I’ve since read elsewhere that closed captioning read “haven’t been flagged”.
I don’t know what to think. I listened to it carefully three times, trying to hear the “n’t” and never caught it. Pete does stumble just at that moment.
Almost every character on the show gets introduced as someone despicable, and then is slowly revealed to have redeeming qualities. The other few are introduced as wonderful then slowly revealed to be louses. Yet most people seem to fix on that first impression of both groups.
That may be the most realistic thing about the show.
I’ll agree with this and backpedal, slightly, on the needs-a-beating remark. Pete hasn’t done anything truly vile since, and I think he realized what an awful, awful moral line he crossed. So I’ll grant that he’s earned his lesson.
When I saw the episode last night, I thought, wow, they really let it all out. The episode I was waiting for. When it just all comes in and out from everyone (except Peggy).
Then thinking about it today, I believe this episode may have jumped the shark.
Don/Dick has had way too many melt downs (Adam/Pete/Bert/Betty/Lynne) about Don/Dick. Let me know if I left someone out.
What the hell more can they do? There is no more Dick Whitman! The VERY last we saw of him was when Anna died. Of yeah, the desertion thing. Pete saved the day. Don was pathetic. As much as Roger is. And as much as everyone loves Joan, she is a woman at a stage in her life where she is every bit as cynical and cold as Don and Roger. Except for comforting the mother in the doctor’s office, she’s almost void of real emotion. OK, good acting.
Maybe the show will take a new direction with Peggy, Pete and Ken taking the lead. The rest of SCDP are a bunch of has beens. And they know it!
Oh yeah, that includes Layne. The most pathetic and contrived single story line in one episode of the entire run of the show. He had his pants down in Macy’s window at noon. Go back to the UK and stay there.
Also, the show is becoming very predictible. Did anyone really think The Beatles tickets weren’t going to arrive? Not after what we’ve seen before. Among the great lines of season four; “Betty” - It is Sunday! One week one thing, the next week, the opposite.
They are starting to put a nice little bow at the end of every show. I hope they can salvage that trend.
This show is in danger of not being special anymore.
Have they said how old Joan is? I would guess early 30s, but I’m wondering if perhaps it’s mid or late 30s. (Christine Hendricks is 35, not that it means much for her character; John Slattery is 47 and Roger’s several years older than that.
The Beatles tickets weren’t an actual storyline. The whole point of the tickets was for them to disappear during the entire episode. You think the episode is going to be about Don taking Sally to this concert, but when everything starts going down Don completely forgets everything else (and so did I, and so did most viewers I suspect). He is Dick Whitman for the episode, and is only Don again once the tickets come back and Megan reminds them that everything “worked out.”
You’re really accusing the show of (shudder) “jumping the shark” and then calling it predictable in the same post?
Wikipedia lists her birthday as February 24, 1931, but I don’t know how reliable that is. The cite for that factoid is: “Flight 1”. Writ: Weiner, Matthew; Albert, Lisa. Mad Men. AMC. August 3, 2008. No. 2, season 2. It would make Joan 34 in the current season, which seems about right.
I believe she was already mid-30’s in season two, when somebody posted her birth certificate in the lunch room as a mean joke(I think that was season two, at least)? I forget exactly how old she was then.
Kinsey used SC’s brand new photocopier to make a copy of Joan’s driver’s licence and post it on the bulletin board for all to see.
I wonder what Joan’s relationship with her own family is like. None of her relatives have ever shown up onscreen, nor has she even mentioned them. It seemed like she was planning her own wedding, she was already living with Greg. It seems like she’s estranged from whatever realitives she has still living.
That’s one of the things discussed in the recent Rolling Stone article about the show. IIRC, Christina specifically talked about how Weiner doesn’t give the actors any background on their characters. So she doesn’t even know about her relatives. Interesting way to do things.
My question is: do we know what aspects of the real Don Draper Dick Whitman has adopted, and which ones he’s dropped? I think he said something about the birth date being wrong, and also the engineering background. So I’m guess that Dick Whitman decided to keep his own birthday and drop any pretenses of an engineering degree. Doesn’t that just seem stupid to anyone else? Why not take the whole thing? Yeah, he’d have to pretend to be a couple years older, but who cares? And he could just sort of say that he decided he didn’t want to be an engineer so he went into sales.
Odd that Joan has never had a single relative. Maybe she ran away from a farm when she was young and clawed her way up. If Betty’s dad Gene was still alive, he would yell, “she has NO PEOPLE”. Well, maybe that’s a good thing for Joan.
The espisode has nothing to do with The Beatles at Shea. It’s about predictability and expectations. The Don/Dick thing. In season three his reaction to Betty finding out about Dick Whitman was a work of art. This episode ripped it off. And not very well. To me that is jumping the shark.
I love the show and I’ll always watch every episode until the end of it’s run in 2012.
But I stand ny my comments. They hit it out of the park with “The Suitcase” and that could have been the end of Mad Men. No questions asked. I voted “meh” for that one. But after seeing it three more times, I believe it ranks among the best ever. I may watch this one one more time.
Did you see my other comments about the Don/Dick thing. That story is dead in the water (for now). Joan is as troubled as Betty and they’ve become almost the same person.
They need to stop with the Don/Dick thing and move on. There are so many other interesting characters to focus on. But not the baboon that plays the artist ( his fame is from Waldorf Stories). Talk aboout another cliche.
They shook it up this year. And oveall it’s been a great season. But if they go to 1969/70, they had better come up with some new ideas.
Add one more to the Don/Dick do you want know a secret?
The cute hamburger stand waitperson when he won the Cloe.
Ok. Don getting tickets and showing up did matter. Only because he messed up before. There is some good in him. So The Beatles were huge in this episode because with everything that was going on he was not going to miss that. Like he did the time before. Let’s see what he does to disappoint someone next week.
Actually, yes - I did. exactly because of what we’ve seen before-namely, Sally gets trampled. For some reason, that storyline distracted me. So I was afraid that Harry forgot, the tickets would get lost in the mail or the courier wouldn’t arrive in time, Don would be too sick (or drunk) to take her, Betty would decide to punish either Sally or Don by saying “no” at the last minute. Pretty much every time anything happened, for some reason I filtered it through Sally & those tickets.
Not I. If I were shooting at him I would wait until he was stationary (preferably asleep) and have him firmly in my sights before pulling the trigger. But I like Sal and I see no reason why I would shoot him. Thus I have no missed him.
