Yeah, but only because everyone else on the show is so unfaithful. Really, she’s been depicted as nothing but devoted to Don as a wife and is heartsick at how things are going with them separated. So it was unfair to expect it but I still did.
Peggy, as I recall, has it in her head that Don orchestrated sending Ted away to break Peggy and Ted apart. I seem to remember Don calling out Peggy and Ted making love-eyes during the client meeting. Rationally, she should accept that Ted chose LA to save his marriage (he directly says so) but she needs someone to blame and she still loves Ted so she’s blaming Don.
I assume at some point there’ll be a meeting where the client is unhappy and people will be expecting Don to break out something magical and he’ll just let the opportunity pass because he would have been “off script”.
I don’t understand why everyone was expecting Don to behave like his old self and flouce out rejecting SCP’s conditions. His entire story arc lately has been his attempt to correct the mistakes he’s made that led him here: he’s trying to control his drinking, he’s staying faithful to Megan. Of course he agreed to the conditions; they’re resolutions he’d already made to do himself (other than reporting to Lou, presumably).
Megan and Peggy I couldn’t figure out. Megan was thrilled when Don showed up unexpectedly, then furious when she found out it was because he was worried about her. And Peggy… eh, I’m over Peggy’s crappy new attitude.
Are we supposed to think that the woman who came on to Don so strong in the restaurant was a setup by the firm courting him? That whole scene played out oddly, and frankly Don doesn’t really come across as irresistable-to-women as he used to; he’s too dissolute and is showing his age. I know the cutaway to knocking on Roger’s door was supposed to be a fakeout – but, again, Don has been steadfastly turning over a new leaf, and it’s too early in the (half-)season for him to fall.
For all Roger has been frustrated and feeling useless lately, he pretty much dominated that partner meeting to get his way.
The minute Betty volunteered to go on the field trip, I knew it wouldn’t end well. That black cloud floating over her head brightened up until the lunch scene. I could see her feeling all pissed off for a while, but having lived with a miserable bitch of a mother myself, after a while she should have decided, well, no use prolonging the coldness. But there’s poor Bobby sitting at the kitchen table, being punished, hours after ‘the perfect day’ ended.
She was furious because she thought he showed up because he missed her and instead was only there because her agent was telling Don that she’s a lunatic. Then he admitted that he not only hadn’t been working for SC&P but didn’t use all that free time to come stay with her while she was all alone trying to make a career in the place promised to her by Don last season. Even if he was trying to find new work, he could have been trying to find new work at an LA agency.
Don is trying something new. His status quo throughout the series was to make a mess of things and run away. He ran away from his family and old identity. Started a new ad agency when the old one was not working out. Ran away from his marriage to Betty (you can argue the breakup was mutual, but the point is Don did not attempt to fix his marriage.)
Now Don is faced with the same choices. He can run away from his mess and go to a new agency and start cheating on his wife again, or he can stay and try and make things work.
I’m simply loving the new Don because I’ve never seen another TV character do what Don is doing. I can’t wait to see how this all plays out.
I imagine Peggy’s redemption arc is coming. We just need to see her fall down a few notches in order to make her rise back up more compelling.
I believe that woman was absolutely a “gift” from the other firm, as part of their courtship of Don. Old Don would have enjoyed her company, New Don goes to talk to Roger about coming back to SCP.
The woman who came onto Don in the restaurant; didn’t she say that her room was on the top floor, near the elevator? I got the idea that she was sending a message from Roger, and that Don recognized that the room she described was Roger’s.
If it had just been the Hershey’s meeting and nothing else, then he probably would have just had to meet with the partners and they would have said something like “hey, be cool, don’t do that again.”
But for a while Don had been a liability, causing problems and being more trouble than he’s worth. Hershey’s was the straw to break the camel’s back.
I think Betty’s story was showing how things for women are changing. Betty’s friend talking about working part-time while Betty isn’t. Since Betty has no other job other than being a mom (and a politician’s wife), she was trying to be the best one she can be, but doesn’t fully understand what that means.
