Mad Men season 3 DVD: Great episodes, so-so bonus features

Short column today, reviewing the "Mad Men" season 3 DVD set, in which the abundance of great bonus features on the first couple of sets starts to catch up with the people responsible for putting this one together.

Still, great episodes, and nice (unlike some other recent sets like "Breaking Bad" and "Chuck") to come out so far in advance of the next season (presumably late summer again) to give new and old fans plenty of time to catch up. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men: Matt Weiner speaks

So it turns out one perservering reporter was able to get "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner on the phone yesterday. Weiner talked to Jace Lacob about the events of the season three finale, and while he (as you'd expect) gave few hints about season four, he was pretty definitive on one subject, which you can discuss in the comments. Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "Shut the Door. Have a Seat": We're putting the band back together

Spoilers for the "Mad Men" season three finale coming up just as soon as I have the carpets cleaned...

"How long do you think it'll take us to be in a place like this again?" -Roger
"I never saw myself working in a place like this." -Don

For much of this season, we wondered exactly when the show would get around to dealing with the Kennedy assassination - whether Matt Weiner would wait till the finale, or get to it ahead of that. He took the latter approach, and many of us assumed it was because he was following the "Sopranos"/"Wire" model of putting all the big developments in the penultimate episode.

Whoops.

Turns out Weiner put Kennedy into last week's episode because that wasn't the season's biggest development, not by a long shot. (In the grand scheme of the '60s, Kennedy was huge, but far-removed from the world of Sterling Cooper.) Instead, he had to get that out of the way so he could use the finale to deal with more pertinent matters for our characters: Betty divorcing herself from Don, and Don, Roger, and Bert finding a brilliant way to divorce themselves from PPL.

Over and over in "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," characters are told some variation of the episode's title, and they sit and hear some life-changing bit of news: that St. John is selling all of PPL to McCann Erickson; that Betty has hired a divorce lawyer; that Don, Roger and Bert are determined to buy the company back; that Betty won't have an easy time of divorcing Don in New York; that Don wants Peggy to quit Sterling Cooper and come with him; that Don and Roger need Pete to come on board; that Bobby and Sally's parents will be separating; and that Don, after being an aloof bastard to Peggy for most of this season, will do anything to get her to go with him to join the new firm.

We end the season on what could be two enormous shifts to the series' status quo: a core group of SC employees (Don, Roger, Bert, Lane, Peggy, Pete, Harry, Joan) have started up a new shop, and Betty has gone to Reno to divorce Don and plan for a new life with Henry Francis.

But will they take?

After all, "The Sopranos" closed its fourth season with Carmela kicking Tony to the curb for one infidelity too many (as Betty already did midway through season two) before taking him back a few months later when she realized she didn't have better options (ditto Betty). As soon as Henry told Betty to not try to get any of Don's money in the divorce, alarm bells went off for me. Bad enough that he proposed marriage to her after they'd spent perhaps a combined two hours in each other's company (assuming that, outside their stint as pen pals, they didn't get together off-camera at any point in the season), but he's setting up a circumstance where Betty's going to be just as dependent on her new man as her old one. It's entirely possible that midway through season four, Betty will be asking Don to move back in with her and the kids.

As for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce(*), while it's a shock to the system to see Don and Roger walk out of the familiar offices (leaving the doors unlocked, no less), this is a company being run by the same guys who were more or less running it this year - albeit with the balance of power more evenly-distributed - and with many (but not all) of the familiar faces from SC. Will this be a new beginning, or just an opportunity for the production team to have fun designing a different office set?

(*) Should there be any kind of punctuation in there? Sterling Cooper seemed to work fine without commas, but that was just two names. This is four - with the potential to expand to five if Pete proves himself down the road. (Don told him that working towards a goal has always led to his best work.)

But we can talk about how significant these changes might be in a bit. Because whatever happens in season four, this episode was such a concentrated shot of pure storytelling joy that I don't much care at the moment whether Betty goes back to Don, or whether Ken, Paul, Kurt, Smitty and even Lois slowly find their way onto the SCDP payroll.

"Shut the Door. Have a Seat" felt very much like a caper movie: the jazzy piano music, the intrigue, the plan unfolding perfectly as Lane walked in, got fired by St. John, and walked out happily, leaving a dumbfounded Moneypenny in his wake. Specifically, though, the episode felt like my favorite part of any caper (or other kind of ensemble adventure) movie: the gathering of the team. I have been, and always will be, a sucker for those sequences in movies like "Ocean's Eleven," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Magnificent Seven" where the two leaders (there are always two guys at first, aren't there?) travel around to assemble the perfect team of experts, explaining their value and using various tricks of persuasion along the way to get them on board.

And what made this particular variation on that trope work so well was that it was a regathering of the team. This isn't Lee Marvin starting from scratch as he walks through a military prison. This is Don and some combination of Bert, Roger and Lane going out to gather the people that they - and we - know so well, and telling them why they're so important to each other.

In many cases, these are relationships that haven't been on great terms this year; given the way this episode goes, that was clearly by design, as it gives greater emotional weight to the reconciliations. And in some cases these unions are a matter of convenience. Don still doesn't like Roger but will put up with him because the company needs his contacts and social skills, and Don and Roger act all magnanimous while in Pete's presence but belittle him behind his back for trying to bolt the company. (They're just annoyed that Pete thought of it before they did.) And Harry, a lucky idiot as always (he can't even remember the room number of their suite at the Pierre), doesn't even get an elaborate sales pitch; just the threat of being locked in the store room by Bert Cooper. (Bert's man enough to do it himself.)

But if not every speech is sincere, we still get to see these characters singing each other's praises, and figuring out exactly the right buttons to push: Bert needs to feel vital, Roger likes the action and wants an apology from Don, Pete needs his ego stroked (specifically, by Don), and Peggy needs to know that Don values her work as much as she values (or used to value) his mentorship.

And it all works like gangbusters, for both the men assembling this new company and for the audience watching it come together.

Again, by design all these characters have been adrift at work this year. Bert and Roger have more or less checked out. Peggy has been Don's punching bag. Pete has been nervously competing with Ken and his haircut. Don's been emasculated by Lane, who is himself merely a puppet of St. John. So it not only feels satisfying to have everyone coming together again, but to see them all playing offense instead of defense. After apparently being foiled by the three-year contract he signed in "Seven Twenty Three," Don pulls off his greatest escape yet, and manages to get everyone important at the firm to go hobo with him.

You don't think of "Mad Men" as a plot-driven show. Important things happen, in the world and to the characters, but it's more about mood, and about the era, and about how people relate to one another. Yet the moment when Don realized that Lane's unquestioned authority to fire anyone - which was set up back in one of the first scenes of the season premiere - would be the key to everyone's salvation felt as satisfying a moment of story design as, say, when Marty McFly realized he knew exactly where and when a bolt of lightning was going to strike in "Back to the Future."

And yet as energizing as so much of the birth of the new agency was, we see that the divorce is painful for the people left behind. It's all fun and games for the people who get to start over, but what about the ones being left behind? Or, worse, the ones who had no idea this was coming?

In the same way, the Draper divorce plays out differently depending on the perspective. Don is cast out of the home and the life he built, while daddy's girl Betty neatly moves on with paternal, doting Henry. And the poor kids are collateral damage just like Allison and Ken and Paul are back at Sterling Cooper.

