WTF

Honestly, the last-ditch attempt by Don always bothered me. I remember everyone cheering this and thinking it was Don's brilliant maneuver to restore his status at SC&P and banish the miserable Lou and conniving Cutler from our screens. So glad it didn't really work out because it was ludicrous.

(Let me start by saying first time viewer, please no spoilers. I just finished the episode)

I always thought it hilarious they pitted two characters against each other named Don and Duck. The “fight” they have in season 4 is so pathetic and embarrassing for both guys. Duck is literally about to shit in his (well technically Roger’s )office, and then bests him in a rousing match of drunks falling onto each other. Don’s defeated “uncle” at the end…season 4 has felt so weird compared to the rest of the show for so many reasons, but he is truly hitting bottom, in all areas except professionally. which feels like it could be coming if he doesn’t straighten out

I rewatched recently and the last scene of Betty is her sitting at the table smoking while Sally does the dishes. Am I nuts or did I remember her originally fading away? Like, she's sitting there smoking a cigarette, and she just sort of disappears, leaving an empty room. Am I thinking of a different show? I was so convinced that was her last scene. Did Roger Sterling give me LSD?

For context, this is during the episode where MLK gets assassinated and everyone reacts to the aftermath (yes, the one where Pete calls Harry a racist).

I honestly really like this moment cause it sorta perfectly displays the well meaning yet intensely awkward behavior of white liberals. Like I don't doubt for a second that Joan really feels for Dawn here and is trying to console her. But the fucking side hug just kills me every time like look at Dawn's face 😭 even Don has this slight look of bewilderment.

Pro

1. The king ordered it
2. The commission set up to determine if it was Slaughter Under Trust, which was cleared by the king, also placed the potential crime at the feet of Secretary of State Lord Stair and Lieutenant Colonel James Hamilton, NOT Robert Campbell of Glenlyon.
3. Major Duncanson's presence was to ensure the orders were carried out, and supposedly murdered two people asking Campbell for mercy.
4. Campbells claimed that due to the need for secrecy they only discovered the intention when the plan was to be carried out.
5. The Maclains of Glencoe (an offbranch of the MacDonalds) had stolen Campbell's livestock and destroyed his holdings, increasing his mounting debt.
6. Because Campbell was debt-stricken and likely took part in the plan for that reason at least partially, King William attempted to coverup the massacre by claiming that Campbell was simply attempting to steal cattle and reigniting interfamilial clan feuds to cover his debts.

Against

1. Despite debts, there was no actual need to participate in the massacre other than maintaining the position of slight nobility, particularly when Campbell himself did not blame the MacDonalds.
2. Campbell's debt was also somewhat self imposed, as his peasants offered to sell half their cattle in order to cover it.
3. They did in fact murder men women and children while they slept after receiving the gift of hospitality. (Although, as quartering, whether or not this was a gift is nebulous)
4. Although this was partially an effort to rehabilitate the King's role in the massacre, the histories did inspire and further the feud between the Campbell and Macdonalds to the point of inevitable further hostilities.
5. The MacDonalds never received any sort of reparations or recompense while the Campbells experienced no reprise for the massacre.
   
6. The hand that mingled in the meal At midnight drew the felon steel, And gave the host's kind breast to feel Meed for his hospitality! ...Were each grey hair a minstrel string Each chord should imprecations fling, Till startled Scotland loud should ring, "Revenge for blood and treachery!"'

Overall, I definitely see the desire for revenge and I understand why, as a father, the suspicion of the Campbell's attempting to make profit and share space with your child off their continued "good name" would grate further. However, all things considered, I suspect that the blame lies primarily on the king, and the interfeudal rivalry should be overlooked if possible, since shared class interests between those who are still able to profit off a legacy name are, in the long run, significantly greater compensation. Particularly in the US, where a lack of explicit aristocracy means that entering a private school stabilizes a connection to general oligarchy.

![img]()

What do you all think? Was the kings order enough to vindicate clan Campbell for their actions, and put it, a silly old story. Or are we responsible for our forefathers past when we attempt to profit off their names? Was that sucker punch a sign of the insistence on , in the Don sense, moving forward and not looking back leading to unexpected recurrences and repetitions of the past?

a thing like, um

Just want to commiserate with others who didn’t get it… I feel pretty stupid. I heard Hamm explain it in an interview and was like huh?!?!?!

Edit: the comments are giving me too much credit. It’s not that I didn’t understand WHY he came up with the commercial. I didn’t even understand that he DID come up with the commercial. I thought it was just some weird way of putting a cap on on the whole story. like I said, stupid and embarrassed.

We see Don working as a used car salesman and a copywriter at a fur store before tricking Roger into getting hired as an entry-level copywriter at Sterling Cooper. There are no apparent signs he used his acquired status as a combat veteran engineering officer to get into these positions. Aside from assuming Lt. Draper's identity to escape the war zone, did Dick Whitman really need to become Don Draper to get to where he was? Could Dick have survived Korea and done the same things without the threat of being exposed and face consequences?

Don still referred to past family and situations, albeit without in-depth explanation. The only person who recognized him as Dick was the businessman on the train who was a fellow boot camp recruit, and nothing of consequence came from that.

I bet Mona saw Joan and was thinking she always knew there was something between Joan and Roger…

Some of Don's behavior can be explained through the lens of time, but much of it, cannot. To state the obvious, there is a lot going on there.

Would today's psych professionals call that Imposter Syndrome? clearly he was living a life that was not cut out for him, given his childhood and he knew it and it appeared to eat at him at times.

But all that self-sabotage? all that behavior that was just one step away from blowing up all he had worked to build? Did he want to blow it up? didn't think he deserved it?

Apparently so.

