Holy shit, Ken!!

I've been thinking about this season as a whole, and while many of the individual episodes have been great, I think 1968 has just gotten the better of them. Which is understandable, since if you presented a timeline of 1968 in a novel-writing class, you'd get dinged for cramming in so much drama and asked to simplify and focus.

and while many of the individual episodes have been great, I think 1968 has just gotten the better of them.

That's an interesting point. I've really enjoyed the season and especially the run of the last four or five eps, but '68 is much to assimilate even as background noise.

I remember there was news special I saw during high school (I think) called "1968: A Crack in Time" that delineated the mind-boggling number of major event that happened that year. It was fascinating to watch because while I was alive in '68, I don't remember any of it at all (except maybe the moon landing).

while I was alive in '68, I don't remember any of it at all (except maybe the moon landing).

Heh, and the moon landing was '69.

Well so much for my one memory. Bye bye 1968.

Examining Bob Benson's resume: [link]

In a really minor note, Pete's mom saying, "I forget" when he asked where she saw Manolo (or whatever the question was) was just frigging perfect.

In a really minor note, Pete's mom saying, "I forget" when he asked where she saw Manolo (or whatever the question was) was just frigging perfect.

I'm really starting to love Pete's mom.

I LOVED that moment. Also Bob getting all tough on Pete.

Really shallowly, I loved Don gamely saying, "Waaah, waaah," and Christina Hendricks totally cracking up in the background.

Less shallowly, that scene made me remember of the disastrous ad pitch Don and Peggy had done (was it Cool Whip?), how stiff and painful it had been and how clearly unable they'd been to even pretend to be actors pretending at marital intimacy for the length of a 60-second pitch, and how spectacularly the ease and playfulness between Peggy and Ted must gall him. In addition to it being totally office-inappropriate and problematic with the other staff and the clients and all the official reasons he had to dislike it, he's got the secret reason that that dynamic is utterly impossible for him to achieve with Peggy, or with anyone else since the real Mrs. Draper died.

(Maybe a little with Megan, at first, but that slipped away long ago.)

I know that a lot of the internets are rumbling about disliking this season and disliking how awful Don is, but I really kind of love it. He's not especially interesting to me, but the different facets of his awfulness he displays to each of the women in his life are fascinating to me, and I love seeing the ways all of them (Sally especially in this episode, but all of them over the course of the season) are constrained by that awfulness and have to navigate their way around it, protect against it, lash out at it to find their way in the world. He's like a horrible multifaceted evil diamond of mid-century misogyny, and he makes a useful prism to see all the different mazes and monsters girls and women had to navigate.

And I also like how each time his horribleness pushes away a woman in his life, his life gets appreciably more awful.