sistermagpie July 25, 2015 Share July 25, 2015 I wouldn't say Joan bore a grudge against Pete for the prostitution. However, I do think the experience embittered Joan to really all of the partners in a certain way and it gave Joan a bit of an instinctive revulsion to Pete a certain moments that brought it out- when there was a question of trust in Avon, when Pete actually was offensive with the "Everyone wants you" after the IPO accountant compliments her book-keeping, Joan's first instinct to describe Pete to Bob. IMO, there was a process where Joan let up on that after Pete proved his worth and Joan couldn't really find a solid reason to resent Pete to Bob, despite her instincts. I think Joan already had an instinctive revulsion to Pete. Like when she tells Lane there's nobody who hadn't wanted to punch Pete at some point. He's annoying and everything Joan would dislike in a guy imo. I took her line to Bob to be like her line to Lane earlier. But I don't think years earlier she would have given him a second thought enough to be able to revise her opinion. Saying he's never broken a promise to her is significant after Jaguar, imo, especially since she's comparing him positively to the other partners. It seemed like one of those moments where she realized her feelings had somewhat changed. Also, I don't think either Pete or Joan recognize much of an ally in grunt-work. I never saw Pete thinking that Joan worked especially hard or vice a versa. I think it's just as simple as Joan respected how much money Pete brought into the company and Pete respected how Joan made things run smoothly- the final products. I don't think either of them particularly idealize obvious grunt-work in others. Maybe Joan does a little- but she only got close enough to Lane to feel that way. However, both of them, but especially Pete, are more likely to idealize (but then envy) big success that seems effortless and glamorous. It's not that the two of them acknowledge it openly so much, but that it seems like the show starts aligning them in ways I don't think it ever did before. Joan and Pete are tapped by Burt for the IPO and are specifically complimented for their work in ways that suggest they don't usually get that, Joan and Pete are the two who are (individually) furious at the same behavior in Don when he drops Jaguar, they have the conversation about "your problems are my problems" when Pete asks for advice, Joan says the complimentary thing about him, and ultimately they have the joking pep talk about McCann. It just feels like the two of them have almost nothing to do with each other and then there's Jaguar and then after that their relationship is more positive. The one clash they have is on Avon, and that two was about both of them wanting the same thing and accusing the other person of standing in their way unfairly. They both thought the other one was stealing their business and screwing them over. Where as Joan's relationship with Roger and Don goes through more serious rough patches. She gets cold to Roger after Jaguar and then feels sorry for him and they forge a better relationship with lower stakes. Joan's goes through an angry patch with Don too. With Pete it just seemed like there was no bad period, just distant dislike (I assume) and then something better. I also don't think much of that forgettable moment of Joan laughing at some non-memorable joke of Pete's. It wasn't funny- Pete just asked if there any birthdays to cover. Joan was the only one who laughed- perhaps because she was a little giddy at her first partners' meeting. Don was still in his understandable bad mood that he was turned into a pimp against his will. The moment might not have been a big memorable one in the scheme of things but it seemed pretty deliberately chosen to me, especially given the timing. This is the week after Pete organizes the deal. Don's still pissy enough to make a reference to things being done without his knowledge, which makes Joan have a moment of freezing to see if that's going to be bad. Even if she was giddy about the meeting she's not going to giggle at Pete's stupid joke (okay, not that stupid. I thought it was funny) if the show wants us to see her as being angry at him about Jaguar. By having him make the joke and her laugh the scene sets up the two of them as allied in that scene rather than everybody at odds or Joan being disgusted with him. Also, I think the merit of Joan's partnership only openly came up with Harry bursting in to object. Pete did loudly object to Harry's "broad daylight" comment with "What's that supposed to mean?" Don glared at Harry. Bert reassured Joan that they weren't going to make Harry a partner under his threat and then, dressed-down Harry even though they gave him a conciliatory bonus for Broadway Joe. Essentially, all of the partners defended Joan's right to be a partner- even Don who understandably resented how it happened. Like, Don preemptively lying that Joan was made partner because of her many years of service to the company to Peggy in The Other Woman to immediately give a Joan an respectable reason for her promotion, even through