Mad Men 714: Person to Person

Don Draper dresses better, talks better, works better, and plays better than anyone you'll ever know. Paired with that blessing is his curse: He makes more and bigger mistakes than anyone you'll ever know. We knew that in Season One, and it's carried him through to the finish. We've seen him fall down, pick himself up, and fall again. It's a credit to writer-creator Matt Weiner and his team that the cycle could stay fresh enough that Don standing on a cliff in the show's final minutes could tease the possibility of a leap and turn into something completely different.

Everyone got their send-off. For some it was love; for others it was career; for Betty it was the grave. That plot seemed to set up Don's fate: If the Draper kids were going to lose their mother, maybe Don would become a full-time father. As Betty saw it, that's not a role the otherwise omni-talented Don Draper can fill. And so, his high-speed dash across the desert led him not East, to home, but West, to the house of the original Don Draper, whose name Dick Whitman stole. There, he found Stephanie, whom we last saw a year ago, pregnant and broke, sent packing to Oakland by a lie told by Megan. Stephanie was far from a major character on the series, but here she filled a particular role: Her abandonment of her child, and the shame she feels for that put a focus on Don having abandoned, at one time or another, absolutely everything. Faced with this, Don offered to become some sort of partner in her life, a ludicrous misplacement of the energy he'd withdrawn from all of his existing responsibilities. Stephanie runs from the resort (clearly filmed at, and representing, the not-named Esalen Institute) and leaves Don with a temporary transportation inconvenience and a hole in his conscience big enough to swallow him inside. Don's frustration ends with the outburst, "People just come and go and no one says, 'Goodbye.'" He's far too intelligent not to see his own sins in that line.

The title of the episode, "Person to Person," is a manner of billing telephone calls that no longer exists. The episode has six telephone calls, most of them showing modern technology as a way to keep people apart when they really should be together. The fragility of telephone conversations is demonstrated in the first call when Sally ends her call with Don and he can't do or say a thing about it. (Incidentally, a similar but more futuristic kind of "hanging up" victimizes Jon Hamm's character in the Christmas episode of the BBC's Black Mirror in which he starred.) Soon, Don – who placed a call to Peggy to try to make up for his own coming and going without saying "Goodbye" – inflicts the same punishment on her, cutting off their call and leaving her worried for his sanity and his safety.

That was the episode's fifth phone call. The one before that was one that ended a relationship, with Joan choosing to talk to someone distant, about business, and shut out Richard, who is present, about love. And so she loses him, for better or worse, for richer or poorer.

But the episode's final phone call goes the opposite way. Stan and Peggy start by talking about business, but soon, and stunningly (and probably with too little build-up) pledge their love for one another. Stan realizes the absurdity of a phone taking the place of human contact, and runs down the hall to kiss her.

In a show about modern media (print, radio, or television) blasting opinions unilaterally into people's brains, the telephone is an apt metaphor. It's another form of long-distance communication, although it works in both ways instead of just one. In that sense, the old landline more closely resembles its mobile offspring that have more completely taken over our world than anyone could have foreseen in 1970, mediating our interpersonal relationships as well as serving up corporate ads. The Mad Men finale may say more about the devices that keep us apart in 2015 than it does about 1970.

But Stan is twice the voice of reason in the episode. He also realizes that Don's flight and escape are temporary. "He always does this, and he always comes back," Stan tells Peggy. He's exactly right.

Steve Jobs was vocal about alternative forms of consciousness having enhanced his creative powers, and there's some of that in Mad Men's final two scene. Don, having shed the New York coat and tie for a meditation circle on the Pacific coast, hums "Om" the last time we see him. And then, the gut-punch ending is the 1971 Coca Cola television ad that anyone who lived in America in the Seventies saw countless times, and we realize that Don's epiphany along the Pacific was not an escape from work, but ultimately just an inspiration for his greatest success, as he went on to return to New York and write that ad, the single most prominent television ad of all time. Don Draper gets credit for the commercial, "Hilltop," that belongs in real life to an ad man named Bill Backer, and in so doing, achieves the fame that he always had the potential to achieve.

In the first episode of Mad Men, Don sits across a table from Rachel Menken and, en route to winning her as a lover and a client, tells her, "I'm living like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one." And now, the show is over, and for Don Draper, there isn't one.

Mad Men 413

"Tomorrowland" puts Don into meaningful one-on-one scenes with so many beautiful women that their names take a couple of minutes to scroll during the credits. Each of these interactions has shown flashes of unbearable asymmetry, with Don apologetically distancing himself now from Peggy, Faye, and Betty. In contrast, he proposes to Megan with a suddenness and neediness that recalls the drunken passes he was making earlier in the season. It is so rash that she hesitates for a few seconds before her nearly-as-rash acceptance.

Though the Draper-Calvet engagement is unexpectedly sudden, everyone can easily interpret it as the kind of thing they say they expect. Roger says, ambiguously, "See, Don, this is the way to behave." Roger, of course, is married to a much younger and very attractive woman whom he found through work. A woman whom, the last we saw, he was prepared to leave in order to get back to another much younger and very attractive woman whom he found through work. Joan and Peggy both effortlessly understand the dynamic of the wealthy man but that it is so easily explained doesn't temper their reactions of distaste. They see the treadmill of eternally young secretaries rising to prominence of one sort or another, and know that they will have to run very hard just to lose less ground. Joan's life is a tangle where promotions bring no raise and the risk of exposure as she incorporates her real pregnancy into a very high-stakes fiction. It's finally paying off for her that she married a poor doctor: He won't figure out that she's not showing as much as she should be because she lied about the dates to make him out to be the father.

The engagement is particularly wounding to Peggy, not necessarily because she wants to be with Don; it is enough that he told her that business is the reason why he never made a play for her. It is more than enough that he tells Peggy that Megan reminds him of her. This reduces the basis of attraction, the reason why Don is making this leap with Megan instead of Peggy, to nothing more tangible than looks. The consummate ad man stumbles badly there in debasing himself, Megan, and Peggy in just a couple of sentences.

Faye ought to get tired of being right. She said earlier that Don would marry again within the year and so, it seems, he will. She says now that Don only likes the beginning of things. This can be interpreted on the time scale of relationships (months) or youth and human lifespan (the several years of youth that Megan has over Faye). Of course, Don is also gaining a hybrid wife/servant, who is still answering his phones, and who caught Don's eye in this episode while excelling in caring for the Draper children.

Henry and Betty's relationship shows us, at the very same time, one of the ways that these May-December relationships can flame out. Neither party has gotten what they wanted out of that, and Betty is less likely striving for friendship than a rekindled romance when she confides in Don about how things are not going well. Don and Betty look disarmingly natural together until the news slips out.

Meanwhile, Don employs uncharacteristically sentimental language in his proposal, appealing to fate when he remarks on how many things needed to happen for them to get together. He doesn't specify that his sleeping with Allison, the death of Miss Blankenship, the firing of Carla, and his unexpected acquisition of a diamond ring are four of those things.

