Mad Men returns. Thumbs up or down?

See, I'm not 100-percent sure. I could see it just being Betty's lack of people skills, a failed attempt at fun dirty talk. As strange as it was, I could see her saying something like that in bed with Don years before and him throwing her down and having his way with her.

 

What'd the doctor do to have Draper bed his wife? Don's one of those guys whom other guys are smart not to like. He's a swordsman, sure, but no hail fellow well met. Incapable of maintaining a male friendship.

I'm hoping that this series ends like The Sopranos, except that Don grabs his chest and keels over in that diner with the great onion rings. And the heart doctor is coming out of the men's room in a Members Only jacket, and just smirks as he walks by.

 

Don won't commit suicide.
Dick Whitman will return to gonna kill him off.

 

That makes sense. I hadn't thought about it in that light.

My thinking was going: you're right at that borderline in eras where a 15-year old could smoke and it was considered their decision (Betty doesn't say a word) and 15-year olds often married 18-year old men without a lot of hullabaloo (I know my grandfather was 18 and my grandmother was 16 when they got married in the 1940s), so maybe Betty would think of a 15-year old as a temptation more than Henry being a creep at that point in time.

Now, Betty would be outright accusing Henry of something mor than just tempted.

And no way Don kills himself. He's got to be stuck with the decisions he's made. His Inferno will be more like a life of purgatory than an outright trip to hell.

I think he makes it to the 1980s, bitter and out of step.

 

Is she better known for Freeks and Geeks than for ER? Also, I totally didn't recognize her in this episode.

As for the ep, well, I'm invested enough that I can't not watch, but this was extremely slow to me. I think it would have been much worse without the Betty subplot. She's either descending into madness or ascending to enlightenment. Or maybe both.

 

Vis-a-vis Annette and the first half of the '60s:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/04/09/end-of-an-era/

 

Bitter? Never. Don knows where he came from and what his life was like before he became Don Draper. He went from a shack to a $75,000 apartment in New York in 1968. Thats a 7-12 million dollar apartment today. He'll never be bitter, and he'll have no regrets. He's a borderline sociopath.

Out of step? Most interesting. Recall his conversation about the over use of "Love" in advertisements. Well, he's about to be bombarded by the summer of love, "Love is All You Need" and the era of free love. His use of weed shows his ability to keep in step, but his clothes, even his vacation clothes, show that he is a Eisenhower man at heart. Does he develop a professional sense of the 60's, hippie-psychadelic-pop culture? He needs it for his job. His Kodak carousel is the epitome of 50's culture, can he move past that middle class view of the world? And if not, does he lose being Don Draper and become Dick Whitman again, in the end.

 

Brian, there's a difference between "you're a creep because you think a 15-year-old is attractive" and "I'll hold her down so you can RAPE her."

If her intent was "I'll put that thought right out of your mind," she missed wildly and comes across as even more unstable than we already thought.

 

I thought one of the more surprising scens was seeing Ken Cosgrove being a dick to someone. Maybe being around all the cynics has finally gotten to him.

 

Noticed this on a rewatch.

Dinkins talks about shooting water buffalo and being able to paint barroom walls with blood with an M2. Don gives the heart surgeon a Leica M2 camera.

 

By the time Don gave him the Leica M2 is was almost an outdated camera. It went out of production in 1968. It wasn't a high-end Leica, though Leica was a high-end camera brand. And at the time the German cameras were better than their Japanese counterparts.