JZ has my proxy. I bought it entirely for those reasons. In fact, that was exactly what I thought was happening once they started putting her in the fat suit.

She was getting positive attention, praise, special assignments and scraps of privilege from the execs, and very badly didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize that (damn, "jeopardize" is a hard word to spell!). Her quasi-privileged position with the higher-ups completely isolated her from any of the women who might have been friends and confidantes, and, of course, despite her quasi-privilege, her femaleness nearly totally isolated her from the clubby world of the higher-ups.

Yes, so very much this! If it came out that she was pregnant, her career would be over.

Also, who is going to go back to a doctor who says "don't be a slut" about any concerns you might have about taking the pill?

So she's been taking these pills and either they didn't work or she didn't take them right,

Didn't she get the pills *after* her night with wassisname "Connor"?

Didn't she get the pills *after* her night with wassisname "Connor"?

I thought it was before, but you need to be on the pill for a full cycle for them to be totally effective.

Didn't she get the pills *after* her night with wassisname "Connor"?

Right before -- like, the day of. Certainly not long enough to be effective.

with wassisname "Connor"?

Pete.

I'd have laughed my ass off if his character's name had been some form of William.

You know, I didn't really like Don till I found out we both wanted to punch Pete in the face. Yeah, Peggy had lost all her girlfriends. In some ways I think Don does relate to Peggy's desire to have more for herself, but you're right, he will always sort of be thinking "Too bad she's a chick," so it can't really be a mentoring thing. Although he does seem to like "the career girls" but maybe cause they're more into no-strings affairs?

Hee. If I get nods of agreement from Corwood, sj and erika for the same post, I think my day has probably topped out and I should just close up my office and go straight to bed before something happens to ruin it.

I actually really kind of love that almost everyone on Mad Men is so hugely unlikable, but with so many flashes of heartbreaking wretchedness under the shiny, cigarette-stinky facade. Even Pete, who is basically a horrible little tick, has had brief moments where you can see that he's genuinely doing the best he can; he's just hopelessly fucked-up and wrong, and possibly even dimly aware of what a horrible little tick he is, just completely clueless as to how to make himself one iota better or different.

Betty completely breaks me. I've only seen the episode with (whitefonted in case Sail and other DVD watchers aren't fully caught up yet) her brief return to modeling once; it wrecked me. Her delight at remembering the freedom and adventures of her young adulthood and at bringing that self back to life, and then the abrupt end because none of that rebirth was ever real, for her, it was all just to woo Don through her and she herself didn't mean a thing to anyone --infuriating and insulting and heartbreaking. I really kind of can't wait to see her again and what she has or hasn't made of her life since Don sat down on the stairs of his empty house .

Thanks, JZ. I knew about Peggy from bits I caught last year, but I'm still only through episode 5. I'm hoping to catch up on the rest this weekend.

What did y'all make of the neighbor's boy, the one with the hair fetish? The relationship between him and Betty is so odd, I'm not sure what I'm seeing. Is it, "You have a hair fetish and I'll keep your secret if you let me cry about my life to you"? I couldn't tell if there was a soupcon of the kid being wiser than his age or not, or if I was projecting that onto him because Betty was talking to him as if he was an adult.