The episode makes such a perfect soap opera that it is easy to miss it doing what Mad Men does best, using the various subplots as mirrors for each other. Via Don, SCDP has come to pitch the American Cancer Society precisely because tobacco had fired SCDP; substitute Betty for tobacco and Megan for the ACS, and there's not much difference between Don's business and professional lives. Faye, meanwhile, sees herself as the tobacco in Don's personal life although the comparison is flawed: Tobacco let go of Don instead of vice versa.

The "rebound" is also paralleled in the business of Topaz, who was forced to make a decision on short notice. Peggy's business success comes thanks to insider information about a desperate party who had the urgent need not to be single -- not so very different from Megan's romantic success. The unsavory confusion of business and one's lovelife is also paralleled by Harry offering some combination of work and social interaction to "Carolyn Jones", who looks near enough like Megan.

In an important contrast, Ken declines to use his future in-laws to wrangle an account, saying that he will eventually lose every client he has, and implying a commitment, instead, to his bride-to-be. Don takes the opposite approach, seeing every client as a relationship that he hopes remains permanent, and he's fooling himself if he can say the same about his romantic life. He certainly understands why he moves on in his business life; he tells the ACS that he had an "impulse to move forward." And so he leaps into life's next chapter cannonball style, beginning the adventure of tomorrow in a place called Tomorrowland. Stephanie perhaps helped Don into it, noting that she and he each have their lives ahead of them. This is technically true, but Don has quite a bit less of his left ahead, and he is much more apt to live that part making the same mistakes that he has made before. Don may not know how much he's talking about himself when he tells the ACS that teenagers think first about themselves, and that they mourn for their childhood more than they anticipate their future. It's been quite a while since Don was engaged to a woman this age. He has a pretty beginning to look forward to.

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My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees
Ep 11 Blowing Smoke
Ep 12 Tomorrowland

Mad Men 412

A line or a circle? Businesses, comic strips, and all human lives have to decide if they see life as a progression or a cycle -- one thing after another, or the same things over and over. There's more than one proverb arguing for each perspective. The last time Charlie Brown tries to kick the football is indistinguishable from the first time. And so it is with addiction and other character flaws. Don's constant inconstancy, Roger's elegant callousness, the firm on the brink of catastrophe. Is Mad Men taking us on a journey or in a circle?

The Heinz man says that "food is cyclical" and he's convinced that beans would inevitably return to the position of dominance that ketchup had taken over, "But I don't have that time. So I want to force the issue." The mid-Sixties was a perilous time to begin waiting for the past to return. Unhappily, for many the rear-looking optimist, the past was not to come back soon or ever.

For an addict, the past is all too certain to repeat. And so this episode brought back Don Draper's first on-air dalliance, Midge Daniels, whose life chose a most unfortunate moment in which to freeze. Once upon a time, Don might have left Betty for Midge. Now Midge is being prostituted out by her husband so one or both of them can get another heroin fix. Midge and her husband disagree on whether he reminds her of Brendan Behan (an incurable Irish drunk who died at 41) or Dylan Thomas (an incurable Welsh drunk who died at 39 -- actually, not far from Midge's apartment). Behan or Thomas -- they have this to look forward to. (Incidentally, for the number-minded fan, the Consumer Price Index lets us calculate that all of the prices for which Don is offered Midge, as well as the massive inconveniences that Pete Campbell faces, tabulate 7-to-1 in today's dollar's.)

Which brings us to Don, who has habits of his own. He's tamed alcohol down to a manageable intake. The explosive potential of his infidelities simmers with bookend shots placing Megan literally between Don and Faye. Don didn't think about his actions leading to the end of his business relationship with Faye, so he certainly didn't think about it outing their personal relationship. When Don calls Megan his bodyguard, he may be giving his future self a line to rue, if Megan proves to be less cool-headed than she was when she promised perfect discretion on their night they had sex in his office. Faye unknowingly provides the same potential when she tells Don to have "his girl" make dinner reservations. (Don may subconsciously have Ted Chaough's prank in mind when he chooses a place the Kennedys used to frequent.)

The overall geometry lesson is clear: When life is bad, you wish it to be a line leading to change. When it is good, you wish it to be a circle. Fate curses you by offering you the opposite. Sally's mental wellness is a line... she shows progress and can start cutting back sessions. Betty's is a circle: She still yearns to see a child psychatrist (even with the comic animals painted on the wall), years after her first psychiatrist fairly or unfairly compared her to a child. In order to break Sally's burgeoning relationship with Glen, she agrees to let the family move to another town. Much earlier, Betty had nurtured Glen's crush, itself a remarkably childish fixation, and the worst Betty has to risk from his contact with Sally would if he told Sally that her mother had confided in him when he was even younger.

Much as that plot resembles The Graduate, the end of the episode will inevitably be compared to Jerry Maguire, with Don's treatise promising higher ideals to the world, infuriating his colleagues (who can't do away with him just yet), and garnering the admiration of both Megan and Peggy as a two-headed stand-in for the Renee Zellweger character. And yet, that comparison is categorically too favorable to Don. What drove Don to write it was not an actual epiphany but a calculated risk that the open letter would be good for business. As the firm faced a vicious cycle (every potential new client believes, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, that the firm will not survive the next few months), Don's letter was an attempt to do as Peggy suggested when she turned Don's words back to him, to "change the conversation." Don can't accept his colleague's criticism, but neither can he Megan's praise. He lets her know that he is interested, as we always have known him to be, in seeming rather than being. And she knew that.

But when we first heard in the voice of his journal that he was quitting tobacco, did we think that he meant he was quitting his personal habit or anything otherwise lofty and not merely making a business move? Did we think that he ripped the binding out of his journal for nothing? The creators are to be commended if we believed that Don was on a line and not a circle, because he had a lit cigarette in his left hand while he spelled high ideals out with his right.

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My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees
Ep 11 Blowing Smoke

Mad Men 411

"Were you lying when you said your career came before everything?" That's a line from 1927's The Jazz Singer, the first "talkie" Hollywood ever made, but it could have fit into just about every scene in "Chinese Wall." Men -- and sometimes women -- sacrificing the rest of their lives for career has been a theme illuminating the series as a whole. But in this episode, it glowed white hot, leaving virtually no one with their non-work life unscathed.

To see Ken Cosgrove walk out of dinner with his fiancée and her parents is to be reminded of Peggy's missed birthday dinner four episodes back. Ken, having at least shown up before hearing the black news about Lucky Strike, walks away without incident. In the next scene, and others throughout the episode, Pete Campbell is called away from his wife's labor. In one of Mad Men's "sign of the times" moments, his father-in-law admits to having been absent from his daughter's birth, and cheerfully excuses Pete to do the same. Perhaps it was excusable for men to be at baseball games while their wives delivered, but Ted Chaough is driven enough to turn up for Pete's wife's delivery so that he can hard-sell Pete with a job offer -- a car and driving lessons included. That work should take precedence over the birth of one's daughter is so taken for granted that when Don accuses Pete of having the delivery as a higher priority, Pete rebuts the accusation instead of accepting and defending it.