It's fun to watch SCDP come together, and beyond painful to see Don and Betty sit the kids down on the couch and explain that Daddy won't be living there anymore. Don tries to soften the blow (to the kids and to himself) by claiming it might be temporary, but Sally - who's been aware of the problems in her parents' marriage for a long time - knows differently, and poor Bobby somehow thinks it's his fault for losing Don's cufflinks. Betty can't wait to get away from Don, but even someone whose people are Nordic can't hold in her feelings of guilt when she watches her son cling to his father and beg him not to leave.

We opened this season with expectant father Don daydreaming about the circumstances of his own birth. In the finale, with both his professional and personal lives seeming to fall apart (and only one of them in any condition to be re-assembled to Don's satisfaction), he flashes back to childhood memories he was old enough to remember, and to how a professional disagreement of Archie's occurred led to Dick Whitman losing his father(**). Things don't play quite the same way in 1963, but Don does wind up severing his relationship with his old company at the same time that his kids have to live apart from their father.

(**) Considering the way adult Don describes Archie, it's interesting but not shocking to see young Dick so broken up about his death. Drunk and abusive or not, Archie was his dad, you know?

And because we have the Dick Whitman biography on our minds throughout the episode, it makes Don's midnight confrontation with Betty - in the wake of learning about Henry Francis through Roger - seem that much uglier. Don has often been an angry hypocrite with Betty, but leaving aside the fact that he's screwed around on her far more than she has on him (with or without Captain Awesome as part of the calculation), for Dick Whitman - whose stepmother never let him forget who and what his real mother was - to call someone else a "whore"? Wow. As always, Jon Hamm's not afraid to show a very unattractive side to his alter ego, and it's in that moment - as the word echoes in the room and wakes up baby Gene - where even Don realizes that he's gone too far, and that his marriage is over.

And having endured that horrible talk with his devastated kids, Don is finally humble enough to realize that he doesn't want to see everyone who matters in his life slip away, and to go to Peggy, hat in hand, and tell her that he does care about her. His marriage is too far gone, but he manages to save this other relationship. He tells her - in a speech echoing the one Peggy gave to Pete in the season two finale, which also dealt with losing a part of yourself(***) and trying to move on without it - that he understands her, and appreciates her, and appreciates that they see the world the same way. And when he gets Peggy to the precipice (in another superb duet between Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm), he pushes her over to his side with these perfect words:

"I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you."

(***) Matt Weiner has said that Peggy's "Meditations in an Emergency" speech was not about having given up the baby, and I don't think that's what Don's alluding to, either. (I'm not even 100 percent positive that he knows why she was in that psych ward.) He's just suggesting that each of them had some kind of idea for who they would be in this world, and instead tragedy and unexpected circumstance have turned them into these two people, who are only happy at work, and who really only understand each other.

To me, the work part of Don's life - and the ongoing rapport between Hamm and Moss - has always been a more appealing part of "Mad Men" than what happens in Ossining. So given the choice between Don fixing things with Betty or with Peggy, I'm glad the writers chose the latter. A "Mad Men" where Don doesn't have Betty to come home to is still "Mad Men," I think, whereas a "Mad Men" where Don doesn't have Peggy to bounce ideas off of wouldn't be.

But to get back to the question I asked near the top of this review, how permanent will any of the changes from this episode be?

As I wrote last week, the series' narrative doesn't have a lot of room for people who either don't work at the ad agency or aren't closely-tied to someone who does. Betty assures Don that he'll always be Sally and Bobby's father, and so there's room for interaction between the two of them. (Don as weekend dad has a lot of potential.) But unless the series is prepared to dramatically expand its scope - to show Sal's journey through the gay subculture of the '60s, to follow Dr. Greg to Vietnam, to spend a whole lot more time on people who don't work for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce - I'm not sure how Betty stays as connected to the narrative. To bring it back to "The Sopranos," by the time Carmela had separated from Tony, the show had established such a large world (only some of it related to organized crime activity) that it felt natural to keep watching Carmela out on her own, interacting with the other characters as Tony's estranged wife. Betty's not a part of this universe in the same way; there isn't really a simple circumstance where you could put her in a scene with Joan, you know?

And because of that, and because I think Matt Weiner wants no part of losing January Jones, I suspect there will be some kind of attempt at reconciliation in season four, even though I feel like the story of the Draper marriage has come to a natural conclusion. What else is left to say? They've broken apart, gotten back together, he's tried harder, she's tried harder, he's cheated, she's cheated, she doesn't love him, he maybe only loves the idea of her, etc., etc., etc. Let's move on, shall we? And if that means either less of Betty, or a shift in the way the show tells its stories, so be it.

As for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce(****), if it does just turn into a redecorated version of the same shop, that will be a wasted opportunity. But I don't think that's where Weiner is going. While there was a good deal of flattery in what Don told Pete about his value, I have to believe that this will really try to be a forward-thinking agency. Up until this point, Sterling Cooper has been on the wrong side of history, but we've just crossed a generational line in the series. Kennedy is dead. The Beatles fly into New York in a few months. The '50s are definitively over, and what we think of as the actual '60s is just beginning. An ad agency that looks at the culture differently, that looks ahead rather than behind, seems ideal to depict the societal change that Weiner talks about so often. In a new office, with a smaller staff, stripped of so much institutional memory and bureaucracy, SCDP could - and hopefully will - be something that reflects the vision of people like Pete and Peggy as much as it does the old guard.

(****) Dammit, I really want some commas in there. And maybe an ampersand.

Weiner's going to be traveling for a while and not available for interviews. And given how he likes to shroud the future of the show in mystery (even the "Lost" producers don't hate spoilers as much as he does), I doubt he'd want to say anything about where the show is going in season four, or when that action might be set. But with all these huge changes, it feels like we need the action to resume sooner rather than later: a season 2-->3 gap, rather than a season 1-->2 gap. Just as Weiner didn't want to skip over the birth of the baby, and what that meant to this marriage, I don't think he's going to want us to miss too much of the growing pains of the new firm, or of Don adjusting to bachelor life, or Betty and the kids getting used to Henry.

Whenever season four is set, this tremendous finale has given Weiner the opportunity to take the show in some bold new directions. I hope he follows them, or else the theme to the next season will be Don's line to the stewardess from this season's premiere: "I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been."

But there's too much of a sense of hope in this episode, in the look on Don's face as he walks back into the living room of the suite at the Pierre after saying goodbye to Betty, for me to think anything but that this is a show looking ahead now. As Roy Orbison sings (in "Shahdaroba") while Don heads into his new apartment, "The future is much better than the past."

Some other thoughts on the finale:

• I know some of you had guessed that Duck's company might wind up buying Sterling Cooper. Not only did that not happen, but Duck didn't appear at all in the finale, which is another reason I suspect we won't be jumping too far into the future for season four. I can't see Peggy and Duck as a long-term thing, but the prospect of Don finding out that his protege is sleeping with one of his most hated enemies is too delicious for the show to not depict. So we have to come back while they're still together, or at least not long after she's seen the light and treated Duck the way Duck treated Chauncey.

• Meanwhile, for all the time we spent debating whether Miss Farrell was cuckoo bananas, a healthy woman out of time, or something in between, she also doesn't figure in at all to the finale. It's entirely possible that Don could wind up with her now that Betty has sent him away - that we could even return in season four with Don and Suzanne shacked up in the apartment Joan found for him - but he was too busy with divorce at home and work to even think of her.

