This is more like it. After spending last week’s episode
with new characters, we’re back to the core group. Everybody is forecasting the
future. Don has the task of writing about the state of Sterling Cooper and
Partners as the firm moves forward. Peggy and Ted ponder their professional
goals. Joan is figuring out what she wants from her personal life. Only Sally
isn’t interested in prognostications, declaring she’s tired of answering what
she wants to be when she grows up.
Since Joan is one of my favorite Mad Men characters, and one of my favorite characters period, I am
happy about this episode’s focus on her. We seem to be winding down her story
and possibly settling her down, although the dalliance with that guy from
California did seem a bit rushed.
“I need to work. I finally found the job I always wanted,”
Joan says in answer to Peggy’s question of why she continues working although
she’s filthy rich. She hides the existence of Kevin at first and her beau
doesn’t take kindly to the kid’s existence, noting that he put a lot off while
he was married and doesn’t want to start over again with a child. “You’re
ruining my life,” Joan says ostensibly to her babysitter but really to Kevin.
This was hard to watch. Joan has always seemed kind of ambivalent about
motherhood. She’s not neglectful but it was not exactly a planned pregnancy and
I thought maybe she only had the baby because it was her last chance. Her heart
is in that office.
The two make up again after he decides he can be with a
woman with a young child. Joan confides she’s had two divorces. Wait, what? Who
was she married to besides Dr. Rape? Did this happen before the show started?
Don is leaving his apartment but is going nowhere as he
doesn’t have anywhere to live yet. The realtor wakes him up and tells him he
lives in an “$85,000 fixer-upper” (those 1970 prices are galling to me now that
we’re in our real estate hunt) and although Don insists a lot of good things
happened, the realtor says you wouldn’t know it. The Calvets left him his bed
and outdoor furniture but that’s it. Without the swanky furniture, the place is
bare and crappy. Later Don notes he came from nothing and ended up in the
penthouse but by the end, he’s out of that place with his marriage erased and
facing an uncertain future.
It seems like little things are starting to get to Don and
little cracks are starting to register on his face. Peggy, the one person at
the company who knows what she wants and where she’s going, tells Don during
her performance review that he’s shitting on her dreams and that affects him.
Mathis’ plan to use Don’s comeback to the peanut butter cookie people backfires
(because he’s not Don and can’t get away with what Don does) and Mathis tells
Don he doesn’t have any character but he’s just handsome. The fact that this
gets Mathis fired shows his comment got to Don.
At the Francis house, Betty actually seems happy and she and
Sally seem to have a healthier relationship. Betty’s maturity faces a test as
Glen returns, having ignored his anti-war sentiments to volunteer for Vietnam
after failing school (what are the odds on him dying in combat?). There’s some
icky sexual tension between the two, calling back to their dysfunctional
relationship in the early seasons. Thankfully, it’s Betty who refuses his kiss,
noting that she’s married (I liked Betty touching her hair as a callback to
giving young Glen a lock of it years before).
You could take that comment two ways: Betty could mean that
marriage is the only barrier to the kiss as she didn’t mention the age
difference and the fact that it’s completely inappropriate to kiss someone who
is barely 18 and that she’s known since he was a child. You could also read
this situation as Betty having no interest in Glen but just reacting
reflexively to someone who paid attention to her. That’s exactly what Sally was
noting later after Don got inappropriate attention from her teen friend.
Speaking of her parents, Sally hit the bull’s eye: “Anyone pays attention to
either of you — and they always do — and you just ooze everywhere.”
Don hits another bull’s eye in response: Sally may want to
get far away from her parents but Don knows she’s exactly like them. Anyone who’s watched this girl develop over the
last few years can see she’s got her mother’s snark and her father’s liar
tendencies. That last scene with father and daughter was worth all the nonsense
from last week. The end of the show will come down to the relationship between
these two.
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