Screenwriter Erin Levy adds a deliberate "from the cradle to the grave" universality by showing the SCDP men trying to save their business with a mercenary approach to David Montgomery's funeral. They whisper strategy between eulogies, and that the event is for them purely a work event is highlighted when Megan asks Don how the funeral went and Don, thinking of business, not reincarnation, replies, "We'll see."

Birth and death fall by the wayside. Naturally, so does love. Don without hesitation asks Faye to break the titular "Chinese Wall" of confidentiality that should keep her from using her insider status to help Don, her lover. After Don makes his Jazz Singer confession that his career "is everything to me", Faye becomes the episode's lonely mouthpiece for the alternative perspective, saying, "I know the difference between what we have and a stupid office." Eventually, she recants, and gives Don an "in" with one of her other clients. And in the betrayal that makes her regard for Don painful to behold, we get a suggestion that Sex -- for Don, following up the lingering gaze he held on Megan last episode -- actually does trump Work even though Birth, Death, and Love do not. In Megan, he may have found his perfect woman -- one who wants him to go home and sleep alone after they are done for the evening. And his flirtation with truthfulness may have received its own eulogy when, undoing the ending of "The Suitcase", he asks Peggy to shut the door to his office.

Roger joins Don as a man who betrays the love of the beautiful woman in his life. In fact, he betrays two, keeping his dark secret from Joan until he begs for the consolation that she can't give. This feeds Joan's best line of the series thus far, "I'm not a solution to your problems. I'm another problem." Soon enough, Roger burns with Bert's brutal but accurate assessment of him inside as his wife Jane (who poses when nobody else is around) lovingly presents him with his now bitterly ironic autobiography in hardcover. (How many copies will this book sell? Ten? Five?) He signs Jane's copy with the agonizingly specific, "To my loving wife", with no comment about loving her back.

Once again, Peggy has hope of being the moral survivor in this dark world. She finds love with Abe despite the fact that his leftism may endanger her role as a cog in the corporate machine. But she has more experience than most people in juggling work and non-work: Stan's pass at her leaves him in need, again, of reading material to cover the sight of his lap, and later asking her, with double entendre he does not intend, "No hard feelings?"

Is there hope for the men of SCDP? Don doesn't see it when his shifty eyes look past the loving and trusting Faye before he nuzzles her hair. Maybe it's there in the eulogies for David Montgomery, who felt that his daughter and not the Buick account was the best thing he ever did. Then again, why are all of the stories about the late Mr. Montgomery about his work?

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My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees

Mad Men 410

"Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?" Those are the lyrics of the Beatles ballad playing over the closing credits. But because it's an instrumental version, they, like most of the truths in this episode, are hidden.

That secrets are the common theme in every subplot in this episode is itself no secret. Early on, Don asks Sally, "Can you keep a secret?" Later, in bed with Henry, Betty says, "I don't want any secrets" while neglecting to tell him, a man defined by political ambitions, that she, his wife, has just lied to federal agents. In their elevator conversation, Pete answers Don's anxiety with "If you're asking if he knows how to keep a secret, he works for the Department of Defense." -- a line which presumes that Pete's friend is more devoted to hiding the truth than to his employer and nation.

If factually informed, as by Doctor Faye's research, this episode might be a tutorial in lying. It's not just that the characters in this episode have secrets. They lie more when they're caught. They lie when they talk about others' lies. Don smiles at his investor's suggestion that he's sleeping with Megan, because that's a scandal he could share with the boys -- and yet it's not true. Joan, anonymous at the abortion clinic, still lies to a stranger and says that she's there for her nonexistent daughter. Pete, who has kept two affairs -- one tinged with blackmail -- from his wife, grouses to her about how liars make life difficult for "honest people" -- a valid complaint, but Pete needn't worry because he doesn't know any.

The news of Lucky Strike's imminent defection is Roger's business-related secret, while Joan's pregnancy is the more immediate of his social secrets. That he suggests that he might leave his wife for her is another. He leverages Lee Garner, Jr., a man with significant lies in his life, into giving SCDP more time by reminding Lee of "all the lies I've told for you." Lee needn't worry too much about the debt incurred when Roger lies for him: Roger's lies come very cheaply. Later, Roger voices sympathy regarding the death of a client while callously thumbing through index cards for his next call. Wishing out loud  -- in front of the man's wife -- that Greg not return alive from Vietnam, Roger shows an almost sociopathic lack of care for anyone who's not him.

Lane has "gone native" in his new home, bearing a Mickey Mouse with red-white-and-blue balloons as a gift, when he expects his son but is met by his father. Lane has a secret girlfriend, who happens to be African-American as well as a Playboy Club bunny. To validate the care with which everyone else guards their secrets, Lane finds out that a cane across the head is the penalty for being found out.

And we are reminded that Don has more than reputation or a caning at stake should his secret past be found out: He is also guilty of desertion, a crime with no statute of limitations, and could face jail time -- in principle but not in practice, even the death penalty -- for a crime. He is rightfully grateful to Betty for hiding his secret. And for following his tactic of further evasion, as Don speaks elliptically once she suggests that they cannot speak freely over the phone. Pete seems to be savvy to this point, meeting Don in person and specifically avoiding the use of the phone. In so visiting, Pete sees Faye departing, and so finds out another secret that he claims he would have preferred not to know. Given the extreme lengths to which he went to find out Don's bigger secrets, this seems itself to be unlikely. Counter-truth tactics are second nature to everyone. Joan and Roger also switch to "code" when she opens his office door. Don and Faye do the same, to cover their relationship.

Finally, when the partner meeting takes place, Pete lies to explain why North American (fictitiously) fired SCDP. Roger, harboring a much bigger lie, berates Pete before giving a thumbs-up to describe business with Lucky Strike.

As the main action ends, Don eyes Megan with obvious intent. Joan's strategy to keep Don from his baser instincts lasted only as long as Miss Blankenship's heart held out. Don is ready to fall again. In keeping with the rest of the episode, this is an impulse than Don keeps, for now, to himself.

All of these private secrets come as second nature to the characters perhaps because their lives are built around secrets. As they propose an approach to advertising for the company that builds missiles ("You never need to say the word 'bomb'"), they scheme up an approach that doesn't mention missiles. The company's report is comically redacted with more black rectangles than it has words remaining. The exec from North American aviation addresses the black rectangles by saying "There'll be fewer black bars as the process moves forward." This prediction, not surprisingly, proves to be false.

Mad Men 409: After The Fall

It's there for the retina -- if not the mind -- to see. As the first shot of "The Beautiful Girls" comes up, an image near enough to the last shot of the credits fills the same shapes of light and dark and it is not plausible that director Michael Uppendahl staged the shot without intending this. The repeated image asks for a reexamination of the much-admired credits, which show a man walk into an office that disintegrates before he can sit. The collapse of the room sends him into a fall to the backdrop of Fifties-seeming advertisement art with a strong emphasis in the subject matter on beautiful women, or as they would have been known at the time, beautiful girls. The man's fall transitions to a shot of him in repose, right arm outstretched. And so we see Don in this episode -- in that pose, just as his destructive negligence of his children and self has been halted. Whether series auteur Matthew Weiner gave his approval or not, the director is telling us that we are moving to a new phase in the series -- what comes after the fall.