his fresh hurt. The partners generally had Joan's back on this issue, partly because defending Joan's partnership = defending their character and agency's integrity. Yes, they all defended it, but Pete's response was the first and most vocal defense of Joan's deserving of her status. Pete was also the person who specifically went to get Joan when they were getting the news about Jaguar, iirc, and I think escorted her out to the company to share the news. He was just most aggressive about Joan the partner from the start. That, to me, seemed to establish that of all the partners Pete was the one with zero ambivalence about her status or the whole deal. And that, to me, made it make sense that Joan seemed to get more comfortable with him afterwards rather than less. Where as Jaguar had more negative effects on her relationship with Roger and indirectly Don. Link to comment
Melancholy July 26, 2015 Share July 26, 2015 (edited) I think Joan already had an instinctive revulsion to Pete. Like when she tells Lane there's nobody who hadn't wanted to punch Pete at some point. He's annoying and everything Joan would dislike in a guy imo. Other than that one line, I can't recall Joan having a problem with Pete in S1-5 which is a long time for two central characters. Joan helped Pete out of his au pair dress jam when she didn't have to. Joan did genuinely want to disparage the guys with her "Everyone wanted to punch Pete"/"It's good that you're different from the other partners", but IMO, Joan went a little OTT in acting like Lane was the specialest partner snowflake to console Lane. IMO, there's a complex blend after the Jaguar deal where Joan had her "grimy little pimp" revulsion and displacement of her own actions on Pete. However, at the same time, Joan came to admire Pete's business acumen, straight-shooter tactics, and respectful attitude toward her. Joan's mixed feelings created that dissonance in that scene with Bob. Saying he's never broken a promise to her is significant after Jaguar, imo, especially since she's comparing him positively to the other partners. Although, I've actually never seen another partner break a promise to Joan other than Roger claiming to his co-partners that he was going to Lucky Strike headquarters to reverse the firing and perhaps, Joan could understandably extrapolate that every time that Roger said or acted like he'd never leave Mona during their affair, was a broken promise when Roger married Jane. IMO, in Delusional!Joan World, Don made some kind of promise that he'd retain Jaguar forever and for always and Don made some kind of covenant that he'd never shtup or marry a secretary since he never hit on Joan. And Cooper, Ted, and Cutler just got lumped in Joan's mostly imagined broken promises. Joan had legitimate broken-promises grievances with Roger and it's good that Joan recognized Pete as a straight-shooter with her and people on his team- but her comment re: the rest of the partners was very silly and more emblematic of Joan's chip on her shoulder than reality. It's not that the two of them acknowledge it openly so much, but that it seems like the show starts aligning them in ways I don't think it ever did before. Joan and Pete are tapped by Burt for the IPO and are specifically complimented for their work in ways that suggest they don't usually get that, Joan and Pete are the two who are (individually) furious at the same behavior in Don when he drops Jaguar, they have the conversation about "your problems are my problems" when Pete asks for advice, Joan says the complimentary thing about him, and ultimately they have the joking pep talk about McCann. It just feels like the two of them have almost nothing to do with each other and then there's Jaguar and then after that their relationship is more positive I agree with all of that. However, I think Joan and Pete were allied more because they were both partners post-Jaguar. However, I chalk that up to Joan was able to play with the big boys more when she made partner and she ended up gravitating to Pete's hard-nosed, business-centric, mercurial IPO view of the world. It wasn't the prostitution thing that brought Joan and Pete closer together. It was the partnership. This is really pointed when Pete and Joan were totally compadres over the IPO and they were plotting- but Pete smarming that everyone wants Joan (because the IPO guys complimented her books) damn near spoiled the mood, partly because it brought up the seamier history to Joan getting the partnership and Pete bringing it to her. Even if she was giddy about the meeting she's not going to giggle at Pete's stupid joke (okay, not that stupid. I thought it was funny) if the show wants us to see her as being angry at him about Jaguar. By having him make the joke and her laugh the scene sets up the two of them as allied in that scene rather than everybody at odds or Joan being disgusted with him. I don't think Joan was angry at Pete and never said so. However, I do think the prostitution thing introduced a dark underbelly in Joan/Pete which came out in Joan's instinctive reaction with Bob, her various reactions when Pete brought