Back when Joan was breaking off her affair with Roger, didn't she say something about her goal always having been marriage and he couldn't give her that so she needed to move on? Couple that with her ticking off Dr. Fiance's virtues to Peggy, she's not calling off the wedding, however much I want her to.

Heh. Alice Cooper is the best baby sitter ever. That's just charming.

The actor who played Christian in Jet Set (the one who arrived with his kids at Palm Beach) is Rudolf Martin. The actor who played Dracula on BtVS.

and I wanted Tony Soprano to beat Melfi's rapist to a pulp. But it didn't happen.

This. And somehow, if it had, I would have been disappointed in that too, because it was Not That Show.

Joan won't call off the wedding. I hate that she won't, but she's not that woman, and this is not that show.

Because while it was a rape, and while she did feel completely violated I'm pretty sure that Joan doesn't consider it a rape. Legally back then it was considered impossible for a husband to rape his wife. And I think she's already extended that mindset to her fiance.

But I also think that all of the events of Joan's arc this season will serve to radicalize her later on. But not this year.

Yesyesyes. Horribly, regretfully yes. Joan's entire arc this entire season has been about how constricting, how crushing the framework is within which she operates--and how totally unable she is to really see it, or imagine herself outside of it.

She's made a name for herself, and a huge central role in the universe of Sterling Cooper, as an übercompetent Queen Bee of the office, effortless manager/diplomat/manipulator of the office environment (the steno pool interacting with the bosses, the creatives vs. the numbers guys, the partners vs. everyone else, everyone in the company with the clients--when her cattiness doesn't get away from her she's just masterful at juggling all these incredibly complex relationships).

But all that incredible competence and deftness go on under a heavy glaze of Marilyn, the only real power symbol available to a young woman of the time. Joan's ferociously bright, ferociously good at her job, but she doesn't recognize her own real value. She does her best to crush Jane like a bug not because Jane has any office or business smarts at all, but because Jane is lovely and willowy and has Joan's own former boy-harem all in a twitter.

That post-firing scene where Joan bears down on Jane like a magnificent battleship about to crush a rowboat? Joan was terrifying and powerful, but the difference in costuming was acute: that scene was the climax of the costumers' work all this season to make her look more and more architectural--rigging and struts and flying buttresses making her look more and more massive, and stiff, and inhuman--as Jane sat there, a birdlike little Audrey Hepburn in a thin little top covering a slender little figure that had no support and needed none. Total character shorthand through costuming: you saw that, you knew Jane might be crushed, but you could also see Joan getting more and more trapped.

More vast, more rigid, closer to faintly ridiculous year after year after year, and even if she crushed this Jane there'd be another Jane the next year, smaller and nimbler and younger still. And another, and another. That battleground, that value that Joan has placed on herself, can be won but it can't be held. Eventually she'll fall.

And she knows it, so of course marriage has been her ultimate goal all along; and, at past thirty, there's no way she won't choke down her own violation and smile and say yes anyway.

Brilliant office manager. Brilliant at dealing with clients. Brilliant at script reading and analysis and brainstorming. And she doesn't even see it, really. Her fiance rolls his eyes at her enthusiasm, and she smiles politely and takes it; someone's promoted right past her and she gets a pat on the head for all her work, and she's bothered but doesn't let herself really think about why. Her sexual advances are brusquely refused by the man she loves, and she sucks it up. And she'll suck this up too, because nothing else about her counts, not even to herself. She's past thirty; if she sends this guy away, she may never get another chance to marry, and if she never marries she has no value at all.

I hopehopehope she gets radicalized, but with one episode to go? It won't be this year.

She does her best to crush Jane like a bug not because Jane has any office or business smarts at all, but because Jane is lovely and willowy and has Joan's own former boy-harem all in a twitter.

She also wanted to crush Jane because Jane didn't play by the rules as set out by Joan. It was a reflection of what's going to be coming with the younger generation rejecting their elders' sense of propriety and rules and "this is how it must be done" and replacing it first with "why?" and then with a more simple "I don't have to do it that way."

Did we ever determine if it was Paul who revealed Joan's age by posting her birth certificate? It would seem one of those details that might come back into play. That maybe it'll be Paul who swoops in to help steer Joan back on course.

Did we ever determine if it was Paul who revealed Joan's age by posting her birth certificate?

I thought it was v. clearly implied that it was, although we never saw his face.

That's what I thought. They always had a very interesting relationship, those two. She challenged him in ways that few others did—he hated that she'd prick holes in the bubbles of his pretensions, but at the same time, I think he respected her for it, albeit grudgingly.

JZ, I love your spicy brains.

JZ, I love your spicy brains.

Don't we all? I don't really have anything to add, but I am Effing determined to watch the finale in real time (as I haven't been able to with any other episodes this season).

Yeah, Joan was not going to break off the marriage from the moment she took his arm. So awful that all of that has to be in her head every step of the way.

When she marries will she quit? I can't imagine the office without her. Although of course, there are major changes afoot at the office regardless.

That's one of the things that's so striking for Joan about Roger, that he was at such a different point in his life with her. And now he was willing to leave his wife and marry his mistress, and it's not Joan anymore.

Wouldn't he be more likely to have a heart attack?

Luckily asshat is a thoracic surgeon.

Uh-oh.