One of Betty’s many complaints about Don was that he didn’t have a clue how to manage money.
I saw it not so much as Roger’s being afraid he might lose his office, and more that he just wanted to end the argument – first because it’s generally a buzzkill which Roger is temperamentally ill-suited to handle, and, more importantly, because as long as it’s an issue it highlights his growing obsolescence/irrelevancy within the agency.
Notice I said that Roger didn’t want to take the risk of “losing to Pete,” not “lose his office.” The longer the dispute goes on, the more attention is paid to Roger and Pete’s relative contributions.
This seems to be more or less consistent with what I said.
My ears practically bugged out of my head when I heard that.
The Korean War ended on July 27, 1953. If Dick Whitman turned 40 six months before June 1, 1966, he was born probably in December 1925. That makes him at most 17 when he enlisted and at most 17 when he met Don Draper and at most 17 when he took over the identity of an officer who would have had to be a college graduate (June 1 is just a birthdate, apparently, although the dialog implied that the real Draper had just turned 40) and fooled every person in the Armed Services who encountered him. Including the ones who gave him a Purple Heart.
Wait, it gets worse. Much worse. After leaving Korea he takes a job as a car salesman, attends CCNY for a time [although people have always asked why a college graduate would do this], moves to a job at a fur store, creates advertising for them after being there awhile, meets Betty, cons Roger into a job, and then marries Betty. In May 1953. That’s the accepted date. It’s about the latest it could have occurred, given the other dates presented over the course of the first four seasons. It’s corroborated by Sally’s age, since she’s usually thought of as being born in 1954. This can’t be too far off since 12 is the real actress’s age.
So Dick Whitman was 16 in Korea. Or maybe 15. And 17 when he marries Betty.
That’s crazy. And entirely unnecessary. Unless the whole thing is a plant for a later event I can’t imagine, there’s absolutely no reason why Don Draper couldn’t be older. His new wife could still throw him a surprise birthday party even if the year wasn’t the round 4-0. I just don’t get it.
Right. I remember that now. He had a small stake in the firm, didn’t he? Not the size of the others, who must have received much more? But he moved into a cheap apartment when he separated from Betty, sank the buyout money into a new firm that is not generating any real profits, and can afford what’s obviously a swanky and large apartment this year? Where’s that money coming from? Megan’s salary as junior copywriter?
For a show people pick apart obsessively and in which everything is therefore a clue, these are huge holes.
And here we go with the obsessive details.
The water-bags on the OEO protesters actually happened. And on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, 1966.
According to Slate, those office workers were at… yep, Young & Rubicam.
My bet is, Weiner threw out any date he had planned and used this as his launching point. Or he could have had this tucked away for years, I suppose, but he really didn’t need to research this before the hiatus.
The exact timeline isn’t exactly crucial to the drama. It’s an inconsistency, but really only noticed by someone deliberately trying to piece the timeline together. This kind of drama is obviously not written for that degree of technical scrutiny. You’re just supposed to accept the facts as they come and ignore inconsistencies or retcons as they occur. TV drama isn’t written like a novel so that all the little details hold together from beginning to end.
So, you can call these huge holes if you want, but it’s obviously not something that the writers really care about. You’ve been shown Dick Whitman serving in Korea and working at a car dealership and he’s obviously not a teen-ager in those scenes, so that’s pretty much that.
Yes. Alan Sepinwall revealed that in his review.
What? Nobody recognized her as Mary Todd Lincoln in The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer?
As for my previous comments on Dick Whitman’s age: disregard them entirely. I must have been out on the balcony inhaling some tea when I did the math. :smack:
I don’t know about going all the way up to the present day, but I would be interested in seeing the different characters in the '70s. Maybe some kind of montage in the final moments of the series to the present, but then that would just look they were ripping off Daria or Six Feet Under.
If Dick Whitman was born at the end of 1925, then he would have been about 24 when the Korean War started in 1950. He would have been 27 in 1953 when he married Betty. And the real Don Draper would have been six months younger, which was plenty old enough to have gone to college and spent a little time in the Army.
I think you’re off by a decade.
If anything this raises the question of what Dick Whitman did between school and joining the Army. That’s quite a few years that AFAIK aren’t accounted for.
Sophia Loren sang the original in one of her movies. Gillian Hill’s version was a cover, sung in French.
OK, here’s Sophia Loren’s English original.
Why is this episode called “A Little Kiss”?
Okay… never mind. I guess it’s because of the song, which must mean “little kiss.”
I hope hope hope they don’t end the series with the characters in their 70’s or 80’s. The makeup will be horrible- old age makekup is never convincing- and it would take me right out of the story.
Everything I’ve read suggests the opposite is true.
According to The Daily Beast, Hills made the first recording:
Yeah, it would make absolutely no sense if the English version came first.
I wouldn’t be so sure. From here:
I thought it was clear from the scenes between Don/Dick in Korea and between Anna/Dick in California that the real Don was born at least several years before Dick.
They actually addressed the inconsistency in season 4 when Pete brought in North American Aviation. If you’ll recall, Don blew up at Megan for filling in a security clearance request form for him with the Department of Defense–he then tells Pete to kill the account because “the dates are all wrong”.
Don had to have falsified some documents to make the ages match up–and if you’re going to falsify documents, might as well make yourself younger than you actually are, right?
Last night when I checked IMDb credits, they were useless. Try here and click on “Credits” to see the guest stars. (Christine Estabrook is correct.)
Note: Yet Another Bobby (YAB?).
No Betty. Maybe January Jones wasn’t ready for filming after having her kid. We really need to see what she’s up to. The “Next Episode” doesn’t show her directly but has Henry yelling at her (apparently). (No Betty/Sally stuff means no Glen stuff. I gotta get my Glen fix.)
It’s the subtle stuff among the women (including Sally) that runs thru this episode. Peggy hates Megan (crush on Don?, Megan taking the easy path to copy writing?). Megan hates Joan (probably thinks Joan and Don have a thing), etc.
Pete doesn’t know how do drive? Interesting.
Megan was running Don with the fake cleaning in her underwear thing. Don is in deep trouble here.
I agree. Dick is something like ~3 years younger than Don. This came up when the defense contract was looming and Betty started to really get mad at Don.