• Even though I assumed Joan would wind up back at the company sooner or later, I did a massive fist pump when Roger went to "make a call" for someone to help with the raiding of SC materials, because I knew exactly who'd be on the other end of the line. Joan gets to make her grand entrance, and then we get to see her and Roger acting like an old married couple as he complains about her handwriting. Whether or not they're The One for each other, the two (both characters and actors) work together incredibly well.

• Joan's back, but Sal is another MIA character in the finale. (Though for a half-second I thought they were going to call him when they couldn't get into the art department. Instead, Don just awesomely kicked the door in.) And with American Tobacco just as fundamental to the success of the new company as the old, how do they get him back? I really, really hope our last glimpse of Bryan Batt on this show wasn't at the end of "Wee Small Hours."

• For that matter, what becomes of everyone else from Sterling Cooper? I don't want to see the show backslide to the point where the new firm is indistinguishable from the old one, but a lot of interesting characters got left behind. Some of that is because they could only afford to start with a skeleton staff, and sooner or later they'll need to take on more help. Assuming Weiner also isn't ready to say goodbye to a lot of these people, it may be interesting to see tensions develop between the cool kids at the Pierre and the confused ones who were standing around Allison's desk.

• Note that when Peggy initially says no to Don, he plans to go to Kurt and Smitty next, and not Paul. Is that an indictment of Paul's talent, or of his character? Did Don fear Paul would rat him out if he could gain some advantage from it?

• Whoever else is on staff at the new company, I'm glad we'll have Jared Harris around long-term. (Presumably, anyway.) I've grown as fond of him as Lane has grown of America, even though I suspect that fondness will create all sorts of marital discord for him. His delivery of "Very good. Happy Christmas!" to St. John was one of the funniest moments in an episode full of funny moments.

• And could the cramped temporary quarters for the new firm create any marital problems for Pete and Trudy? So far, Pete seems to be swallowing any objections he might have to continuing to work with Peggy, and he and Trudy again seem like a finely-tuned machine (she gets her father to give Pete back the Clearasil account he took away when Pete wouldn't provide a grandchild, and she even brings the staff "every kind of sandwich imaginable... and a cake!"), but I don't think it's an accident that Weiner wanted the seating arrangements to put Peggy and Pete at the same desk.

• John Slattery, as always, get all the best lines, whether Roger's saying of Jane, "It's the most interest that girl's ever had in a book depository" or him responding to Harry's "Are you kidding?" with a deadpan, "Yes, yes we are. Happy birthday." But the man can get a laugh without any dialogue at all, like the way he had Roger's hand just shoot up as soon as a puzzled Don asked if they should all vote on the firing plan.

• God, Sally has been forced to grow up so much by these circumstances, and it's both a little funny (because of the things she says through her lisp) and a lot tragic, and the work of Kiernan Shipka is still another reason why I don't think we'll jump all that far ahead. They can only fudge her age so much, and unless Don's family is becoming a minor part of the show, I can't imagine Weiner wanting to recast Sally at this point.

• Though Conrad Hilton gives Don the tip that allows him and the others to pull off their great escape, Don clearly wants no part of the man's manipulations again anytime soon. He probably could have gotten Connie to sign on to the new agency, but didn't want the attendant headaches. As with so many other people left behind, I hope this isn't the last we see of Chelcie Ross on the show.

As we come to the end of another season of this show, I want to thank you all again for being both the smartest and best-behaved group of TV blog commenters around. I write about a lot of TV shows, some of them ("Sons of Anarchy" and "Breaking Bad," to name two) that exist in the same creative stratosphere as "Mad Men," and none of them come remotely close to drawing as many passionate, insightful comments as this one does. You've done a good job of sticking to the commenting rules (we're late enough in the season that I'm not going to bother repeating them), and you've made this a tremendous place to discuss one of the very best shows on television.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "The Grown-Ups": Watching too much television

Spoilers for the penultimate episode of "Mad Men" season three coming up just as soon as I take you to see "Singin' in the Rain"...

"The Kennedy assassination is very well-trod territory, and I just don't see myself adding (anything) new to that." -Matthew Weiner, at the end of season two

Weiner, like any artist, is allowed to change his mind, and so season three wound up not only including the Kennedy assassination, but confronting it head-on. But after seeing the finished product - the first episode of season three I've found truly disappointing - I can understand why he was initially reluctant to do it.

On the one hand, this is a series about the social change that came in the '60s, and so you can't not deal with Kennedy's death in some way. It would feel like either a cheat, or simply a glaring hole in the narrative. But on the other, Weiner was right that the assassination itself, and how people learned of and reacted to it, has been told so many times that there simply wasn't a lot that he (in a script co-written with Brett Johnson) could add to it.

With season one's episode about the Nixon vs. Kennedy election, or season two's Cuban Missile Crisis finale, the show took the approach of showing that even in the midst of a presidential election, or the potential end of the world, people were still caught up in the drama of their own lives. But even more than the Cuban Missile Crisis (which was an abstraction - the threat of something happening, rather than something actually happening), Kennedy's assassination was such an enormous event that it took over everyone's life for a little while. And many people spent those tumultuous days doing exactly what Pete and Trudy, and Betty, and the gang in the kitchen at the wedding - and characters in so many other JFK-era dramatizations - did, which was to sit in front of the television and try to process all of the bizarre, horrible things that were happening.

In the end, I don't know that Weiner had a choice, either about doing an episode about the assassination, or about showing the characters largely being passive, frustrated observers to it all.

But if it was necessary, it wasn't very satisfying to watch - watching a TV show about characters glued to their TV sets feels particularly slothful - and it felt even more unsatisfying coming on the heels of the astonishing second half of last week's "The Gypsy and the Hobo." "Mad Men" tends to go back and forth between telling larger stories of the '60s and smaller stories of the characters - and, at its best, stories that combine the two - and the shift from the important (to us) but (to the world at large) small moment where Betty learns the truth about Dick Whitman to the more sweeping yet (to our characters) remote story of JFK being killed was jarring. Since I realized when this season was set, and certainly since I saw the date of Margaret's wedding on the invitation(*), I've been waiting to see how "Mad Men" would deal with the assassination. But now that we're here, I find myself wishing they had pushed it off for a bit so we could have seen more of how Betty was dealing with this new information, and what the state of the Draper marriage was before Betty decided to end it.

(*) I'm not usually a good prognosticator, but I was pleased to see that I was right in assuming that Roger would stubbornly go through with the wedding, that it would be sparsely-attended, and that most of the guests would be miserable. Margaret's wailing, "It's all ruined!" reaction to the assassination was a nice reminder that not everyone was so devastated by the death itself.

Now, the fact that Betty's willing to walk away from Don (and into the arms of Henry Francis) should more or less tell you what the state of the marriage was. But we closed "The Gypsy and the Hobo" on a somewhat hopeful note: Betty hadn't asked Don to leave, wanted to go trick-or-treating with him and the kids, offered him the last bite of her sandwich, etc., while Don seemed relieved to have the burden of the secret lifted. Then the Drapers are largely invisible in this one at first (Don and Betty don't appear at all, alone or together for the first 10 minutes), and then they're dealing with reactions to Kennedy's death, and then Betty's eyeing Henry at the wedding. It's clear from their reactions to the kiss on the dance floor - Don looks hungrier for his wife than ever before, where Betty is lost in thought and a bit puzzled - that they're moving in different directions, but I think an opportunity was missed to show Betty going from Point A (interested in saving the marriage) to Point B (recognizing it as a lost cause).

