Okay, so I really enjoyed the whole "Mad Men" ep last night, but the thing that really really bothered me is that Peggy didn't know she was pregnant. I think the reveal to the viewers could have been done differently. How the fuck didn't she know for nine freaking months? She mistook labor pains for a bad sandwich?

That whole thing didn't sit right with me.

But that happens, right?

I mean, it hits the news about some teenager who didn't realize that she was pregnant.

And really, I'm sure that Peggy thought that having started the pill she was protected so she couldn't possibly be pregnant.

People still think that. It takes a month, of course.

sumi,

I guess I can see a teenager, but Peggy is not a young teenager. It just seems ludicrous to me that she wouldn't feel the baby KICK and dismiss it as...what?

I bought the pregnancy storyline, but I'm not sure they made it clear that she didn't suspect it at all. Not that they gave much indication that she did suspect something, but she was looking at her weight gain in the mirror in one scene and there was enough ambiguity that just maybe something was running through her head.

Or not. Fact is, people have been know to give birth on toilets totally unaware that they were pregnant.

Someone I work with didn't figure out she was pregnant until she was four months along--and she was TRYING to have a baby! And I have known people to be in denial longer than that.

For all of their obsessivness about every element of the Mad Men set being authentically 1960, they do make some odd choices elsewhere. The Dylan song won’t be released for several years, so it seems like a bit of a cheat to have it heralding change in the character's lives. And a few episodes back the head secretary was quoting a Marshall McLuhan piece from 1964.

Of course, the writers should be devouring McLuhan: Advertising, gender, and the modern workplace were his mainstay. There’s many an episode to be found there. McLuhan probably should be the "Grr Arrgh" guy of Mad Men. But prescient secretaries throw off my suspension of disbelief.

When I was in nursing school, one of my classmates was having abdominal pain thought she had a gallstone. Her boyfriend the fire fighter took her to the ER. Imagine their surprise at their full term, 7-1/2 pound "gallstone." Oh, and we'd been studying obstetrics and doing clinicals in the OB department while she was pregnant. I always wondered how much of it was denial.

What amych said. Yeah, that's all I've got.

Oh, except for the part where I kept waiting for Betty to kill herself.