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.

I watch this show less and less now, though I did catch up with last season. But it seems to me, even though in many other ways the two shows could not be more different, the fan response is reminding me of the fan response to the last season of "Entourage", I think some people, in both cases, were watching "The Don Draper Pwns" show, or the "Vince and Ari Kick Hollywood Ass" show even though it can't be that way all the time...no drama(and I'm not just talking Johnny here, ha ha.)

They keep going back to that sound clip of Don saying, "Things have to change" but it's not clear at all that he'll be capable of changing.

Even as the women characters, especially Peggy and Joan, have changed tremendously over their time at the agency.

I was just chatting with a friend on the subject and mentioned that just as you only have to adjust your perspective by a few degrees to see the whole Harry Potter series as a story about Hermione as the main protagonist, that you can just as easily see this series as being Peggy's story. More than Don's. At this point, it's Peggy's interactions with Ted, Pete, Joan, Stan, Ginsburg that are the source of positive, deeper sparks.

Though Don making baby noises and Joan being an old Jewish lady was pretty amusing.

Honestly I would have liked Harry Potter more if it had been told as Hermione's story. I would definitely like Madmen more if it were told as Peggy's story. But you know both works have enormously successful without my input. I always crack up with a great deal of sympathy at Kirk Douglas saying way back when "Rambo should have died at the end of the first movie. Stallone would have lost all the money he made in the sequels but it would have *right*. I don't have much of an opinion on the Rambo thing. But I can totally sympathize with having a view on how a movie or a book should have been different even when it was enormously successful the way it was.

Though Don making baby noises and Joan being an old Jewish lady was pretty amusing.

Totally great.

Also, I don't think we've seen Don *hide* his drinking before, so that's a pretty big red flag.

I always crack up with a great deal of sympathy at Kirk Douglas saying way back when "Rambo should have died at the end of the first movie. Stallone would have lost all the money he made in the sequels but it would have *right*.

Rambo (actually, First Blood) was a novel before it became a movie. In the novel, Rambo did die at the end. At least, according to the Foreword of the novelization of the second movie (the one I read).

Interesting. Kirk Douglas had not read the novel, Just thought that was really the only ending to the movie that was true to the characters.