Weiner apparently said in one of those "Inside Mad Men" features on AMC's website that Betty originally planned to move herself and the kids permanently to Philadelphia, and only went back to Don after the lawyer's advice was so depressing. In that light, Betty's emotional journey makes more sense - the Dick Whitman revelation was only a temporary blip in her desire to get the hell away from this man who's always been like a stranger to her - but in terms of what's been shown on the screen, rather than explained in an on-line footnote, I wanted more middle. I wanted to see how, if at all, Don and Betty's interaction changed after this news, to see how Betty viewed her husband now, how Don acted at home, etc., and aside from their brief moment in Gene's room in the middle of the night, there was no time for that with all the JFK drama unfolding.

And I wanted all of that because it feels like the relationship has now passed a point of no return, so we're never going to get a chance to see this in the future. Betty has now declared her desire to end the marriage twice, and while she took him back once, it would be tedious if the show kept breaking them up and putting them together again - especially since Betty only really took him back the last time because she was afraid to have the baby alone.

And that in turn raises a troubling question about what happens to Betty going forward. Betty has only ever figured into the story as she relates to Don, and we've seen this season with Joan and, especially, Sal, how easily characters who don't work at Sterling Cooper and/or don't have relationships with characters who work there can fall off the map. If Betty follows through on her plan to end the marriage, where does that leave her in the larger story? Will we have random, disconnected subplots about what Betty, Henry and the kids are up to? Or will the reality of Henry turn out to be so different from the fantasy of him that Betty will run screaming back to Don, and have Don (yawn) take her back?

I'm a little under the weather, so in the interests of both coherence and my health, I'm going straight to the bullet points to discuss everything else:

• Because Pete and Betty have so much in common as people (which I talked about at length in my review of season two's "The Inheritance"), their stories often tend to move in parallel. So in the same episode where Betty decides she's finally fed up with being Mrs. Don Draper, Pete has had enough of being at Sterling Cooper. I liked how Lane spelled out the difference between Ken and Pete's approaches, and how Pete - who always tries too hard at everything because he doesn't know how to be a real boy - doesn't understand why his approach is less appealing than Ken's. How do you suppose he'll react, though, to the idea of working with Duck should he find out that Duck is with Peggy?

• Whenever someone asks me if any character on this show is actually happy or well-adjusted, I always point to Kenny and his haircut (as Pete describes Mr. Cosgrove), but I guess the downside to that is that the writers don't have the time or interest in crafting stories about someone who isn't disappointed in his life or at any kind of personal or career cross-roads. Ken stories in the first two seasons were usually about how other characters reacted to him (Pete being jealous about the short story, Sal having a crush on him), and this year, we haven't even seen that much of our new Senior Vice President of Account Services.

• Carla Gallo makes her first appearance since the season's fourth episode as Peggy's roommate Karen, and it's clear from their conversation that the two are every bit the mismatched disaster they seemed back when Peggy was trying to sell herself as "fun" in their initial meeting. I liked Karen's confusion at learning that Duck was unmarried - "Oh. Then why are you with him?" - since to her (and, based on reactions to the first Peggy/Duck episode, to much of the audience) the relationship makes no sense if it's not a simple affair.

• And if I was Peggy, I would want to get as far away from Herman (Duck) Phillips as I possibly could. He's turned her into his new addiction - cajoling her to blow off Kurt and Smitty (his "a couple of homos" joke was half-right) for a nooner, inhaling cigarettes while waiting for her, and unplugging the TV so that news of Kennedy's shooting wouldn't get in the way of their sex. Fortunately, you could see alarm on Peggy's face when he put the TV back on - not only about the news itself, but about the realization that he tried to keep it from her until after he did his business.

• This week's episode was directed by Barbet Schroeder, probably best known for directing Jeremy Irons to an Oscar in "Reversal of Fortune" or, to lesser acclaim, sending Jennifer Jason Leigh after Bridget Fonda in "Single White Female" (another story of female roommates who probably shouldn't have been). I particularly liked the way he shot the moment where Betty emerges from the lady's room and sees both her husband her potential lover standing in front of her, as if both she and we aren't sure to whom she'll approach.

• I'll give Roger Sterling this: he may be selfish, and childish, and a boor, but the man gives a good speech. His introduction for Don at the 40th anniversary dinner was terrific, and his toast at the otherwise disastrous wedding reception was even better, finding a way to make the decision to go through with the ceremony seem noble, rather than stubborn.

• There was a lot of discussion after last week's episode about whether Roger, when dismissing Annabelle as The One, was thinking of Jane, or of Joan. I'm not sure it's either one - I think Roger's probably too cynical to believe in a greeting card concept like The One - and I still think he never would have been happy marrying Joan (she's too strong-willed and has too much baggage for him), but it was clear last week, and even more clear here, that she matters very much to him. She's the one he wants to talk to at the end of that awful day, not his drunken child bride (who, in one of the funnier lines of the episode, complains that she won't ever get to vote for Kennedy), nor his ex-wife (though it's clear from their phone call tag team on Margaret that they still can operate on the same wavelength from time to time), nor his drama queen daughter. And Joan still cares about him, too, just not enough to always indulge his neediness.

• While Walter Cronkite's reaction as he reports the official word of JFK's death is the most famous TV image from that day (and one of the most famous of all time), I thought it was a nice touch that the secretaries changed the channel in Harry's office from CBS to NBC, since Huntley/Brinkley were the more popular news team of the period.

• In his toast, Roger suggests that relative kids Margaret and Brooks are taking care of the adults, rather than the other way around, and while that's not really true (for Margaret, anyway), it was nice to see Sally immediately move to hug her mother upon news of the president's death. To a girl Sally's age, the death of a president isn't entirely real or relevant, but the pain of her mother was, and she reacted to that. Also, note how she (and, for that matter, Bobby) was painfully aware that her mother didn't in any way reaction to Don's presence in the kitchen on Monday morning?

• Don and Peggy, two peas in a pod: both wind up at the office because it's the only real home they have. And gold star to those of you who pointed out that the AquaNet commercial was supposed to evoke the Dallas motorcade, which the storyboard made very clear. Peggy's going to have a lot of rewriting to do over the next week.

Finally, I should warn you that this is the last episode of the season that I'm getting to see in advance. While AMC has sent out previous episodes for advance review to many critics, Weiner decided he wanted to keep the finale totally under wraps. So I'll be watching it live on Sunday night like the rest of you - and that, obviously, means that the review will not be posted right after the show ends on the East Coast the way it has all season. My plan is to do what I do for "Lost" finales, or for the later episodes of "The Sopranos" after David Chase also cut off the critics, and just stay up to write, but it may be a while. So don't lose any sleep waiting for it - and please don't send e-mails or post comments in other threads asking when the review will be done (or, worse, discussing the finale itself).

Keeping in mind the usual commenting rules (no spoilers, including talking about the previews, play nice with others, make an effort to read other people's comments so you're not asking the exact same question that's been answered six times already, etc.), what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "The Gypsy and the Hobo": The conversation

Particularly long spoilers for tonight's "Mad Men" coming up just as soon as I alphabetize the secretaries...