I felt sorry for poor Bobby. He was obviously thrilled that his mom was on the field trip. And his stupid mistake of trading away her sandwich isn’t even that stupid when you think about how there probably have been multiple times when she wouldn’t have anything for lunch except her cigarettes.
Peggy is resentful of pretty much the world right now, but she’s angry at Don because of how he treated her and Ted. It’ll be interesting to see if Don can prove himself.
I’m surprised that any viewer would see Don as somewhat happy. I don’t think he’s as miserable as he’s been at other times during the show, but I definitely wouldn’t characterize him as happy.
Peggy is being unrealistic in thinking that she and Ted had a chance at having a great relationship. But Don dealt with things in a bad way and that definitely increases Peggy’s resentment. If Don was mature, he would have sat Peggy down and said that her and Ted’s relationship was unprofessional, and was going to cause problems for her, and that while her creative ideas were good, that the client wasn’t going to go for the cast size and costs.
You’re probably right about that happening in a meeting. Clients don’t want to see another meltdown like at the Hershey’s meeting, but they also probably don’t want to see boring, by-the-script, non-magic Don. There will be a lot of frustration with having Don back, but it’s not really Don.
I agree, that was weird. Women hitting on Don doesn’t seem strange, like the stewardess hitting on him, but the way that scene was set up was strange.
The recap of the episode in The New York Times suggested that the episode is setting up a conflict between Don’s creative style and the data-driven analytic method suggested by Harry Crane.
I was going to mention this as well, Jim literally wanted to replace Don with a computer, it is the old world vs the new, also exemplified in Betty’s story arc.
I assume also that Joan still has a (legitimate) chip on her shoulder about Don throwing away Jaguar without consulting anyone and then dismissing Joan’s outrage by saying she got what she wanted out of it. That also ruined the deal she was involved in to take the company public (? - is that right, been a while) and get big money.
Maybe I misunderstood but I assumed the computer bit was about putting together viewership numbers or magazine subscribers or whatever so determine how to best target advertising. Which would fall right into Harry’s realm as purchasing media. But that doesn’t really step on toes of what to make the ads look/sound like in the first place. I can see a conflict over how to allocate money (buying computers vs paying more commercial actors) but not really conflict over how the departments are run.
Did Jim want to replace Harry with a computer? I thought he said he wanted to talk about Harry and Roger said “Fine, he’s gone” but Jim really wanted to advocate for Harry’s computer request.
What kind of computer would Harry be thinking of purchasing? At this point, I think they’d need a dedicated computer room, computer analysts and so forth. Or was he imagining renting time on someone else’s system?
Jim’s idea was that the money they were paying Don could instead be used to buy a computer. The thing that is weird about that scene is that there is some obvious exposition going on for the viewer when it has to be explained to Jim, or he needs to be reminded, that Don is a partner and they would need to buy him out, that the savings form not paying him would not really be there.
This thought fleetingly crossed my mind, too. I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Observing Don report to Lou should be mesmerizing. So Lou only has a two-year contract, eh? How far are we into that? Glad to hear he feels threatened by Don and on shaky ground.
And when several people told Don (to the effect) that “we don’t miss you–we’re doing fine…” Uh, no. They’re NOT doing fine.
Roger got it right: Don is a [creative] genius. And that’s the one thing you need in the ad business, and it’s a gift, a talent, that cannot be learned. Peggy has some of it, but not at Don’s level. The agency NEEDS him. All the creative people they have right now don’t add up to one Don Draper. But yeah, he has to be kept on a leash. However, the leash they came up with is too tight and frankly insulting. But he needs the work and this is what he does. If he can discipline himself he can redeem himself.
This show is so painful to watch. The tension sometimes is almost unbearable. What MAKES it bearable is coming here to the SDMB and finding out that others had not only the same reactions and thoughts and questions, but better and deeper insights than my own. <sigh> No one IRL around me watches MM except one other person. If I couldn’t digest the shows afterwards in some forum like this one, my head would surely explode.