up the prostitution scheme, the dynamic when Pete said the IPO accountant wanted her. However, that dark underbelly co-existed with a genuine improvement and closeness in Joan/Pete when Joan came to appreciate what Pete did and how it enriched her and Pete regarded Joan as a co-partner who made executive decisions instead of merely an office manager who shuffled secretaries. Pre-Jaguar Pete and Joan were mainly just distant with Joan voicing one negative thing about Pete to console Lane after Lane had a fist-fight with Pete. However, the prostitution thing introduced a suspicion/revulsion in Joan while at the same time, their close work as partners fostered a respect. The respect won out at the end of the day. I think that same twistiness existed in Joan's relationship with Don. Pre-Jaguar Joan deeply admired Don professionally and she was very fond of him- although I think Joan had a build-up in thinking that he was a personal mess because of Allison, marrying Megan (with Joan's paranoia that it meant something that Megan didn't invite Joan to the surprise party right when Joan was feeling office politics vulnerable), some judgey vibes that Joan gave off when Sally landed in the office in Three Sundays and The Beautiful Girls. Don's objections to the prostitution created mixed feelings in Joan- some appreciation of the chivalry and an instinct that she could safely drown her sorrows in front of Don and her pain would be understood but not used to humiliate her. However, Don's too dramatic, too late burst into Joan's apartment engendered some paranoia that Don was really judging her and that kind of fear leads to a level of preemptive dislike. When Don fired Jaguar, Joan considered it enough of a betrayal that fed exactly into Joan's emerging paranoia/dislike but also erased Joan's confidence in Don's business acumen and ability to a team player that Joan seemed to work very hard at *hating* Don until some undefined thawing in Time & Life/The Forecast. Yes, they all defended it, but Pete's response was the first and most vocal defense of Joan's deserving of her status. Pete was also the person who specifically went to get Joan when they were getting the news about Jaguar, iirc, and I think escorted her out to the company to share the news. He was just most aggressive about Joan the partner from the start. That, to me, seemed to establish that of all the partners Pete was the one with zero ambivalence about her status or the whole deal. And that, to me, made it make sense that Joan seemed to get more comfortable with him afterwards rather than less I mean, Joan didn't see it but I think Bert's response to Harry saying that they were alike with, "Mr. Crane, I was different from you in every way imaginable" was the most devastating take-down of Harry (and partly his treatment of Joan). It was one of Bert Cooper's burns that just ended the entire conversation right there. However, sure, in front of Joan, Pete was the most vocally enthusiastic about Joan becoming partner and he was the most excited about the Jaguar deal. I agree that this raw and non-ambivalent enthusiasm made Joan more comfortable with Pete. However, all of the partners had Joan's back when it came to defending her from being treated like a whore and never intentionally slut-shamed her for her actions...absolutely including Don who resented the deal and Herb but not Joan or her new status as partner. Edited July 26, 2015 by Melancholy 1 Link to comment
sistermagpie July 26, 2015 Share July 26, 2015 Other than that one line, I can't recall Joan having a problem with Pete in S1-5 which is a long time for two central characters. Joan helped Pete out of his au pair dress jam when she didn't have to. Oh, I'm not saying Joan had a problem with Pete. I'm saying they had zero to do with each other, but it was in no way surprising when Joan jokingly told Lane that everybody's wanted to punch him at some point because there's almost nothing about Pete that seems like it would fit Joan's idea of what a man should be like. It's only post Jaguar that they have actual scenes together that make it believable when Joan thinks twice in her scene with Bob. If Joan had said something like that earlier I think it would have been really surprising and caused a whole lot of speculation. Joan had legitimate broken-promises grievances with Roger and it's good that Joan recognized Pete as a straight-shooter with her and people on his team- but her comment re: the rest of the partners was very silly and more emblematic of Joan's chip on her shoulder than reality. Yes--but I think that's the point of the line in the scene too. I mean, not that it's silly for her to say, but that the line's about Pete, not the other partners and what they've done. She's just currently feeling more positive about Pete than she feels about the others. It wasn't the prostitution thing that brought Joan and Pete closer together. It was the partnership. I get the feeling we're not really disagreeing on this part. I was responding to the idea that Joan had a grudge against Pete after the Jaguar thing, Pete more than anyone else. I don't mean to say