"Open this drawer." -Betty

Damn.

Damn.

Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn.

Damn.

Back in the days before comic book fanboys got a little too obsessed with their favorite titles maintaining a uniform continuity, comic writers were fond of doing fantasy issues where Lois Lane would finally prove that Clark Kent and Superman were the same guy, or where Batman would get married and have seven Bat-sons, or Green Lantern's vulnerability to the color yellow was replaced with a vulnerability to the color fuschia. Eventually, these "imaginary stories" (because the others were, of course, very real in the minds of their readers) became so commonplace that, whenever a title experienced a genuine seismic change to the status quo, the cover would often have to be accompanied by a blurb declaring this, Not a hoax! Not a dream! Not an imaginary story!

You need to slap a blurb like that on "The Gypsy and the Hobo," in which Betty finally confronts Don (who could sure pass for Clark Kent if you gave him some spectacles) about his own secret identity, and in such a way where there's no room for him to run, or hide, or dissemble. He fudges one detail (that the Army "made a mistake" only because he switched the dog tags around) and leaves out the adultery, but beyond that, he tells Betty everything: Archie. The prostitute. Abigail. Uncle Mac. The switch in Korea. Anna. Even, much as it pained him to do so, Adam.

And Betty - who impressively backs her lying husband into a corner and makes it abundantly clear that he has no choice but full transparency - hears all of this. Early in his story, she sarcastically asks if she's supposed to feel sorry for Don because he doesn't feel capable of being loved, but by the time he finishes explaining how he drove his own brother to suicide, she does feel pity for him.

More importantly, it seems, she feels some relief - and, so, amazingly, does he. This has always been Don's nightmare scenario. The day Betty found out the truth about Dick Whitman was going to be the worst day of his life, as far as he was concerned, so he held himself apart from her, kept secrets, slept with other women, even treated her like a child. But Betty finds out, and Don's world doesn't end. She doesn't order him out of the house, doesn't call the cops, or a divorce lawyer. She offers him breakfast the next morning and, when he gives her an excuse to not have to go trick-or-treating with him, she declines the offer. She doesn't want to run, and doesn't want him to run, not yet. She actually wants to be with him.

And as they stand on Francine and Carlton's porch, and Carlton jokingly asks the grown-up Drapers, "And who are you supposed to be?," Don looks... happy? At peace? Or simply surprised that his wife hasn't thrown him out yet in spite of knowing the truth about Dick Whitman?

After watching this one, I may need to retract my Hugh Laurie is a lock to win next year's Emmy column, because if Jon Hamm submits this one(*)... well, we have a horse race then, folks.

(*) Bryan Cranston would be tough to beat in any year - and lord knows what the "Breaking Bad" writers are going to give him to play in season three - but Hamm didn't help himself this past year by submitting "The Mountain King," which isn't an ideal awards showcase, in that he's playing Dick Whitman for virtually the whole hour, as opposed to shifting back and forth between the two personas, or else largely playing the more magnetic Don Draper personality.

By now, Hamm's made the switch from arrogant Don to cowardly Dick so often that the trick should feel less special, but it doesn't. He goes from defiant (when he thinks Betty hasn't been inside the drawer yet) to defeated (when she tells him she has) so perfectly. You can almost see all the air leave his body - not to mention all awareness that Miss Farrell is waiting outside in the Caddy (more on that in a bit) - once he learns that the jig is up. And while Betty suspects that Don will try to run again (and why wouldn't he, given what she knows?) or come up with a story, we can instead see Don not trying to manufacture a pitch, but Dick bracing himself to tell his wife as much of the truth as he can handle. And you can see that he was not in any way prepared to be hit with the thunderclap of Adam's name, even though he's precisely aware of what's in the box. Sending his brother away is, as far as Don's concerned, the worst thing he's ever done - worse than stealing the real Don Draper's name, worse than cheating on Betty - and so he's tried to bottle it down even further than Archie and Abigail and the rest. But as Betty tells him the name, his confession becomes the opposite of the advice he gave Peggy in "The New Girl" - "I guess when you try to forget something, you have to forget everything." - and so even though he doesn't want to tell her everything, he has to. And Hamm... has Hamm ever been better than he is throughout this whole sequence, playing a Don/Dick who's totally exposed, who can't run or hide, who has to confess all of his greatest shames to the woman who represents his dream life? And that look on his face in the end - there's just so much there, right? So many possibilities for what he's feeling, and for what his life might be now.

And I don't want to slight January Jones in here. This is twice now that she's had to play Betty trying to cope with a devastating truth about her husband (first Bobbie Barrett, now this), and Jones was just as good at playing Betty's steely resolve here as she was at the broken doll quality of "A Night to Remember." Betty nibbles around the edges of the problem at the start of the show (asking Don if he has any cash handy, well aware of how much he has in that drawer), then gets frank but depressing advice from her father's lawyer Milton(**), then heads home early so she can have the element of surprise to aid her against her very slippery husband. And she does not give him an inch of breathing room, does she? I loved seeing the role reversal in the kitchen, with Don reduced to a child who's been caught doing something bad, and Betty as the maternal figure who's going to administer discipline but has to calm the little brat down first by getting him something to drink.

(**) I'm sure Betty would be screwed-over to an extent if she wanted a divorce and couldn't prove adultery - though wouldn't Jimmy Barrett be happy to offer supporting testimony? - or the identity theft, but would she really be at risk of losing the kids? I thought it wasn't until after the "Kramer vs. Kramer" era that courts stopped routinely assigning primary custody to the mother in divorce cases.

And the genius part of the script, by Marti Noxon, Cathryn Humphris and Matthew Weiner, is the way that Miss Farrell's presence hangs over the proceedings like a ticking time bomb. Betty doesn't know she's out there, and Don may forget quickly, but we are acutely aware that she's still out there, and that she might be impulsive (if not outright cuckoo bananas) enough to knock on the door to find out what's taking so long, and then this delicate situation between husband and wife could just explode. I've watched the second half of the episode several times already, and each time I'm on edge, even though I know that Suzanne just waits for hours, then slinks off with her suitcase in the middle of the night, suspecting, but not knowing, what's to come.

Now, Weiner and Hamm have talked in the past about how one of the fundamental problems of the Draper marriage is that Betty doesn't know who Don really is, and Don therefore keeps her at a distance so she won't find out. Those walls are gone now, and in theory, their relationship could get healthier as a result. But there's another problem, perhaps an even bigger one, and it's that Betty still doesn't seem like Don's type. She's his idealized woman, but not the ideal woman for him. And maybe she could become his woman (as in their Italian role-playing), but for now it's clear that he's still drawn to the more independent, more in touch with their own emotions women like Midge or Rachel or Suzanne, and when he tells Suzanne he won't be seeing her again, he adds a "not right now" caveat. That could be just him trying to soften the blow, or it could mean that, for all that was exposed and potentially healed tonight, Don's wandering eye will still be an issue.

Even if it isn't, there's the fact that he never concretely told Suzanne that Betty doesn't know about the two of them, which could lead to something very awkward down the road should their paths cross again. Because whether Suzanne's crazy or just ahead of her time (and this episode lends more evidence to the latter theory), she seems exactly the type of person who would feel compelled to apologize to Betty should they ever come face to face, and that would be very, very bad for all involved.

