As for the doctor thing, remember that Betty’s doctor and Don conspired over her depression (?) treatment in an earlier season, essentially treating her like a child or puppet. Things might have changed a little by 1970s but if Betty was being unresponsive or defiant, the doctor turning to Gene is a perfectly ordinary action for the times.
Don has a lot of money to throw around, but it’s ridiculous to think he has $500.
The owner didn’t say anything when Don didn’t pay for the room because he knew he’d tried to hustle Don for the “donation”, he knew they’d swindled Don on the car repair, and he knew Don could get them in big trouble for the beating.
Yes, the kid left right after. And they can now all pretend that Don, not the kid, was guilty since Don assumed the blame. So the kid can go home and everyone can pretend he didn’t try to steal from them.
psst, Amateur Barbarian, Gene is Betty’s dead father or her youngest son; Henry is her husband.
I didn’t get Wojo’s story at the VFW.
“We bounced them…”
“Told them to start digging…”
“Took a few hours…”
Huh? Did they bury the Germans alive?
“You did what you had to do to come home.” Um, ok.
They couldn’t feed the prisoners and themselves. They made the men dig their own graves and then killed them.
I’m wondering about this too…current web searches are split between whether “bouncing” means they simply killed them (rather than having to feed them as POWs) or ate them.:eek:
Someone’s gone so far as to update Wikipedia’s bounce page - (bottom of page - “Other Uses”).
The other guys seemed pretty forgiving if it turned out they ate them. They might just have given Dick a pass for stealing Don’s identity.
“S’all right, buddy. You did what you had to do.”
I took the story to mean that they ate them. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
It was wartime. If they came across enemy soldiers they could have simply killed them and left them where they lay, and nobody would have given it a second thought. But it was obvious that what happened was traumatic, even for wartime, and it important to the story to specifically call out the fact that they were starving, and that their number had already dwindled from 9 to 3 before the incident occurred. given all that, to me it was pretty clear that they killed and then ate the German soldiers. And the fact that these men were willing to ‘forgive’ cannibalism is what gave Don the courage to admit what he did.
If you’re going to eat the prisoners, why have them dig their own graves and then shoot them so that they fall into those graves? You’ll just have to haul them out to the BBQ right after.
Shoot them so they fall onto the BBQ (after you have them marinate themselves, of course.)
If you shoot an enemy of war, you let them rot where they fall.
If you shoot and EAT an enemy of war, you probably want to hide the evidence and your shame in a hole.
Yeah the veteran story could have been a bit clearer.
No it doesn’t. At least not to me.
What’s causing this change of conscience in him?
That people are on to the fact that he gets buy on his looks, charisma, charm and professional schtick? He’s hardly the only one to do so and he’s smart enough to know that. Yeah, there are others like him but he’s “toasted” and he fucking knows it.
I see no driving reason why Don Draper would want to become Dick Whitman again. At least nothing that I’ve picked up from the story line to date.
All my knowledge of the rules of war comes from Hollywood, so take this with an enormous grain of salt, but… I thought that it was considered a war crime to shoot a surrendering enemy. That you’re required to accept their surrender and treat them humanely. Perhaps that’s why the soldier was so traumatized by shooting the surrendering germans.
He’s been having an existential crisis for a while now. The biggest, and latest clue, was in The Forecast. He asked Ted and Peggy about their goals, but kept asking, “and then what?” He had the beautiful wife(s), house/apartment, money, cars, women, but none of it gave him the answer. He realized he was a good-looking shell (evidenced by his very self-aware comment to Sally at the bus station.) The shedding of all of those things is coming as a relief, as we saw by the small smile on his face when the kid drove away in his car. He’s shedding Don Draper like a snake skin.
He outright told Sally a few episodes ago what question he’s wrestling with now, as MoonMoon alludes to. He knows he needs to be more than just a beautiful person. And then a few episodes later, he explains his fascination about Diana to her ex-husband “she just seemed so lost”. Don has been a beautiful person who’s been lost and is looking for something more.
While this shift has been incremental over the seasons, it hasn’t been subtle lately even by Mad Men standards.
Don has been staying in touch with the kids by phone. I see no reason why he would abandon them. Especially to the care of a grief-stricken former stepfather…
At that point in the war, I doubt they gave any thought to accepting their surrender, Rules of Land Warfare aside. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to provide their prisoners with the minimal needs of survival. Plus, they would never have been able to take their eyes off the Germans for fear they would turn on them.
Shooting enemy soldiers trying to surrender was often the only option open, and happened far more often than Allied authorities were willing to admit. It was also done out of pure hatred of the enemy, rather than for practical reasons.
It thought it was revealing that he told the kid “I was in the advertising business.”
Not I am but I was.
I don’t think it’s just because he’s history at McCann’s, either. At this point, he reminds me of Jules in Pulp Fiction, who left “The Life” to “Wander the Earth.” (Though I doubt Don experienced anything like “Divine Intervention” before making his decision.)
I wonder if Don coming home to find that Betty’s died from the products he was pushing would be enough to push him over the edge? :dubious:
Thanks for the additional details!