How the series begins this new phase is by moving sideways -- Don is still the central figure in this episode, but only insofar as a few, but not all, of the titular beautiful girls are involved in plots that revolve around him. Spanning the range of ages from ten to dead, Sally, Faye, Betty, and Miss Blankenship become plot devices that impact Don's life in suddenly inconvenient ways. An early episode of The West Wing, also featuring Elisabeth Moss, had "these women" as part of its title and focus, but only part. "The Beautiful Girls" suggests that women are inherently enough of a type to group them and make an episode around them; to make an episode about nothing more specific than women is in fact as well as politically objectification.

But there's no mistaking that that's how Don sees the collection of females who complicate his week in this episode. While he sees them as a nuisance to the career and affair that he wants to be having successfully and simply, he is with lies turning away the daughter who has taken a considerable risk to reach out to him. And however much Ida ruins Don's afternoon with her demise, the event certainly inconveniences her more than it does Don. Don's self-centered take on these events, along with parallel insensitivity from lesser characters such as Stan and Harry, call attention to Peggy's less-than-resounding call for civil rights for women.

The strongest of "these women" are weak in this episode: Peggy somehow has to read Abe's piece to be insulted by it, not seeing enough in the reference to Nazism (and the "I was just following orders" defense) in the title. Her efforts to instill social consciousness in the company only make her laughable. Joan, still wearing the pen around her neck that earned Joey's spite last episode, is all too easily wooed by Roger. Faye, who has stumbled into Don's life long on schooling and short on extracurriculars, feels that she has been judged for how she measures up in precisely the endeavor she has neglected, mothering.

The episode comes together in Roger's line, "If it looks like I'm going [to die], open the window. I'd rather flatten the top of a cab." This reprises the culmination of the opening credits' fall and Roger possibly chooses his words mindful of the 1947 suicide of Evelyn McHale whose suicide note lamented that she would not "make a good wife for anybody." Literal ups and downs fill the episode, from Bert Cooper's sadly superficial eulogy noting that Ida died at a higher elevation than she was born (making her, in the era of Program Gemini, an astronaut), to Sally's spill onto the floor.

Is the fall from the opening credits a deliberate topic in this episode? Stan croons with anatomical thoughts that Peggy is going to meet Joyce "Down below..." Megan consoles Sally with "I fall all the time." And the episode's final and signature moment is the closing of elevator doors on Joan, Peggy, and Faye, before they begin to descend. Certainly they are taking a slower and safer descent than Miss McHale's fall from the Empire State Building. And in all probability, with Don's life as the show's utmost focus, their gender's "Mad Men" episode in the spotlight closed along with those doors.

Mad Men 408

"I was blind. And now I see." Miss Blankenship is referring to her cataract surgery. Don has found some Amazing Grace of his own, and perhaps it is enough to save a wretch like him. This is old Don Draper. Bruised a bit and making some risky bets (like eavesdropping and two-timing). But he's not an adulterer anymore, and he's set aside serious alcohol abuse in favor of the existential woes that used to be conveyed with a grimace and now come forth in graceful, penetrating and -- for writers Lisa Albert, Janet Leahy, and Matthew Weiner -- triumphant prose.

Don's career has made him a sprinter among wordsmiths, the mind behind clever slogans half the length of a haiku. Don's journal shows him to be gifted in introspection, at least now that saving himself has proven to be necessary and worthwhile. When we first hear the words of his monologue, it sounds like one end of a conversation with a therapist, but we see that it's just Don, alone with his brilliant mind and his newfound -- or newly revealed -- self-awareness. It's an exercise in salvation. The optimism of the last episode has been borne out, thus far: The best idea does win. At least, a much better idea than waking up badly hungover with the waitress he left his one-night-stand for, and in so doing standing up his own children. Don's arc of personal improvement is obvious at every turn -- he wins an impromptu swimming race at episode's end, and wins the battle with the usurper in his home just by showing up. As another testament to his turnaround, he is invited to more sex than he accepts, and makes his model ex-wife feel insecure upon glimpsing his new life. It's telling that he sends Miss Blankenship away with the alcohol she brought -- the amount that she expected him to consume.

While the B plot brought the series to its full potential as a fraternity movie, the A plot -- Don's plot -- was resplendent, beginning with the long corridor of the swimming lane symbolizing the difficult route ahead. We later see Don submerged like Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, in much the same state of disillusionment. But this is an improving Don Draper, who looks a lot like the Don Draper of seasons one and two, standing outside the health club, watching a market basket of 1965's people and styles go by as the Rolling Stones remind us that Don's trade tells us how white our shirts can be and that a man's not a man if he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as he.

Particularly when last season's episode "Seven Twenty Three" showed Don as perhaps the first member of his generation to be knocked down -- literally -- by a member of antiwar counterculture, we knew that the series has always had the option of a larger historical metaphor, with Don symbolizing the end of Eisenhower America as it slides into decay with the changing times, as season upon season slowly undoes him. But Don came apart quickly and has soon been -- for the most part -- put back together. He's on the rise precisely as the war in Vietnam begins to hold a combat role for U.S. troops. Don may yet see worse than he has seen, but his arc will not rise and fall precisely with historical trends that we already know.

Broadly speaking, "control" underlies all of the episode's interactions, but that is such a general concept that it is either unintended, or is a throwaway. It is true that Peggy and Joan both try to get control of Joey and Stan, and when Peggy succeeds, Joan diminishes her victory as a way of finding the control that she has lost in her home life as well as in her marriage. To chastise the boyish men of the writing staff, she uses the threat of the war as a form of control -- and destruction -- at which they can't and don't laugh. But this is nakedly a compensation for the loss of control that she feels, worried even that her husband has to come in proximity to ammunition at boot camp and leave her without a confidante. In a still more peripheral plots, there was the battle between the vending machine and everyone who tried to use it.

But these parallels are weak and beside the point. Perhaps the meticulously-constructed parallel plots that have appeared in previous episodes this season were beside the point, or a kind of stunt. (In this episode, the most obviously parallel scenes are Don's two steamy cab rides with blondes.) Perhaps Don's rise from the abyss is itself the story arc of a self-help book or an after-school special. But the readings in the journal, and how the accompanying imagery is filmed by director Phil Abraham, delivers the depth and impact of this episode. There is Don, in bed alone, the way he has always wanted to be: Comfortable, rolling to the cool spots, feeling like a skydiver. When he says it so clearly -- and beautifully -- it isn't so hard to see who is Don Draper. Significantly, Don does not derive any particular empowerment in this episode from further openness with Peggy. What bridges the two episodes is that Don has found a voice with which to speak his feelings -- something that Joan also says she needs. We perhaps best understand Don Draper when we see that he prefers to direct his openness to one and the same person who is his bed partner -- nobody else at all.

