Ha! I loved Sally when she was being a little grown up. Poor Don for not knowing how to deal with his children.

Also, I was amused/disgusted by Betty's "I missed you". It was totally for the audience of women.

Anyone else think that Sally's going to run away for good this time?

I doubt she'll run away (that would lose her as a character), but I do think she's about to discover drugs and boys in a big way.

Kind of scary to me that I had the "This is not a negotiation / Do I have to pick you up and carry you out of here?" conversation with Dylan just yesterday. Apparently this is something I'm going to be repeating for another decade? Yeesh.

(the gay man not the awkward man with the wife)

His name is Kale, but I think of him as Not!Sloane.

Oh. My. God. I felt terrible but I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at any episode before as I did over last night's Mad Men. I love farce. Poor Mrs Blankenship.

One major point of fail - in an episode where racism and civil rights are addressed explicitly, could we have not made the only POC onscreen be a mugger? Please?

I get that we're being set up for Peggy's Big Activist Awakening and Joan to be the conservative mirror to that*, but SERIOUSLY SHOW, STOP IT.

[*Okay, I hope that's where we're going, anyway.]

His name is Kale, but I think of him as Not!Sloane

Thank you. I had forgotten the name of the main character and if you hadn't mentioned it was "Will" in your post, I wouldn't have remembered that.

He's named for a leafy green vegetable.

Will?

One major point of fail - in an episode where racism and civil rights are addressed explicitly, could we have not made the only POC onscreen be a mugger? Please?

I doubt that casting choice was an accident. When the civil rights issue blows up in the office, everyone will expect Roger to be racist, but when Joan is negative about it, it will be a surprise

I had the same thought, but the idea that they're trying to give Joan a reason to be racist still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

I had the same thought, but the idea that they're trying to give Joan a reason to be racist still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

People aren't born racist. They are racist for a reason, either indoctrination or negative experience. At this point. I would bet that Joan's experience with people of color has been as people who work for her (elevator operators, maids, etc.), and she has no reason to take a position on civil rights. I suspect that she will embody the knee jerk reactionism of a lot of people of the era.

Yeah, I had Jessica`s reaction to it. Again, the problem with being given the white view of the world is that we have the white view of the world. That is, we`re being shown a story and a development, but we`re being shown that from the white perspective. There have been characters of color all along, but they are only allowed to be peripheral, as viewed through the white lens. Even characters like Carla, who are clearly pivotal to the primaries on the show, are never able to show their interior life. I realize the principal cast has the focus, and everything else is supporting, but a vignette here or there would go a long way to showing that the writers understand that this is a limitation of the way they`ve chosen to stretch the canvas. Otherwise I get worried it`s a limitation of the writers` perspective.

I think it's definitely conscious. Having an African-American character of consequence on the show (or any other Person of Color, for that matter) would ring false for the same reason that all of the casual racism rings true: that was accurate for this world. It's like Louis C.K.'s joke about how black people would never use a time machine to go back before around 1986. They've given us subtle clues in the past to Carla's inner life, but switching focus to her would seem to me like pandering to the audience. I mean, she's been in what?, three minutes, maybe? of this season. But, that said, I completely approve of Peggy's growing political awareness. There's a great book about the women's movement in the civil right movement called Personal Politics by Sara Evans, which deals quite a bit with how neanderthalish all of these liberal dudes were in the 60s. Another example that just struck me: Robert Downey Sr's movie Putney Swope, meant as a satire of advertising and capitalism and insidious racism in society that comes across now as some of the most cluelessly racist crap that a white liberal could sling at the screen outside of the liberal John Ford directing the archconservative John Wayne to talk down to archbadass Woody Strode in his films.