That just has to happen!
So is Don coming down with lung cancer, you reckon?
And Eve deserves a prize for planting the seeds in my mind for Sally to go all Manson Chick any day now. That will be the payoff of all payoffs for me. 
Everyone has flaws. Our best friends and closest relatives have trespassed some line or other. Why would that make us change sides?
Anyway, none of us would be here without countless acts of cuckolding in our family trees. It’s a mundane sort of thing, which eventually becomes irrelevant.
Plus, the other side is a rapist. And an idiot. And a very bad surgeon. Who knows how many wounded soldiers he’s killed with his incompetence?
I did exactly what Sally did: snitched the paper, read about Richard Speck, did not sleep for, oh, about three years. I wish *my *grandma had given me some dolls!
I spent the 1960s pretty much convinced that the Boston Strangler, Richard Speck, the Manson family, the Zodiac, and whoever killed Valerie Percy were all hiding in my bedroom closet.
I think his cough/illness was just an excuse for him to have the fever dream. I thought it was interesting that all they had in the office was aspirin. If I remember right, there weren’t many OTC remedies for colds and flu in 1966.
I didn’t remember anything about the nurse murders. I thought Richard Speck was the guy with a rifle in a tower at a college somewhere. Texas? Guess I’d better brush up on my mass murder history.
Charles Whitman.
Which made for a hilarious one-liner in FX’s Archer when Archer, upon observing a colleague expertly snipe a Cuban hit squad, dubs the act “A Charles Whitman Sampler.”
I generally frown upon dream sequences, so that slightly downgrades this episode for me. Otherwise I thought it was stellar. I loved the scene in the bar with Don, Ginsberg and Ken.
“You realize you almost got fired, just now.”
“I don’t think it was that close.”
“I do.”
What I find really odd about Grandma Francis is that she appears to be the same age as her son! I can’t find an age listed anywhere for either performer, but they both look to be in their early fifties.
I agree. Don has become boring; he doesn’t even have those brilliant insights into advertising pitches that he used to have. At this point, he could almost leave the series and not be missed, just like Betty is doing. Roger still rocks the place and has the best lines and scenes. At least we’re through with the Doctor McRaper story arc, and Joan will be returning to the workplace next episode it seems.
I think it’s interesting, at least to me, how Don has gone from uber-hip and all that to actually looking a bit fuddy-duddy compared to all the young, hip folks at the firm (and his wife!).
I’m looking forward to watching how Joan Holloway got her groove back.
I’m also not sure what the hell that was - but it didn’t work for me, either.
Most of the rest of the episode did. I loved Peggy & Roger and felt triumphant when Joan kicked out Greg.
I like how Joan’s mother is simultaneously a greedy, superficial, and hypercritical little troublemaker AND a genuinely helpful and concerned mom. The two natures can co-exist.
And Roger laid the groundwork during Don’s birthday party for being unhappy in his (second) marriage.
Exhibit A for why dream sequences are the lazy writer’s worst enemy.
Oh, boo. A fever dream sequence, really? That couldn’t have been more corny if I’d been watching it in the fields out back of my grandma’s house in Nebraska.
And, I’m all for compressed storytelling and show-don’t-tell, but some – any – buildup to Joan’s decision would have been a good thing. We went from Joan conniving to sex up her hubby so’s he won’t notice her bastard spawn, to Joan angry at her rapist husband for not staying around to sex her up, to Joan going to bed and waking up deciding what the heck the marriage was over. And Greg arriving at the same decision in less than one minute after she brings up the idea.
Feels like there should have been another fever dream sequence of Joan’s stuffing Greg under the bed, or something, to explain the emotional whiplash. The pieces that made up her decision are probably scattered all over the last few episodes, but they forgot to put in something to unify them into one perspective.
At least Don’s crappy fever dream did that.
Sepinwall has a good point that the fever dream worked BECAUSE it was fairly obvious from the start to be a dream. From his review:
I think they are closer in age than biologically feasible, with Grandma Francis appearing to be in her mid-60s, given her imdb profile. The actor playing Henry Francis is overly careful about avoiding his age being mentioned anywhere, so I’m figuring he’s mid-50s playing ten years younger.
Last week’s dream sequence was obvious from the first second. This week’s dream sequence was a direct cheat of the audience. It’s hard enough to believe that the sniffles can create hallucinations of that magnitude or that a mere cold could lead to a complete blackout that lasts overnight. Fever dreams are real, but it’s impossible to imagine that in them you’re exactly as sniffy and feverish as you are in real life. We were being told something important about Don Draper until we weren’t. I wanted to believe it was real because it would have been far more interesting that way.
Both new characters are being handled badly as well. Dawn is being used as a symbol rather than as a person. Ginsburg has been in the office for literally a week if I have the timing right. He hasn’t had time to even learn about the campaign, and there’s no way anybody in that office would have allowed him to speak at the presentation let alone lead it. He should have been cut off after the first syllable when he mentioned Cinderella.
The writer credited with Weiner is Victor Levin. He’s never worked on Mad Men before. On IMDb he has some 90s sitcoms credits and a bunch of nothing meaningful since. Let’s hope we never see his name again.
The actor is 52 years old. Let’s say he is playing 48 and the mother is playing 65. Seventeen years is too hard to believe.
Did they just drop the problem of Joan having a baby by someone else since her husband was overseas at time of conception? Or are we to infer she made a quick visit to see him at his base before he left (she was taking a bus ride last season after visiting the clinic, so she might not have been going back to NY but to whereever the husband was.)