Mad Men 407

As has been the case all season, the episode has a single theme driving the beat, and this time it was toughness. The client case, Samsonite, featured the only luggage of the day that strove for durability. The current event de jour was the Ali-Liston fight that marked the coronation of the then-23-year-old boxer, known for his toughness in taking punches, though in this fight, he won early by giving one. The distinction between giving a punch and taking one is useful to consider in the episode's main plots involving Don and Peggy. From the pitched football commercial and the bad news that both Don and Peggy suffer to the state of Don's and Duck's respective livers, the protagonists in the episode take punches instead of giving them. That holds true when Don throws a punch and fails to connect. But he takes punches very well episode-long, and is likely in a far better situation by the end than at the beginning. Because in cultivating Peggy as a confidante, Don has done himself the first favor we've seen in a long time. He may even have hit bottom and rebounded towards a happier future, although this is far from certain.

The counterpoint of toughness, (male) weakness, was inevitably on display. Peggy's uncompelling beau, Mark, fasting without his upwardly-mobile woman to the ironically-chosen tune of La donna è mobile, was in both senses of the word pitiful in turning the shame of being stood up into a noncommittal breakup. Don wept openly in front of Peggy and bemoaned his life in ways beyond the day's signature tragedy. The alcoholics' vulnerability was a token of amusement for Roger, just as Roger's unintended exposure in the form of the found audiotape was a token of amusement for Don and Peggy. The loss of male power was most literally brought to bear in the form of Bert Cooper's unnecessary orchiectomy, a revelation that explains the previously obscure reference from two episodes ago to "Lyle Evans, M.D." that Roger made when explaining to Cooper the eternal animosity he felt regarding the Japanese race. The weakness of the weaker man was also on overt display in the two lost fistfights of the episode: Ali's knockout of Sonny Liston (still rumored to be a fix with Liston having taken, allegedly, an intentional dive) and Don's laying out by Duck (likely fixed more by alcohol than by Duck's war experience).

The point of this episode's theme was not to show several men (and articles of luggage) swapping physical injuries. It is to peel back the characters, primarily that of Don Draper, to reveal their inner core. We didn't see or care to see if Don ended up with physical bruises. We saw instead the evidence of the deeper injuries -- the best answer yet to "Who is Don Draper?" Injured by the loss of his sole confidante Anna (a loss whose impact on himself he notes; the tragedy in terms of Anna herself, he omits), Don hurriedly replaces her with Peggy. This is a turn of events so beneficial to Don that we might surmise that he forced her into the late night of work precisely to help bring about that end. It is noteworthy that of all of Don's many secrets, only a small number of them are still withheld from Peggy by the end of this: Principally, the occupation of his mother; and, the great ruse of switching identities with the first Don Draper (and the latter fact, remember, is already known to half the partners at the firm). It would be a comparatively small matter now for Don to complete the act of coming clean and make Peggy every bit the insider that Anna was. She's a good choice: smart enough to understand him; moreover, he already knows one of her secrets -- the what, but not the who of her pregnancy. Moreover, we see Peggy suffer in the face of numerous gibes, from Trudy, her mother, and Mark, that she is not as young and pretty as a woman in search of a husband could be.

Running the "toughness" angle between the different subplots gets to the core decision facing Don. He sees the boxing matchup as a same battle between approaches to manliness. He hates "Clay" not because he is threatened by African-American masculinity, as Peggy's father was by Nat King Cole's. He hates him because "He's got a big mouth. 'I'm the greatest.' Not if you have to say it. Liston just goes about his business. Works methodically." Liston, as Don encapsulates him, is what Don chose to be in the interview that began this season -- the interview that didn't work because the firm needed Don to be a visible star. The interview that ended the season premiere had Don selling himself like Ali. But this was a put-on. Don still hates having a big mouth to the point that he hides himself, destructively, from the contact that he obviously needs. He opened up a bit to Faye last week, and much more so to Peggy this time.

It's a tribute to the high quality of the series that this episode can offer, spread across Don and Peggy's several conversations, possibly the most open discussion of the creative process that we've seen, and that that seems like the sidebar to the real interest -- what is going on with this particular bunch of fictional characters. And that it matters less that we see the great adman and adwoman trying to find the right pitch for a product than that we see Don working on a more important item: himself, the self that has been edited and tweaked countless times to arrive at this obviously inadequate, all-too-often drunken man on the verge of collapse.

Roger deftly makes fun of the Alcoholics Anonymous members in comments to Don, who sorely needs that advice. Don may chuckle at Roger's comments, but just going about one's business of vomiting in the work bathroom is losing, not winning. Duck shows us, in a collapse that plays out in seconds over a phone call (and later over Roger's carpet), how much a man with his -- and Don's -- problem with alcohol can disintegrate when he tries to be tougher than his problems. Duck shows us a man who is in his professional and social life like Liston laid out before Ali. Don was on the way there last episode, and he's on the path to this outcome midway through this one.

Don is working out the problem of his life all episode long. He's unintentionally speaking of himself when he says, earlier in the long night, "I'm not so sure about it. I mean, every time we get into this, we abandon the toughness element. Maybe there's something to the elephant." The strong, solitary figure, silently trying to resist all that's outside -- Don is the elephant. And as the night wears down, and Don's weaknesses are exposed, he draws more and more strength from turning to Peggy, eventually giving up everything and placing his head in her lap, not as a sexual overture, but out of need for comfort.

If there is hope for Don Draper it is that as he considers holding onto toughness, in the ad and in himself, that he says "The best idea always wins and you know it when you see it and then it happens." After turning to Peggy, he is the Don Draper of Season One again, mystically fresh, with the winning idea. Whatever their clasped hands mean, Don has gotten closer to the best idea about what he needs to be when Peggy asks, about his door, "Open or closed?" and he answers, about a new self who has a confidante by his side, "Open."

Mad Men 406

Peggy recalls the announcement of Don's nomination for a Clio. Don let everybody pat him on the back even though, Peggy reveals, she came up with the idea. And, she tells Stan, Don thought that she was clapping for him. Stan asks her, "Who claps for themselves?"

In this episode, Don, certainly. Also Roger, Peggy, Pete, Ken Cosgrove, Harry, Ned Elliott, Ted Shaw, Danny, the supposed Major General Alvin, and Harry Crane. And, Stan, let it be noted, you yourself. Like most episodes this season, "Waldorf Stories" has a single theme running through each of several subplots and this time it is the desire for and overreaching for credit and acclaim. Three flashbacks simultaneously develop this theme with regard to Roger while also helping to answer the season's central question, "Who is Don Draper?" The flashbacks also mythologize the show's untold backstory, showing us how Don insinuated himself into Sterling Cooper in the days when Roger's hair had some pigment, Joan was the woman on his arm, and Don didn't know how to color coordinate.

We've seen Don bask in the glow of acclaim before. In last season's "The Color Blue", his face told it all when he was recognized for excellence at Sterling Cooper's fortieth anniversary celebration. But only his face. This time, when Don is given recognition but doesn't have Betty on his arm as a stabilizing influence, (and she herself as an ego-sating trophy), the event brings out every worst instinct he has, leading to a horrific all-weekend drinking binge wrapped around two one-night stands who met one another. In this episode's past as well as present-day narration, "Who is Don Draper?" is most easily answered in terms of ambition and a craving to be "a very important man at a very important agency". Past-tense Don wanted to be like Roger. And as the episode also told us pointedly, "Be careful what you wish for, because you'll get it."

