it on TV.
What was his idea for the Samsonite ad? Was it to portray the Samsonite suitcase as Ali standing over the knocked-out American Tourister suitcase as Liston? As she asked, would the suitcases be animated? How would the audience make the connection to the title fight? And since this would be, at the very least, an implied endorsement by Ali, wouldn’t that have been controversial at that time?
After seeing ghost-Anna with the suitcase, I fully expected him to wake up in the morning with the slogan “Samsonite: ready when you are!” While he was looking at her, it seemed to me that a flash of an idea or inspiration came to his face.
So I was quite surprised at what he came up with (Ali-Liston as luggage). It’s not clear if the writers are really thinking this is a good ad or not, but like others have said, it seems a “fail” on several points, not the least of which everyone thinks the match was a sham, that Liston took a fall. Not a good association for a client’s product.
I thought that was a great scene, especially with Peggy coming into his office looking like hell. I’m hoping that my way of reading it was correct: Don came around a corner (cleaned up) but isn’t magically at 100% (stupid ad idea).
Mark did have a plate of half-eaten food in front of him during the break-up conversation.
The Anna “appearance” didn’t bother me because the show has done things like this before. Remember when Don fell down the stairs and flashed back to his childhood or that episode where he imagined his own birth.
I liked the contrast between Don, who knows how to appear recovered from an all-nighter after so many years of practice and Peggy, who’s probably in bed by 10pm most nights.
The Forum of the Twelve Caesars was a fantastically high end restaurant. It was the sort of place you take people to in order to impress them. I’m sure Peggy was looking forward to the restaurant as much as the date.
Remember. In television there’s no such thing as an unexpressed thought.
Maybe. The other way of looking at it is that Don’s whole life is about “donning” a false appearance. He’s better at that than at being an ad man. That he could do so this time doesn’t mean that much to me. Peggy is the one who needs to learn to fake it if she’s going to get ahead in such a fake business.
I commented last thread about the short time - no more than two years - between Don’s getting out of Korea and marrying Betty in 1953. He didn’t spend all that time with Anna, either. That’s a deep bond for a teenager to make in a year or so.
I’m lost on the whole time line. Did they meet in New York or California? If the former, do we know exactly when Anna moved to California? How much time did they spend together?
But people do say crap like that in real life. It’s not just a TV trope.
The timeline has always been problematic. I thought Weiner had admitted that it would have made more chronological sense to make Draper a WWII vet but that he chose Korea because it was a much more ambiguous war.
I think Anna always lived in California. She tracked Don down at the Cadillac dealership in New York.
I’m really impressed by the research the show goes into and this is a great example. I’ve heard of The Forum of the Twelve Caesars at some point but all I knew was “upscale restaurant”, yet they used the actual menu and clothed the waiter in a purple livery for the brief scene even though way under 1% of the viewing audience would have realized its accuracy. (According to that article the restaurant’s been closed since 1976 by which time it was years past its heyday so even most lifelong New Yorkers would have little or no memory of it.)
Do we know what Peggy’s (now ex)-boyfriend does for a living? He must have had the money to pay for everyone’s meal at that extravagant restaurant (thank you, Exapno, for that link), as there is no way any of Peggy’s family or her roommate would be able to afford it.
Yes, they do. It’s amazing how many times since the age of 12(!) that I’ve had some “helpful” woman reassure me that I’m not so old and dried up I’ll wind up alone and dressing my cats in baby clothes. There’s just a certain type of person who assumes every female’s dearest goal in life is to get married and have babies, so when confronted with someone who hasn’t done that yet they conclude that person must be filled with despair at this failure. They don’t want you to be filled with despair, and also they have no brain-mouth filter, and so they pop out with these sorts of comments.
She was saying what occasionally reminded her.