Whether Miss Farrell surfaces again or not, whether Don and Betty manage to be more open with each other or not, this is a radical dynamic shift in their marriage. Don has always been not only the bread-winner, but the decision-maker. Not anymore. Betty knows too much about him now, can do too much damage to him now, can absolutely take away the kids and the money by getting him sent to jail as a deserter and an identity thief. So either he learns to share power with her, or she takes it from him. And we all know how little this man, whether he's calling himself Don or Dick, likes to be told what to do. If this isn't a solid partnership, then entirely new problems are going to arise.

And I see that I've now written over 1600 words about something that took up maybe a third of the running time of "The Gypsy and the Hobo," if that. I don't want to slight the rest of the episode, particularly since so much of it tied in thematically to the Don/Betty conflict.

In both Roger's story and Joan's, we see them dealing with romantic partners, past or present, discovering the truth about who they really are trying like hell to fight that, just as Don has for so long before potentially accepting his true identity at the end of this one.

Roger's old flame Annabelle has a crisis on her hands because her dog food company's name is poison in the marketplace, and she refuses to let Don (who knows a thing or twelve about the power of rebranding yourself) or anyone else change that name. And recently widowed, she's convinced herself that she was the love of Roger's life and can easily get him back, and is hurt and mystified to be both rejected in the present and dismissed about the past.

Dr. Greg, meanwhile, struggles with his psychiatric interview - and the man would be the world's least insightful shrink, based on his whining to Joan, "You don't know what it's like to want something your whole life, and to plan for it and count on it and not get it," which exactly sums up the story of Joan's life now that she's married to this loser - and is so fixated on keeping his surgical career going that he (as a bunch of you speculated on the last time we saw the jerk) enlists in the Army. The military is desperate enough for cutters that they'll even sign up his brain-less fingers, and I suspect (as so many of you did) that he's going to end up in Vietnam, either dead or gone for so long that Joan will wind up back at Sterling Cooper, under whomever the new ownership turns out to be. Now that Roger knows she's looking for work, so long as he has any kind of influence under the new structure, whom else would he call first?

Cathartic as it may have been to see Joan bash her clueless rapist husband in the head with a vase - and irrationally excited as I am by the thought of Greg getting blown up in Vietnam - I found Roger's story the more interesting of the two subplots this week. John Slattery, as always, gets the best lines and knows how to deliver them - when Annabelle compares their relationship to Rick and Ilsa in "Casablanca," Roger replies, "That woman got on a plane with a man who was going to end World War II, not run her father's dog food company." - but there was something oddly tender and mature about how Roger carried himself in this one. Or, if not mature, then secure - as in, maybe he really does think Jane is The One, does love her enough to not cheat on her (as opposed to just being afraid of getting caught), and has genuinely been looking all his life for someone just as carefree as himself. Now, it's entirely possible that Roger is full of crap and just trying to hurt Annabelle the way she hurt him, and it's more than probable that should Jane start to feel the ticking of a biological clock and start talking about settling down and having kids, Roger would toss her aside like he did Mona and start looking for his next young thing. But if young Roger was really the man Annabelle described - "hoping to be a character in someone else's novel," boxing, not wanting to work at his father's ad agency - then maybe this is for real.

Or maybe I'm feeling more kindly disposed towards Roger this week because of how charming he was during the phone conversation with Joan (who, even she no longer works at Sterling Cooper, knows the company's operations better than he does).

I spent some time with Slattery and his wife Talia Balsam (who plays Mona) at AMC's press tour party in late July, and we got to talking about whether Roger had settled - that he wanted Joan and wound up with Jane. And Slattery, who thinks about the character a lot more than I do, said he didn't believe so. He felt that when Roger, after his season one heart attack, told Joan, "You are the finest piece of ass I have ever had, and I don't care who knows it," that wasn't just Roger being crude, but Roger expressing the depth of his feelings for her. Joan was a great time for Roger, but she was also strong-willed and tough and more serious than Roger ever wanted to be, and despite his promises to leave Mona for her, perhaps he always knew this wouldn't work in the long-term.

But whatever's happening with Roger's marriage, with Joan's career, with the Draper marriage, the ownership of Sterling Cooper, things are going to happen soon and they're going to be tumultuous. We end this episode on Halloween. Margaret's wedding is 23 days away, which means JFK's assassination is only 22 days away. Again and again, I go back to Grampa Gene's line to Sally about their Roman Empire book: "Just wait. All hell's gonna break loose."

Some other thoughts:

• Great as so much of this episode was, "The Gypsy and the Hobo" also suffered from that occasional "Mad Men" tendency to be a little too on-the-nose, to spell things out too blatantly. So we get Bobby dressing up as the hobo his father truly is, and we got Greg's vase-inducing line so perfectly summing up Joan's life story, and Roger's line about the dog food company name ("Let it go! The name is done! It's unfair, but it's over!") so neatly echoing his feelings about Annabelle, and, of course, Carlton's closing line to Don.

• I had gotten the impression from Don's conversation with Adam back in "5G" that Mac was just as much of a sonuvabitch to Dick as Archie had been, and it seems to pain him to say Mac's name to Betty, yet he also tells her, "He was nice to me." Am I misremembering?

• For a half-second, I thought the episode's title might be an allusion to Cher's "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" (tramp is another word for hobo, and Don's an identity thief), but the song came out 8 years after the episode, so... ?

• The vanity mirror in the Draper master bathroom led to a memorable closing shot in "Maidenform," and here we see it used to show just how much Don hates himself for all the things he confessed to Betty. Guy can't stand to look a himself, from three different angles.

• It's been a good season for "Mad Men" cigarette humor, from Pete's coughing fit in "Wee Small Hours" to Don unabashedly lighting up a half-second after Annabelle explains that her husband died of lung cancer.

• A lot of people were intrigued last week by Roger's comment to Bert Cooper about having discovered Don at a fur company and want some gaps filled in. I don't think there's a lot left to fill in. Don has said before - most memorably in his Kodak pitch in "The Wheel" - that he began his advertising career as an in-house copywriter for a fur company in the city. (This is also how he met Betty, as she was a model at the time.) I imagine Roger tried to acquire the company's business, was told they were very happy with their in-house whiz kid, and proceeded to poach the whiz kid. But check out the look on Roger's face when Don says he's eaten horse meat, which I'm guessing was an allusion to his dirt-poor upbringing. Everyone at that office has always speculated about Don's past (except Cooper and Pete, who know), and Roger tried to probe Don about it going back as far as the series' second episode, on a double date with Mona and Betty. Given how much he's grown to dislike Don, any chance he tries to probe further?

• Annabelle, by the way, was played by Mary Page Keller, who's had a long career in television but is probably still best-remembered for playing one of the leads in "Duet," one of the first sitcoms on the Fox network.

• Loved William banging on the door to Gene's office, assuming Betty and Milton were conspiring against him. So cheap and petty, as always.

• Is this the first time we've seen Sterling Cooper's focus-testing suite since the secretaries tried out the Belle Jolie lipstick (and Joan obligingly gave the chipmunks a show through the two-way mirror) back in season one? That scene was funny, particularly Peggy's confusion about how to turn off something that's actually happening, but I thought the line, "When people are protesting, I'm on board!" was another instance of the episode aiming too directly at its target.