The flashbacks show us that Don is much the same man now that he was then, a man whose very syntax works, despite his brilliance, in limited patterns. He tells Roger, "I don't think that's how it goes" and tells Danny, "That's not how it goes." He pitches his ill-advised bid to meet with Life Cereal's executives while drunk by saying "What do you say we put a cherry on this thing?" Later, his pass at Faye begins with "What do you say we get outta here and really celebrate?" And in a pattern larger than mere words and phrases, Don has wished to become like Roger and by now, to an extent that is almost hard to watch, it turns out that he has.

Don and Roger are both successful, but can't be told that enough. The self-defeating nature of such a strong desire for positive reinforcement is put on display many times. Beyond the desire to actually do good work (what Don tells Faye matters, though he's nowhere near actually possessing that mindset), these men and others like them desire the explicit recognition for it to the point of requesting it, and manipulating events to help keep it for themselves to the exclusion of others' success, not to mention to the exclusion of the truth. Roger defines himself to Joan as a man deserving of credit for finding men like Don. But what the flashbacks show us is that Roger didn't evaluate Don's talent; he did everything possible to reject Don and ended up unable to recall hiring Don while drunk; it is a fact either that Roger made such an offer or that Don recognized when Roger was drunk enough that Don could fabricate the story of Roger having hired him without the lie being caught. Certainly the ad men's usual lies increase in frequency when alcohol is mixed in. Don's mid-bender lies to Betty, Doris, and Peggy pale in comparison to his taking the credit for an ad campaign that Peggy thought of. That is, if her memory is accurate, and she's not imagining a larger role for herself in the Glo Coat ad, something that is suggested when she admits that Don came up, at least, with the cowboy concept for the ad.

Peggy doesn't have to worry about suffering the harmful effects of receiving too much acclaim. Any that she deserves for the Glo Coat ad has been directed entirely to Don, and if there were any acclaim left over, Roger would want it. She takes heaps of disrespect from Don and everyone ranging from Stan to Miss Blankenship. And she's not only putting the sexist pig Stan in his place when she uses her bare body to arouse and tease him; she's also getting an ego boost thanks to her body when her career is determined to deny her credit for her mind. Indeed, fact that women could only get recognition for their sexuality is highlighted by the fact that the one woman from the firm who is invited to the awards ceremony is not Peggy, who worked on the prize-winning account, but Joan. In an interaction that we cut in too late to witness, Joan entertains the advance of some unseen ad man, to which Pete says, "That was not a business proposition" and Joan replies, "Catch more flies with honey." Joan may just have received enough positive recognition in her lifetime that she actually cares more about the business ramifications of such an interaction than one more opportunity to have her ego stroked.

The minor characters in the episode provide a veritable tidal wave of moments when they, too, crave their moment in the sun. Lane responds to Harry's Red Skelton story, "I surmise due to the usual nature of your stories that that's someone of note." Danny, whose name is not coincidentally like Don's, puts famous ads by other people in his portfolio. The "general" calls attention to his quilt of decorations. The first of Don's two conquests won an award for a jingle that is the Star Spangled Banner.

Inflating one's self is only one approach to ego. Downplaying others is a path to the same result. While Don has taken the credit for Peggy's work, and to her chagrin is in the process of doing so with Danny.
Astonishing given the later revelations, Don early on tells Peggy, "You finish something, you find out that everyone loves it right around the time that it feels like someone else did it." He means that it feels like someone else, in the abstract, did it even as she knows that she actually did! And she's not above cutting others down when the time comes. When Peggy needs to get back at Stan, she says, with an anatomical second meaning referring to his earlier arousal, "I only changed one small thing".

While Don and Roger are busy illustrating "Pride cometh before the fall", the moment priming Greek tragedy in the episode is when they witness and respond to the public self-humiliation of Duck Phillips, the duplicitous former colleague who sold the company from under them and bedded Peggy in hotel rooms. Duck, a relapsed alcoholic, attempts, but badly, to heckle the presenter at the Clios. Roger and Don laugh at Duck's drunken attempt to capture the spotlight. In the same weekend, they'll both hit resounding lows helped by the mixture of alcohol and ego. The only consolation for Don and Roger is that they go on to do so before smaller audiences.

Mad Men 405

The Chrysanthemum and The Sword, Ruth Benedict's 1946 study on the culture of Japan, rests on the central premise that Japanese culture exerts influence on the individual through the threat of shame. In contrast, many Western subcultures such as Roman Catholicism rely on guilt as a comparable motivational force. The distinction comes down to whether or not one must be caught to feel punished. Shame as a motivating force is an apt lens to hold up to Don Draper, who is avidly immoral when certain of not being caught but is consumed with the fear of having his secrets found out. Whether or not that book or this idea offer accurate insight regarding Japan, the distinction between guilt and shame is the central principle for the episode as a whole.

In the episode's central non-business subplot, the idea of guilt and shame are at the forefront of Sally's two peccadilloes. When Sally cuts her hair in an obvious bid for attention, everybody's care is for the shame it might bring upon them: The sitter's reaction is "Your dad is going to kill me... Do you understand I'm in worse trouble than you are?" Don's reaction is that when Betty finds out that he will be "in a river of shit" and he presents Sally with a hat covering her hair, to stall the revelation a moment longer. Finally, in a darkly comic circuit of mutual shame, Betty believes that Sally's misbehavior is for the purpose of publicly punishing Betty herself for the divorce.

Later, when Sally is caught masturbating, Betty's reaction is a spotlight on her hypocrisy: She tells Sally that this is not to be done privately or publicly, but later tells the psychiatrist that it's something she herself did and still does ("mostly outgrew it"). Shame becomes an endlessly rising canon: the resort to psychiatry itself is something that Betty has hidden from Henry, and that Don wants to keep from the world, asking the dense Miss Blankenship, "Lower your voice, please."

Don has always been a reliable source of hidden truths. Early in the episode, a crushing blow to him is contained in a brief interaction with Miss Blankenship: A call to California has gotten no answer. Cultural references ranging from "Help Me, Rhonda" to Selma, Alabama place this episode in March 1965. Months after Don's visit with the real Mrs. Draper, she is likely succumbing to cancer, and Don no longer has anyone with whom this many losses can be acknowledged.

In fact, given the supposed overarching distinction between Japan and the West, the only person in the episode who comes across as a firm representative of the West is Roger Sterling. Though he's utterly isolated for putting a stubborn war grudge ahead of business interests, the principle driving him is all internal: "I made a pledge to a lot of men you'll never meet not to do business with them." He may as well be abstaining from sin in order to please the heavenly saints -- Roger absorbs heaps of shame upon himself to stand by that principle, with xenophobia that is as reprehensible as it is brilliantly executed, with barbs covering unconditional surrender, the atomic bombings, and seppuku.

