Interviews with:

Jon Hamm, Christina Hendricks and Bryan Batt of Mad Men.

Those are awesome interviews, sumi, thanks.

And someone needs to get Christina over here. She's clearly a proto-Buffista. She mentions Top Chef and Firefly both!

Bad Sopranos fan! No Cannoli. Cause I did think "I've heard him before," but that it.

do you all really think that was Don Draper's father? I thought he had no relation to him at all given the way the man treated the boy.

You don't think he was just a bad father? I mean - seriously -- he totally looks like Jon Hamm. Why would they cast like that if he isn't meant to be the father?

A man knocks up a prostitute who dies in childbirth(?) and, through guilt, agrees to take in and raise the child. I can totally see such a man being abusive and treating the kid as unwanted.

Jon,

I can't imagine Don Draper's mother really is a prostitute. I think his father was cuckolded.

Sumi, for some reason I didn't think the man looked that much like Hamm, but maybe I need to rewatch!

I thought that there was alot of resemblence around the eyes.

And I can't imagine-- who would Dick be if that woman wasn't his mother and yet she had a son by his father? Surely, it suggests that her husband is his father. And I cannot believe that you think it impossible for a child to be abused by his biological parents.

Yeah...they might just think he's weak. Or need a scapegoat.

I think Don is the man's son from an earlier relationship (not necessarily a marriage), and that the woman currently raising him refers to his biological mother as a whore, and Don himself as "that whore's son."

The House Next Door made a point about the last shot that I thought was kind of brilliant:

Don’s lies are a burden he can’t easily shrug off, and the last shot of the episode reminds us that the door of his office bears the same coded message that the hobo carved into the gatepost of the Whitman farm: A dishonest man lives here.