• Still trying to figure out how to equate 1963 travel times to 2009 ones. Google Maps puts Ossining to Norwich at only two hours, when Miss Farrell says they'll need four, where last week Don made what today would be a six-hour round trip from Ossining to Framingham well before dawn.

• The song playing over the end credits is "Where Is Love?" from "Oliver!" - which, don't forget, is the musical Joan got St. John and Harold Ford tickets for on the trip that led to the end of Guy's golfing career.

Once again, we're going to stick with the slightly modified version of the commenting rules for these posts, so let me repeat how it works. Until we get to 200 comments (i.e., until the comments are split into separate pages), the original rules apply (skim everything before posting to avoid annoying duplication). After 200, if you're going to ask a question, or if you're going to suggest a theory or observation that you don't think has come up yet (i.e., "I think that guy Connie from the country club bar might be Conrad Hilton" or "Do you think Joan's bloody dress was supposed to be a Jackie Kennedy analogue?"), or if you want to answer or correct something from a previous comment, I want you to do a word search (every web browser has one, usually listed as Find in the Edit menu) for some possible keywords you might be using. (In those cases, try "Hilton" or "Jackie" or "bloody.") If you don't see any of your keywords - and again remember that Blogger splits the comments into multiple pages once you get past 200, so check 'em both - then ask/opine away.

It may seem annoying or laborious for you to do this, but I want everybody to show respect for - and not waste - everyone else's time and effort, and this seems the best way to do that.

And given how close we are to the end of the season, let me again remind you of an even more important commenting rule: No Spoilers, which includes absolutely no reference to the previews for the next episode. Period.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Mad Men, "The Color Blue": I can see clearly now

Spoilers for tonight's "Mad Men" coming up just as soon as you tell me if my speech was Churchill-rousing or Hitler-rousing...

"The truth is, people may see things differently, but they don't really want to." -Don

I always like to pick a theme or story to spotlight in these "Mad Men" reviews, but "The Color Blue" was so busy in terms of both that it's hard to choose just one.

I could start with speculation about how PPL's attempt to sell Sterling Cooper will impact all the characters we care about (and whether it might somehow facilitate the return of Sal and/or Joan), or with speculation about the atom bomb that just got dropped in the middle of the Draper marriage when Betty finally got a look inside Don's secret drawer.

Or I could note the number of characters in the episode who build up great plans or escapes in their heads - Paul with his glorious Western Union pitch, Mrs. Pryce with her desire to go back to England, Miss Farrell's brother Danny with his scheme to give Don the slip on the drive to Bedford, Bert Cooper with his desire to skip the anniversary party, and, of course, Betty with her plan to have a dramatic confrontation with Don about the contents of that shoebox - that don't work out at all in reality.

But I think I have to start with the pillow talk between Don and Miss Farrell about my favorite piece of shared little kid/stoner logic - How do I know that what you see as the color blue is the same thing that I see? - and how that applies to this episode.

There are plenty of moments in "The Color Blue" where two characters look at the same situation and see different things. Paul thinks Peggy is Don's pet, while Peggy (still shaken from Don's recent scolding) knows otherwise. Don looks at Danny Farrell and sees a junkie, when he's really an epileptic down on his luck; Danny, in return, sees Don as arrogant where Suzanne views him as merely secretive. Lane is horrified at the thought of PPL selling the company, where his wife sees it as a dream come true. Etc.

You could say that many "Mad Men" episodes are in some way about different perspectives, most notably season two's "Maidenform," which gets referenced here as Paul prepares to use the shelved campaign art as inspiration for a, um, non-productive endeavor.

But what's interesting in "The Color Blue" are those moments where one character after another briefly has their own prejudicial filters lifted so they can see the color blue (or its current metaphorical representative) for what it really is, and not necessarily what they always thought.

Paul discovers that Peggy is much more talented than he ever gave her credit for - and, worse from his perspective, that she's more talented than he is.

Lane sees St. John and his bosses for the vultures they truly are, and realizes they never had any long-term interest in this company he feels personally invested in.

In watching Suzanne's relationship with her brother, Don has to again look at what a terrible turn he gave his own brother, Adam.

And while Betty has often suspected Don was hiding something bad in that drawer, she could never have fathomed that it was evidence of a previous marriage.

The scary part of Betty's discovery, of course, is that she really hasn't seen the truth of her husband just yet. All the evidence is there, but she doesn't have the context that we do to put the pieces - the two sets of dog tags, the Whitman family photos, the divorce decree - in the right configuration.

And what does Betty do with what little information she has? She's all prepared to confront him that night - waiting way past bedtime in one room, and outfit, after another - but by the time she goes to sleep, she seems to have given up, putting the box back in the drawer, and Don's keys back in his robe. (Couldn't she at least have gone to the hardware store to make a dupe?) Maybe she'll go after him again down the road, just as she keeps going back to Henry Francis (who's starting to get frustrated as he realizes what an overgrown child she can be at times), but the Betty who went to Sterling Cooper's 40th anniversary party seemed a woman defeated, not one plotting her next move.

For that matter, Paul seemed quite deflated at the end of the Western Union pitch in Don's office. Paul has carved an entire identity for himself out of being the smartest, most cultured man in the room, and it hurts him whenever someone punctures that balloon. (Remember how upset he got in "My Old Kentucky Home" when his ex-roommate started poking holes in his stories of Princeton life?) He can only rationalize Peggy out-shining him with the thought that she's Don's pet, or that she has an unfair advantage as the only woman. But after he neglects to write down his brainstorm(*) and sees how quickly Peggy is able to take his Chinese proverb and turn it into a campaign - because she has natural instincts for the job, where Paul only has book knowledge - he can't be in denial anymore. As with Betty, I wonder what he's going to do with this realization. In general, Paul is a small and petty man, so he could grow to resent and snipe at Peggy more than he already does. But it might be interesting to see him treat her better, even if it's in a naked attempt to learn from her so he can one day pass her.

(*) Like Don and Peggy, I winced in sympathy at that story. It's happened to every writer, and it sucks. In fact, several of the points I make in this post came to me right before I fell asleep, and I quickly grabbed my phone to e-mail them to myself.

Paul subplots tend to be jokes at the expense of the character's sizable ego, but this was a more empathetic look, and very well-played by Michael Gladis, particularly during the drunken, sweaty, self-gratifying interlude in the largely-empty SC offices. Yes, Paul's a pompous twit, but he's worked very hard to make himself into one, and it hurts to realize he hasn't even done a very good job at that. Peggy, Kurt and Smitty have all overtaken him in terms of youth, hipness and, it seems, talent. So what's Paul's niche now? The guy who, if he shaved and put on glasses, could pass for Harry Crane?

And if he gets sent back to England, what's Lane's niche? Despite being constantly treated like a second-class citizen by St. John Powell and friends, Lane still has a capacity for being disappointed by his bosses. So now that he knows they only bought Sterling Cooper to flip it once Lane had cut down expenses(**), what does he do with that information? It's clear from his conversations with his difficult wife that he's become quite taken with New York, and with this company. Would he risk his marriage, and his professional standing, to stay in New York, perhaps by tipping off Bert, Roger and Don and giving them a chance to put together the money to re-acquire their own company?

(**) Or did they? On the one hand, that would explain their refusal to do the MSG deal, since it would be an increased expenditure for a reward that only the next owner would enjoy. On the other, they did seem to have grand plans for a Guy Mackendrick-run Sterling Cooper, and perhaps only decided to sell the assets once he lost the ability to golf.