Maybe because of the particular subculture of advertising, "where the truth lies", anybody driven more by guilt than shame should likely have found an exit long ago. Don, putting his much-lauded brain to use by reading the episode's eponymous work of nonfiction (he channels George C. Scott's Patton: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"), devises a stratagem to destroy his personal adversary Ted Shaw, depending on Don's ability to make the Japanese executives lose face in his meeting with them. Don, who could just as well be speaking of himself when he quotes "A man is shamed by being openly ridiculed and rejected. It requires an audience." correctly understands that the Honda executives can be controlled with shame, and so he launches a plan involving a fake commercial, and he manages to manipulate his nemesis into providing the stimulus for that shame. We should not be surprised if Peggy later cites Don's scheme after he criticized her for staging a fight over smoked ham in the season opener. If all of the racial stereotypes advanced by the episode were true, it is hard to imagine that the translator could bring himself to tell his bosses "You did not honor your own rules." This capped a masterful deceit to drain both cash and honor from Shaw's ad agency, set to the caper jazz from Season Three's finale.

To be successful, drama relies upon character development and not just character. The surprising twist in this episode may be that Don is growing rather that spiraling towards a fall. His "Japanese" outlook is eminently on display when he expresses amazement that a trapeze artist would confess to Dr. Faye Miller a key truth about his relationship with his father. "He said that?" Don asks with characteristic distaste for such personal revelation, especially where one's father is concerned. "Why does everybody need to talk about everything?" But the more he talks with Faye, the more he starts to open up. Soon he's talking about his divorce, his kids, Sally's problems -- just the sort of things one would expect Don to hide. The great mystery laid down by this episode is: Why does Don open up to Faye? Is it that he sees another shallow Betty in the all-too-similarly-named Bethany? As he loses Anna Draper, is he looking for someone to share the truth with? Does he see in the PhD with the fake wedding ring, which she ironically removed as a facade within a facade last episode, someone who lives as he does, with three-level lies? Or maybe he's not developing at all, and thinks that opening up might be a way to win another battle in his never-ending war for sexual liaisons with every attractive woman around him. Thus far in the series, Don's simple self-serving motives have yet to be trumped, and could just as well have been the subject when Joan asked "Not very subtle, are they?" and the translator ogled her signature physique while answering, "No, they are not."

Mad Men 404: The Rejected

Youth will be served, but not right away. As the decade moves closer to its appointment with revolution and upheaval, the generation that brought change faced many obstacles along the way. Youth and innovation were the subject of more than one of this episode's title reference, "The Rejected."

That begins with photos rejected from LIFE magazine because the boss hates nudes. The photographer's show is raided by the police. Soon enough, Clearasil (a face cream for teenagers) is rejected in favor of Ponds (a face cream for aging women). Allison loses her job as Don's secretary to someone perhaps too old to be her grandmother. The new ideas of Doctor Faye Miller are predictably rejected by Don just as the youth and vigor of Ken Cosgrove have been wasted at the two firms that he's worked for since Sterling Cooper. Along the way, Pete Campbell's child is forgotten when Pete assumes that Peggy's congratulated are work-related. We even find out that Trudy's mother had her uterus removed. The older generation really doesn't allow up-and-comers a break in this episode. Least of all Malcolm X, who is shot.

The rejected strike back. The photographer insults Peggy's entire commercial existence ("Why would I ever do that?"), just a moment after his friend assumes that when she says that she's a writer, that she must mean something besides a copy writer. (Peggy kisses him in thanks for the insult. Or, more to the point, for being part of the generation she chooses when she leaves the white-haired men in suits on the other side of the glass door at the end.) Pete forcefully gets Clearasil to oust Pond's from the firm's business. Allison throws a decoration at Don. Faye once again lashes back at Don when he rejects the very axioms of her approach. And in the episode's final shot, Don closes a heavy wooden door on the old couple arguing with mind-numbing lethargy over pears. If the very old and their ways have no use for the young, the reverse is equally true. And when the sparks are done flying, doors close to separate them. The door that Peggy closes on the older admen could be right out of The Graduate, itself a movie about two generations turning their backs on one another.

Symbols of intergenerational strife are worn to death in studies of the Sixties. Fortunately, "Mad Men" builds these scenarios on the back of rock-solid characterization. When we first see the older-than-Moses secretary now serving Don, we don't need to see Joan Holloway's face to know what sort of misbehavior on Don's part she was insuring against.

When Pete Campbell unleashes a torrent of bile in the direction of his never less than pleasant father-in-law, we react first with the uncomfortable reminder of how thoroughly amoral he is; then with the memory that he is also impeccably pragmatic, wonder not if but how, in his calculation, the vicious attack must be in his best interests. He's not just venting steam ("Every time you jump to conclusions, Tom, you make me respect you less"); he scores the career-boosting business victory that he was angling for, and it only cost him the goodwill of a key member of his family.

And in the process of using the characters, well-defined over seasons past, to execute repetitions on a basic theme, this episode scored one of the best nuanced moments in dramatic television. When Allison's emotional disarray from the quickie with Don threaten to spill over into the focus group, and in so doing shame Don publicly, Don squirms, and a lesser payoff would have been to let the scene erupt noisily, with the largest audience possible. Such are soap operas. But Allison's comments, when she does voice them, end up with just the right audience of one. Her lachrymose outburst is not coherent to the typical mind, but Peggy knows exactly what Allison is saying. She knows that Don has taken advantage of Allison, and that Allison assumes that Peggy must have achieved her career success by giving in to Don's carnal impulses, too. The implied loss of prestige immediately kills Peggy's sympathy. And as we think that Peggy's above that, that Allison has it wrong, we remember that Peggy had thrown herself at Don and it was she who was rejected and how that -- and her momentary fling with Pete -- has to bruise her self image. Allison's not the enemy, just the messenger. The tension helps push Peggy, who was gazing at her engagement ring just before this upheaval, to choose the far side of the glass door at the episode's end.

Don and "Who is Don Draper?" were less focal in this episode than in the last three. But between his distracted approach (what we'd call "multitasking" today) in the call with Lucky Strike, the bottle that was empty because he'd drunk it all, and his squirming during the focus group, we see a Don Draper still in decline. The man who makes his livelihood knowing what people want to hear doesn't know that the woman who kept sidling up to him after their one-minute stand didn't want to have to write her own compliments as her send-off. And Don, philosophically channeling David Hume and Nicholas Nassim Taleb, is technically correct when he tells Faye "You can't tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved." But Faye's scientific form of determinism is just another noose he's trying to slip out of. Don, we can tell exactly how you're going to behave based on how you have behaved.

He should accept Faye. She belongs aside the admen. She so adeptly makes up for losing her planned ruse (a misspelled nametag) with another (a "lost" nametag). It's like she went to the same school where Don learned to make up fires to get out of calls he doesn't want to be in. And everything about Pete that Ken Cosgrove is referring to when he says with a brutal lack of conviction, "Another Campbell. That's just what the world needs."

Mad Men 403: The Good News

Vacation is by definition the leaving behind of one's normal routine. For Don Draper, this goes a bit further. When in California, he can safely go by his birth name, Dick Whitman. Three thousand miles from New York, even the family of his formerly legal wife Anna Draper know him as Dick. Asked to sign the wall he painted, he signs "Dick". And this suppression of his adopted identity seems to grow on him: When the stewardess calls for Mr. Draper, Don doesn't react until the second time. Who is Don Draper? He's a man who hasn't gotten fully used to being Don Draper.

