Giving the kid his car was brilliant?
Maybe.
But the kid has no money. The first time he gets a flat tire or needs gas, he’ll have to sell the car and he won’t get a very good price for it under those circumstances.
I would guess Don is just setting up the kid for a big, big disappointment and the feeling that he is a real loser - which he is.
Pete should do all right. Even if this fell through AND he lost McCann in the process (though that seems unlikely) he’s in a situation like Joan where he’s already set for the near term with the initial buy-out. Plus he’s a white male with connections who is willing to play the game.
Why are you calling Betty “Buddy”?
Don’s pet name for Betty has always been “Birdy” (or possibly, “Berdy” or “Berttie”).
…Being Mentored Half-Assedly By Roger Sterling."
[crosses fingers]
More likely, Sally realizes her dad got rich pushing the product that killed her mother, and hates him with a passion for the rest of her life.
Even better: Don shows up at the house to visit the boys, and Henry, driven mad with grief over Betty’s demise, shoots him with a .45.
Remember the first episode? “It’s toasted!” Now Don is toast! 
Don is not heading back to NY.
He is finishing his disappearing act.
He dropped his job (left in the middle of the day). He dropped his family (He’s still calling them from the road, however). He dropped his wife (Second divorce). He dropped his money (million dollar cheque). He dropped his car.
He’s going to return to California as a blank slate. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took another name.
One cool thing that the AV Club pointed out in their review is that McCann asked him to ‘fix Coke’ and then the motel owner asked him to ‘fix Coke’ again (this time the machine). Pretty cool writing.
All the people who keep thinking that Don is going to take another false name have not been paying attention all these seasons. Or even to this episode, where Don goes on a bit of a rant to the dumb kid about how it’s impossible to live your life under a false identity.
If anything, Don might go back to being Dick. This roadtrip and this episode in particular is part of him seeking to reconnect to his past.
But either way, he’ll probably end up in California.
But quite realistic for the day.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always hated January Jones’ line readings. She has Betty come across as snotty and borderline insane - and I’m sure she was directed to read this way, so it’s not a dig at the actress. She read far more naturally this show, as if she had given up her airs. And I loved that she chose to go back to class.
Betty has always been interested in appearances, so the letter didn’t offend me. She was acknowledging that Sally was now grown and responsible.
And has she ever said “I love you” to Sally before? I can’t recall, but I’m fuzzy on this.
I’m irritated as hell that Don is giving shit away to people who don’t deserve it.
His most recent ex did not deserve the $1M check he wrote her. What the hell did she do to earn that? Similarly giving the cadillac to the kid, the fuck for?
Most pathetic of all is his initial reason for this trip - to yet again find the broken waitress. And why?.. Because she reminds him of the woman he had brief affair with and handn’t spoken to for years until due to pure dumb luck finding out that she recently passed away?
It’s all too out of character for him and I’ve seen no good reason in the story line to date about why he’d be compelled to suddenly come clean about his past and who he is.
This just isn’t building to a satysfying or even plausable conclusion for me.
Geez, what an episode. I watched it on Amazon Prime just a little while ago, and I had to take a break halfway through.
Did NOT see the thing with Betty coming. I’m not sure I agree that her reaction to the diagnosis was “classy”… especially snubbing Sally when she showed up in the kitchen, and being so cold and matter-of-fact about refusing treatment and also refusing emotional connection. But it was certainly Betty.
I’m glad Don got to make his confession (part of it anyway) to a group of sympathetic guys, even if they did beat him up later for the wrong reason.
Pete handled himself pretty decently through the whole episode-- that was a surprise, too. Some of his lines could have come from the lips of an earlier Don Draper.
I feel like we’re careening toward the end and there won’t be enough time in the last episode to wrap things up satisfactorily. We’ve got to get some kind of closure in New York!
That *was *cool.
Question: Granted that Don has a boatload of money in the bank… how would he access it during a road trip like this? Credit card use was not that widespread in the early 70s. Out-of-town checks wouldn’t have been welcome most places. ATMs were not all over the place. In the previous episode, Betty was showing Sally how to fill out travelers’ checks, which was the standard way of spending money on a trip.
I remember in the late 1970s, going at lunchtime to the grocery store near where I worked to cash checks for running-around money. The guy I was dating was a LOT older than me (closer to Roger’s age than Don’s) and he used to go to the bank to get spending money…he didn’t know you could get checks cashed at grocery store customer service counters. If he had forgotten to go to the bank during the week, he thought he was out of luck. There weren’t that many places to readily get your hands on your own cash back then. How would Don have managed on this trip? How would he pay for the bus ticket? I guess he might have been carrying several hundred dollars on him in a money belt or something.
I have often felt uncomfortable with the level of misogyny in Mad Men. I don’t mean the sexism that the characters face, which more often than not accurately reflects the time. I’m referring to a kind of hostility directed at the female characters by the writers. If you compare Betty in the early episodes, when she was treated with a considerable degree of sympathy, to her transformation into a nasty shrew, it is quite depressing. So it is refreshing to see a more complex and understanding representation of the women characters, e.g. Joan finally standing up to somebody about the sexual harassment she faces on a daily basis (even though taking a stand didn’t get her anywhere, which was a disappointing but probably realistic resolution) and Peggy seemingly coming into her own with her shades and her cigarette and her newfound swagger.
I think the writers are trying to give us a similar chance WRT Betty. Unfortunately, the cancer storyline just seems such a flat, movie-of-the-week plot device. It’s designed to make the audience have an automatic, knee-jerk sympathy for Betty. I would have preferred to see something less clichéd, more nuanced. In fact, if our last view of Betty had been that scene with Don, with her at the kitchen table studying psychology, that would have been a better conclusion for the character than the dramatic discovery of cancer. Betty’s letter to Sally was excellent, though, in the way it revealed so much about her. And thank God the writers allowed Betty to include some words of love for Sally, rather than overdoing it and reducing Betty to a harpy once again.
Betty kinda had to get lung cancer because of this:
Do read the NYT article-- it addresses your comments about the show’s women, too.
Regarding Don’s traveling money, perhaps he’s living off of that fat stack of cash Meredith found in his desk when they moved to McCann (along w/ passport and Anna’s ring).
Thank you for the link. I will definitely take a look at the article.
Must be what’s in the Sears bag.
I think that’s his suitcase. He left with just his suit so I assume he stopped at Sears to get clothes…that’s why he’s not dressed…well, like Don.
The cash he’s been using is definitely from the “bug-out bag” that Meredith game him in the previous episode.
Someone help me- Don tells the story that he killed his CO in Korea by dropping a lighter. My memory was that there was a shell that exploded and killed the real Don Draper. Am I misremembering and if so, what did Don mean by that lie?
Didn’t the lighter set the fire that burned the corpse?
I’m not so sure about that. My mother had cancer a few years before Betty, and even in the 1960s, even here in the Midwest, the doctors would at least speak directly to her. She certainly didn’t have my father coming in and interpreting for her.
Now it could be that the scene was meant to represent that Henry continues to treat Betty like a child, and this is her last chance to be in control. I’ll buy that, but it’s symbolic, not realistic.