It's obvious that both Cooper and Sterling would welcome an opportunity to be relevant again, and maybe with Alice Cooper's help, they could compensate for whatever money Roger has spent on his divorce and trophy wife. And in the chaos that creates, I could certainly see Joan being begged to return. (Sal is a trickier problem, but I don't want to say goodbye to him yet.)

But whether Sterling Cooper becomes Sterling/Cooper-owned again, or whether we get yet another new ownership group in place, I do wonder what the point of this British ownership arc has been. Yes, it's introduced the terrific Jared Harris to the cast, and it gave us the black comic masterpiece that was "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency," but if the status quo is restored, or if we just get a new owner, why did we bother at all with these guys? There hasn't been as much culture clash as I might have expected, as this season has been a bit more Draper marriage-centric than the first two. I know Matthew Weiner resists comparisons to "The Sopranos," and to the idea that Duck was this show's Richie Aprile, but depending on what happens with PPL over the final three episodes, it is starting to feel like "Mad Men" needs its own annual equivalent of Richie/Ralphie/Vito/etc. to provide a little (in this case, very little) external professional conflict for Don.

And given what's going on with the two women in his life, I'm not sure how much time and energy Don's going to be able to focus on his British overlords over the next three weeks.

Based on the comments here, opinion seems about evenly split between whether Miss Farrell is cuckoo bananas or just someone on a different emotional wavelength from our repressed 1963 characters. I tend to go back and forth (though "cuckoo bananas" is fun to say, which prejudices me), and certainly a lot of her behavior in "The Color Blue" could be read either way. Yes, she follows Don onto his train, but with no cell phones, or e-mail, or possibly even a work number (I wouldn't be surprised if Don gave his card to Danny before he ever gave it to Suzanne), and with her smart enough to not call the house(***), how else is she going to get ahold of him when he doesn't call as promised?

(***) Or did she call it? There's a long pause after Don asks her, but that could just be annoyance that he would suggest such a thing. I don't believe it was Henry Francis, but it's funny to think that both Drapers have good reason to suspect entirely different people of the hang-up.

But whether she's nuts or just passionate, it's clear that she is very, very into Don, even more than he's into her (and he's very into her), and I still fear this ends well for no one. She tells Don, "I don't care about your marriage, or your work, of any of that, as long as you're with me," and in fact seems so untroubled by the adultery aspect that, when she asks him if he feels guilty about something, it's his career and not his cheating. But there's going to come a point where she will care, and/or when Danny gets into trouble(****) and uses that business card, and then what happens to Don's marriage?

(****) Not only does Don feel like a bastard when he sees Suzanne taking care of her little brother when he drove his own to suicide, but he also sees something of himself in Danny, who, because of his epilepsy, feels the need to constantly stay on the move, hobo-style.

Or will Betty's glimpse, however incomplete, into the man her husband truly is lead to another Draper separation long before the Farrell family comes into play? For all his creative struggles this season, Don seems ascendant in that moment on the dais at the company's anniversary dinner, but has his life peaked? With all that's going on away from his field of vision, is it all downhill from here?

Some other thoughts:

• Baby Gene's another season-three-long subplot that hasn't led to as much as I was expecting (other than the outstanding hospital interlude in "The Fog"), but at least one of his nighttime cries leads to Don forgetting to put his keys back in his briefcase.

• Because people keep asking me about it, here are my brief, completely uninformed thoughts on the situation with both Kater Gordon (who shared the writing Emmy with Weiner for "Meditations in an Emergency," and who co-wrote this episode with him) and Robin Veith (twice nominated for eps she co-wrote with Weiner) leaving the show's writing staff, which Nikki Finke has tried to turn into a scandale: I don't know the specific dynamics of the "Mad Men" writing staff, but I do know that on some shows with meticulous and demanding creators (David Milch, David Kelley and Aaron Sorkin, to name three), any relationship the other credited writers have to the final versions of scripts can be tangential at best. I'm not saying that's the case here, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was, and therefore it wouldn't surprise me if any writers either chose or were asked to leave because they were viewed as fungible.

• As I've mentioned in the past, "Mad Men," like most primetime series, is under restrictions on how many episodes most of its cast (with the exception of Jon Hamm and January Jones, and maybe Elisabeth Moss) can appear in, so I was pleasantly surprised to see Pete, Trudy, Alice Cooper and several other characters who hadn't previously been in the episode pop up on the dais for the anniversary dinner. Maybe because they had no dialogue, the budget people were able to work a little mojo? Or can a regular castmember like Vincent Kartheiser not work at the rate a non-speaking extra gets?

• A small touch, but I like that we're seeing these little glimpses of Allison and Don developing a rapport. She's gone from not being able to read his moods to having the kind of telepathy that we've only seen Joan share with him before. She arguably seems like a better secretary for him than Peggy, who was too caught up in personal drama and then distracted by her copywriting career.

• Danny Farrell was played by Marshall Allman, probably best known for playing Lincoln's annoying son LJ on "Prison Break."

• Heh. Lane and Mrs. Pryce hate Moneypenny just as much as the Americans do.

• Of course 40 is the average lifespan for someone in the ad game, given how much these characters drink and smoke.

• Trying to figure out how Don has his old Dick Whitman dog tags. Did Adam include them in the box of photos he mailed before he hung himself? Did Don hold onto them when he refused to get off the train and see his family? Or did I forget some other reference to them in seasons 1 and 2?

• Roger's mother is just as good with the one-liners as her son, albeit perhaps not as intentionally. Loved Mrs. Sterling assuming Jane was a grown-up Margaret, and then, when Roger explained this was his wife, asking, "Does Mona know?" The tone of Jane's voice as she said, "Yes, she knows" suggests she's getting really tired of all the baggage that comes with this marriage.

• Still more tension between Betty and Carla, as the kids express interest in going to church every Sunday, just like Carla does.

• Also, I like that Sally's starting to not let her mother get to her as much; check out her "Geez, Louise!" after Betty yelled at her for asking too many questions about the hang-up.

• A sign of how well Lane has adjusted to this office: the funny "Who told you I was vain?" / "Please, it's obvious." exchange he has with Cooper to cajole him into attending the party.

• "How do you talk to Achilles?" "He's a janitor with a very bad memory." I have no point to make here; it just makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Once again, we're going to stick with the slightly modified version of the commenting rules for these posts, so let me repeat how it works. Until we get to 200 comments (i.e., until the comments are split into separate pages), the original rules apply (skim everything before posting to avoid annoying duplication). After 200, if you're going to ask a question, or if you're going to suggest a theory or observation that you don't think has come up yet (i.e., "I think that guy Connie from the country club bar might be Conrad Hilton" or "Do you think Joan's bloody dress was supposed to be a Jackie Kennedy analogue?"), or if you want to answer or correct something from a previous comment, I want you to do a word search (every web browser has one, usually listed as Find in the Edit menu) for some possible keywords you might be using. (In those cases, try "Hilton" or "Jackie" or "bloody.") If you don't see any of your keywords - and again remember that Blogger splits the comments into multiple pages once you get past 200, so check 'em both - then ask/opine away.

It may seem annoying or laborious for you to do this, but I want everybody to show respect for - and not waste - everyone else's time and effort, and this seems the best way to do that.

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