Don's skill is in crafting messages that others want to hear. Don's brief stay in California is full of moments where he says who he is by saying the things that he wants to hear. He brands himself. We can disqualify the preening he displays for Stephanie, who has won his lust with no qualms on Don's part that he remembers her from before her permanent teeth grew in. But when he talks to Patty about Anna's cancer, he lets fly with a moment that channels his rage and incipient grief with a moment of self-celebration. He notes Patty's helplessness because of her "limited means. But I'm here now." Patty and the circumstance quickly remind him that he can't throw money at Anna's problem. He loves Anna; it was noble that he wished to try. But the choice of words he used showed more than mere anger at Patty. It showed how central his material attainment is to his self-image.

And the weakness that the show of bravado is covering up: Don tells Anna that he'd never told Betty about his past because he believed that she would leave him when she found out; Don saw in his divorce confirmation of that. In his worldview, it was not his lying but his background that turned her away. To the point: Don attributes his divorce not on the truths about him that were within his control, that indicate character flaws; he atttibutes it to the station in life into which he was born.

Whether or not Betty was the kind of woman who saw her husband as a man diminished, Joan certainly is. When she cuts her hand, she repeatedly tries to get him to take her to a hospital instead of treating her himself.

Back in New York, Don and Lane find companionship with one another. Lane is soon to pour out the contents of his suddenly emptier life to Don. But it was Don who shouted cross-office, summoning Lane back to his side so that their drinking and shared flight from misery could resume. And how empty is Don's life? When he mentions that he expected to "meet a ladyfriend" on that night, New Year's Eve, it matched Bethany's proposed second date with Don. But Bethany, who would see Don, perhaps, for free, has apparently been cast aside or at least rescheduled so that Don could see the same call girl, Candace, who had slapped him before. Lane joins Don, and repays him later for the services of the prostitute arranged impromptu for him.

During their besotted night of misbehavior (Lane, especially, for squawking in false Japanese in the showing of Godzilla and pressing beef to his abdomen during dinner), Don is retreating into solipsism. When Lane notes that Don is spilling liquor onto the carpet, Don borrows Anna's line from earlier in the episode about smoking her dress. Lane cannot, of course, get the reference; Don is again speaking for his own benefit only.

There seems to be some foreshadowing that Don's existential tragedy may sooner rather than later lead us to his mortality. (Not before the last episode of the series, of course.) Anna's fatal cancer is placed before Don so we can see his reaction to it. It's all the more ominous for being unknown to her. He proposes their next meet-up on Easter, a day of resurrection. Later, Lane compares Don to a chap who died young in a motorcycle crash.

The episode ends with Don enigmatically distressed by Joan welcoming the company to 1965. His look of discomfort may reflect that seeing what the future brings has not recently worked well for Don Draper.

Mad Men 402: Christmas Comes But Once A Year

"Nobody wants to think they're a type." Market research specialist Dr. Faye Miller is talking about Don, trying to wound him -- maybe having deduced why he ducked out of her survey. It turns out that she has it right when she says "nobody". The episode is filled to the rafters with people bristling when they are said to be -- or shown to be -- of a particular type. As we saw with last week's "Who is Don Draper?", Don not only doesn't want to be part of a type, he's equally uncomfortable being an individual. Dr. Faye Miller, who feels slighted because Don walked out on her survey doesn't realize the enormous implicit compliment that Don paid to her work. He lies to her, saying that he left because he doesn't think that the results could possibly be effective. But he actually left out of a fear that the results would tell too much about him. The alternative would be to lie all the way through the survey and see if he can stonewall a PhD expert as well as he did the Advertising Age reporter. He'd rather not try.

Two other characters who are loathe to be cast as a "type" are Peggy and Freddy Rumsen. Creative differences and the need to assert control on a shared project lead to frictions with both of them deliberately using the same strategy of verbal wounding that that Faye uses on Don. Freddy, ostensibly speaking of the Ponds Cold Cream account, keeps reminding Peggy pointedly that of the truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of no fortune must be in want of a husband. Later, when she foolishly opens up to him about her current romantic prospects, he describes to her the 1950s (I know -- it's 1964, but remember: Freddy's out of date) version of The Game and counsels

Peggy to withhold sex if she wants to marry. It's implied that Peggy gives in to her boyfriend's pleading to be her "first" precisely in order to break out of the type that Freddy tries to place her. Many such individual choices, in aggregation, made the Sixties the time of change that it was. Freddy himself suffers Peggy's retort that he is old-fashioned. If it leads him to any pain, he doesn't show it with life choices. Peggy's of the generation of change: Freddy is not. Later, at the party, the decadal backdrop gets its sixty seconds of attention with references to LBJ policies on the way: civil rights and Medicare.

Lee Garner Junior's unwelcome visit forces meretricious behavior on the entire office. When Roger suggests, kidding on the nose, that Joan dress herself up as a present for Lee, she's comfortable enough in her work relationship with Roger to fend this off with a glance. Later, Don's secretary Allison speaks with a very effective performance, in tortured facial expressions, just how much she likes being the type of secretary who has a quickie with her boss, then accepting an envelope with money in it.

In the meantime, Lee's sociopathic behavior at the party, held only to please him, forces several people into uncomfortable situations. His primary target is Roger, who is forced to wear a Santa suit and is reminded of his history of heart attacks while Lee gropes Roger's wife. At this last point, one wonders if Lee, whose advances last season "outted" Sal and cost him his job, is a homosexual who likes making unwanted advances towards women because it is a more socially acceptible form of sadism; or, a bisexual who acts on his urges with regard to both genders; or, a more wild possibility, that he's a heterosexual who made a pass at Sal out of sheer sadism, relishing the destructive outcome. The person best able to cope with Lee's behavior is Lane, whose unbending stiff upper lip enables him to respond to Lee's unctious "You didn't need to do that" with a dryer-than-the-desert "Yes, we did." Roger casts the whole thing in graceful nothings, telling Joan "This is the office, and that's life, and this is good, and that's life."

The show's side plot, Don's family, shows Sally interacting with a junior sociopath who may be Lee in a younger (and unwealthy) first draft. The creepy Glen, relentless behind his monotone, wedges himself into her life with a phone call and then the psychotic tribute of leaving her room untouched while vandalizing the rest of the house. Don has left a void in Sally's life where a positive paternal relationship should be and we should only be surprised if she doesn't turn to Glen to fill that void.

Meanwhile, for Don's it's all void. Phoebe, the nurse across the hall, lets him know that just by coming home drunk he's the type that her father was, and she knows it so well she knows about the way one's feet bruise when business shoes are worn all night. When two women resist his advances, not nearly so well timed as in the past, he keeps trying until he gets the liaision he wants to fill his void for a few minutes. As soon as he's done with Allison, he rolls off her and zips up. No clothes came off. She stands up, uses the toilet, and they're done. He makes no mention of it the next day, only thanks that she brought him those Freudian keys.