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.

Umm, it does?

Not literally -- he's referring to the closeup on the "Don Draper" nameplate.

And I cannot believe that you think it impossible for a child to be abused by his biological parents.

Oh, that's not at all what I think. It just seemed to me that his "father" was treating him like one might treat a nephew or something. I don't mean in terms of abuse, but just the remoteness if that makes sense. I just felt like that man didn't really seem part of the household if that makes any sense.

Let me be specific. I thought that the behavior of Draper's "parents" was in direct opposition to the gender relationships between all the married men in the ad agency. When the hobo came to the house, the "wife" spoke first, the husband was in the background. The wife invited the hobo in and the wife gave him $$, that the husband took from the hobo but lied about it.

If it were Don Draper and his wife, he wouldn't have allowed her to give $$ to a stranger. He wouldn't have bothered with "let him work for it first" lie when his intent all along wasn't to give him $$. It seemed to me given the gender dynamics that the wife had the power and that the husband couldn't/wouldn't assert his authority. This is in pretty stark contrast to Don, Pete, etc. in the present.

They have a strange relationship and the "husband" didn't quite seem like he belonged.