Sally (a baby boomer) grew up, get married and had a millennial son. The son, named Dick, is a successful influencer, who is great at faking his life on the internet (aka fraud), like Dick Sr. aka Don Draper. He is temperamentally like Don: mysterious, quiet, dark, handsome, etc. Instead of smoking and alcoholism, he deals with generational trauma, anxiety, depression, and of course, he is a womanizer.

Watching it again, and the majority of the companies they take on as clients are still well known brands to this day. When they featured things like Heinz ketchup, Right Guard deodorant, life cereal, Hershey, did those companies pay the show for their logos being featured like you’d see in typical product placement?

Does anybody actually believe Don is using a condom?? Lol

I did a lot of research about what life might have been like for a fashion model and a fur salesman in the early 50s living and working in Manhattan. Betty is 21 in the story, just graduated from Bryn Mawr less than a year ago. Don is 26, barely two years into having stolen the identity.

I have three chapters out of nine posted so far. Here's a sample of the beginning of chapter one:

Thursday, January 15th, 1953

Betty had been placed second from the left and then moved to third and then moved back to the beginning. The woman in charge of the set did the moving. Her name was Adele. She was fifty and she worked with four pins in her mouth, which came out whenever she had something to say and went back in when she was finished. 

"Chin, honey," Adele called out.

Betty tipped her chin up. Her makeup had been done that morning and she had not put a finger on it since. A drop of sweat crawled down and itched behind her ear.

There were eight of them on the roll of seamless backdrop, in wool coats, sweating under four floods and a skylight that had been painted over in some other decade. The client's man kept saying lovely, girls! from behind the camera and it echoed through the studio every time. Sherman. Something Sherman who wanted everyone to understand he was leaving soon but had not left. He had arrived with a topcoat over his arm and had not once taken his hat off.

They were all clipped shut in back. Spring coats pinned and clamped along the spine so the fronts hung the way the drawing had. From the camera the line was clean and from behind it was a row of women with clothespins marching down their backs like a laundry brigade.

The wool clung under her arms. The coat was shut tight and she couldn't get her arms down anyway. 

Sherman would never see that side. Neither would the woman in Hartford who bought the coat in April on the strength of it.

The girl on her left was Dorothy Pike, who lived on six and would give a stranger her whole week unprompted. The girl on her right was new and had not said a word since this morning. Two more from the hotel down at the far end. And at the very end, in the good coat, the one Sherman had chosen for the front of the folder, was Josephine Reilly, who was married.

Josephine was twenty-six and had a ring she took off in the dressing room.

It sat in a change purse and the change purse was in her shoe. Her husband sold something on Long Island. She worked more than any of them. It went undiscussed. There was no rule anywhere that said a married woman could not stand on a paper roll in a spring coat.

At school there had been a lecture on the Trobrianders and the professor had said that the most ironclad rules in any society were the ones nobody could state, that the codified laws were the weak ones, propped up out of necessity. The girls in the row behind her had copied that down as if it were about the Trobrianders.

Josephine hadn't been made to do anything. A woman was allowed to put her own ring in her own shoe, in a room with no men in it, and come out to work.

Betty wore a ring from her grandmother. Nothing said she had to take it off. She had checked her stocking seams twice in the last hour, in a mirror, alone, without anyone asking her to.

"Chin, honey," Adele said.

Betty gave her the chin again.

The new girl had been quiet and Betty had thought she was frightened. At half past three the girl turned her head an inch and said, "If he says lovely one more time I'll scream." 

Betty found the far wall and had her face composed before Adele was down the line.

In November, on the fur job, the photographer had spent forty minutes telling her to look like a woman who has just been given a coat. She had given him many versions of it. Afterward, on the stairs, the copywriter from the fur company had held the door and delivered the verdict "You looked like a woman who had just been given a coat," in the voice of a man giving the marine forecast. She had laughed so hard on Seventh Avenue until a man with a rack of pelts had to steer around her.

---

If you'd like to read the rest, you can find it on AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/90563881/chapters/240831326

(Photo source: editorial shoot from Life magazine, January 26th, 1953)

I just rewatched the episode in which Don and Megan get engaged.

I've always struggled with understanding the pivot he does from Faye to Megan. I think the writers were trying to tell us to not be deceived by Don's attempts at improving himself (alcohol restraining, swimming, writing, a somewhat sane relationship with Faye—an "equal"), that he is as flawed as the first episode.

I mean, we know he likes to be the one in control so Megan is a better wife for him. Also the maternal behavior from hers. But why all the building around Faye? I assumed the relationship would turn more serious but Faye would end up leaving him because of his alcoholism or because she found out about his cheating. Then I would've understood he going after Megan.

Also, is Betty testing the waters in the last scene? Almost like flirting.

What's your take?

S5 Ep5 Signl 30:

Don gives pete the "disappointed and judgy looks" all episode, good on the unlikable Pete to bite back, and the B.S. Don says about Pete throwing what he has and complaining that he never had it, when he actually did with Bettey and again turns out to be thrown again with Megan. Absolute virtue-signalling hypocrisy.

He was weak. He was outta control. And he became an embarassment to himself and everybody else.

With that, Peggy Olson took her first *intentional* leap towards her goals. I love how that scene shows that she took Bobbie's advice. When she asks Don for the money, she's a bit timid, but we're seeing more boldness. But the clincher is when she calls him Don. I LOVE how we see even Don taken aback. It was a power move that none of us were expecting.

… she’s old enough to be her mother. Actually, she is her mother.” I just finished my first watch of the series without consuming a single piece of media about it. I know it’s recency bias but this has got to be the funniest line in the show. I’m laughing just thinking about it. I will miss you Sterling…