I'm'a stick with Clay-Liston. Not because I have any evidence, mind you.

oh, and did anyone else wince when Trudy said "If you loved me, you'd want to be with me" and Pete said "that's true" and then she just kissed him and they went to load the car. whoa.

But I think he was planning (or she was hoping he was planning) to come down on the train later anyway. He wasn't planning on going in the car with her. That's why she gave him cash in case the "trains aren't working."

I LOVED Duck being blindside by Don not having a contract. It was mentioned, but casually, a bunch of times and it just highlighted how out of place Duck is there.

Oh, also, it felt like they cut the show for it to run ads normally. There were some awkward transitions I thought (like Betty going from looking at the store window to being inside the bar).

Oh, also, it felt like they cut the show for it to run ads normally.

oh, yeah, they totally did. The transitions were very abrupt in places, but would have been fine for commercial breaks.

I'm'a stick with Clay-Liston. Not because I have any evidence, mind you.

That is a good reference point, because that's probably the earliest cultural conflict between old school/new school notions of masculinity as it was played out in sports. In football you don't get it until it's Namath vs. Unitas (1969) or in baseball with the long haired, mustachoied A's vs. the clean cut Reds (1972). (All of those instances of the newer, more "feminized" masculinity triumphing.) It's largely a generational shift as the Greatest Generation of WWII vets (and its ideal of a stoic, hypermasculine culture) is succeeded.

There's been a long focus on the changing roles of women, but there's an intriguing shift in the notion of masculinity coming as well. The Beatles will be a huge shock along that faultline.

Loved the look on Duck's face when Don was all, "I don't have a contract."

BUH - WAH?? I was counting on that to be all self-righteous and pompous and and and....fuck. I need a drink.

I have nothing to add that even come remotely to what all of you have said ever so smartly and wonderfully. Although I will say that even knowing how the Bay of Pigs turns out, I love that writing for the show is so good, that I actually caught myself thinking, "I hope they're still there Monday!"

Heh. I didn't see The Simpsons Mad Men parody.

But I think he was planning (or she was hoping he was planning) to come down on the train later anyway.

I think that's exactly why she kissed him. She took his ambiguous answer as an assertion of what she wanted to hear.

I'm'a stick with Clay-Liston. Not because I have any evidence, mind you.

And we had some foreshadowing of that with the Don/Jimmy bar fight scene.

I wonder though... what about MLK's "I have a dream..." speech. That's August of '63 and with children and civil rights and the future being such a strong undercurrent this past season it might provide an interesting starting point. Or do we think it might fall under the aegis of an event that's been "done" to death, as it were?

I think that's done to death. Or at least to on-the-nose for this show.

Some fascinating bits from a Weiner interview here:

You stop worrying about Peggy as a person and you start seeing that it's a secret she's living with, and she was really young. If nothing else, you start to realize that having that baby would have ruined her life. And that is so common and so part of our culture, and we're judgmental about it, it's just the way it is. Women leave their families, men leave their families. When I started talking to the priests about what I was doing, they were saying this is a 3 or 4000 year old problem socially that we figured out how to deal with. Just from the Catholic point of view, I've had wonderful consultation from amazing clergy, most notably Jim Van Dyke in New York City. Part of his job is shepherding older priests who are retired, and he would ask them for all the details, he's the one who gave me the great detail of Father Gill doing the modern Grace, and Peggy's mom going "Now, are you gonna say Grace?" Everyone Catholic has said that was right on the money. My own fascination with it was, okay, Peggy has committed a sin that is like murder, and maybe worse for a young girl, probably the worst sin a young girl could make. She's been raised thinking that, and where is that going to go? I wanted her to have to deal with it, but I also wanted it, from the very beginning, I wanted it to come out -- look, it was all about telling Pete. That was all about revealing that secret and not playing that irony any more. I built it into every episode this season, I knew from the beginning, to earn that. I knew that Pete would fall more and more in love with her, and they would become more and more of a real relationship. When his father died, he looked around the office and looked at her -- they slept together. They slept together. They had a relationship. I think, in the end, the baby, all of it, was just a way for us to see, what I'm showing with everybody: that Peggy is a complicated person who has made a lot of private choices, and she can either be like Don -- she's going to pay a price somewhere, and not in a judgmental way.