I am glad Don told Faye and that she was okay with it. For now anyway. Big props to Jon Hamm for the great anxiety attack performance, by the way. Really powerful.

The Pete/Don relationship is wonderfully conflicted and layered and intriguing. Pete was over a barrel, but I was surprised he took the whole failure on his own shoulders.

Straw poll: how many people think Joan didn't have the abortion?

I wonder if Burt will put two-and-two together.

I thought he did.

The Pete/Don relationship is wonderfully conflicted and layered and intriguing. Pete was over a barrel, but I was surprised he took the whole failure on his own shoulders.

I was surprised too.

I'm wondering if Betty not telling her husband about Don's past will hurt him in his political ambitions in the future.

Straw poll: how many people think Joan didn't have the abortion?

I'm completely undecided on that. However, I do think it is interesting that the season has looked at differences between Joan and Peggy, and I wonder if it is going to come up that they were in a very similar situation. I'm also still wondering if either of Joan's two previous abortions were the result of her affair with Roger.

Straw poll: how many people think Joan didn't have the abortion?

I'm undecided as well.

Regarding the abortion I was wondering if there was any significance to Joan lying that she had a daughter that was 14. As in, maybe she would have a 14 year old if she hadn't had one of the previous abortions?

Big props to Jon Hamm for the great anxiety attack performance, by the way. Really powerful.

Seriously good. I could do without hearing him act "vomiting" any more, though. He's way too good at it. Or their sound people are.

Straw poll: how many people think Joan didn't have the abortion?

I totally think she did.

Oh, also? The mother in the doctor's office was Susan May Pratt who you may know from Center Stage and 10 Things I Hate About You, but also starred in Hunger Point with Christina Hendricks [link]

I liked the detail that Joan claimed her daughter was younger -- I took it to mean that she chose that age to make the mother feel a little better.

A fair number of my friends who've had to have abortions could name the "ages" of their children without pausing for calculation. That's one situation I'm glad to have not been in.

She had the abortion. She didn't want to, but she's fiercely practical and there was really nothing else she could have done -- most people in her life would have assumed the baby was Greg's, but he's a doctor, he can count, and he knows for a damn fact that she turned him down the last time he tried to initiate sex. And Roger has shown himself, yet again, to be a feckless ass. He probably feels about as much for Joan as he's ever felt for anyone in his life, but it's nowhere near enough to weather the storm keeping the baby would bring on.

I was meanly, nastily delighted to hear the doctor ripping Roger a new one. Rude, unprofessional, totally denies her any agency at all, but still pettily satisfying.

That shot of Joan riding the bus home alone afterward could have been a Hopper painting.

And ah, God, poor Laine. How humiliating and nightmarish, and no wonder he feels so free and joyous in NYC. Felt. No possible good can come of his going back to England, can it?