that Joan felt any special bond to Pete because of the Jaguar thing. I just think that in that situation, the one that changed Joan's status, Pete was the one dealing with her face to face etc. while mostly everyone else was trying to pretend they were just looking the other way. So rather than Joan having to overcome a specific anger at Pete for heading the Jaguar deal, she's open to however they work together as partners.If there was a positive aspect to their relationship due to how the deal went down it's maybe just that Joan knows exactly how Pete feels about the deal while she can't really know about the other partners. So Pete's a bit safer from the start because his doesn't ever wonder what he's thinking. However, the prostitution thing introduced a suspicion/revulsion in Joan while at the same time, their close work as partners fostered a respect. The respect won out at the end of the day. Ah--that must just be where we read it differently. I didn't see any dark underbelly in Joan's comment to Bob, anymore than I saw anything much significant in her comment to Lane. The two lines seemed very similar to me, just a thoughtless dismissal of a guy most people in the office don't like.Maybe a bit more personal since she has now dealt with Pete coming into her office like some low level demon trying to buy her soul, but it didn't at all make me think of Jaguar specifically. I imagined Joan's reaction to Pete in the past being somewhat the opposite of this: Pre-Jaguar Joan deeply admired Don professionally and she was very fond of him That where Don caught Joan's attention in a positive way Pete was somebody she probably thought about as little as possible. I don't think he was much on her radar except as somebody she would never ever seriously date (unlike Don). But regardless, I think we actually agree that it's not that the prostitution thing forms a bond between them. It's just that it's not an impediment to their relationship when Joan's new status lets them get to know each other a little better. So when they have that scene where Pete's asking her for advice and says "Thank you" just because she listened to him, or when they have that scene in the cab after having a beer with the other partners, it's not like the prostitution thing, imo, is hanging over those scenes making them bond. It's just the thing that started and didn't stand in the way of the new relationship. At best you could say that a lot of the things they would see in each other were present in the Jaguar scenes--like Pete being a grimy little pimp and Joan's ability to be ruthless (which she hid for so long). Link to comment
sistermagpie July 27, 2015 Share July 27, 2015 From the A LIttle Kiss Thread... I don't know how much Megan went in for the "daddy thing", beyond the obvious of "Dad pays the bills and helps make opportunities...like shoe commercials." I based that on the fact that when we meet her father we see where she learned to be Don's wife. He's a philandering allegedly genius drunki and Megan seemed to suit him because she's so used to taking care of her parents. When they got married I didn't see Megan seeing herself as making any compromises for career kickbacks. I mean, she did want to be a copywriter and Don made her that, but I don't think she saw the marriage as a stepping stone to that, exactly. Later on they had a classic young second wife relationship where he paid for her acting classes and house in the hills and fancy clothes, but her marriage struck me as more romantic than mercenary at the time. Raymond from Heinz is actually a character who's interesting to track across his entire run, because all along he's a symbol of the state of Don and Megan's relationship . Brilliant catch! And of course, Don will be cheating on Raymond next season and lose the beans for the ketchup. When I think about that character, too, I think about the series of Heinz pitches and what they say. There was a lot of discussion after the Bean Ballet about whether it was supposed to be good or bad, but I was firmly in the camp of good. To me, that ads one of the only seemingly truly modern ads the place ever seems to pitch since it goes for the psychedelic druggie type visuals. Raymond *said* he wanted them to make the beans modern, but he hated that genuinely modern take. So then they go for something more old-fashioned and straightforward--it's a camping trip, but teenagers are on it. So the people in the ad are the kids--the same ones who would later show up in the Coke ad, basically. He doesn't like that either, because he actually doesn't like the present/future at all. What he goes for is the old-fashioned future, a commercial that puts people in space but assures us nothing has changed. It's just the 50s with spacesuits and not an angry teenager in sight. In a way that mirrors Don and Megan too. When it comes down to it Don kind of does want what he always wanted. Not modern and hip, but that feeling of belonging to a family, despite the fact that he doesn't actually fit in that reality. 3 Link to comment
Melancholy July 27, 2015 Share July 27, 2015 (edited) I agree that Dev F.'s Heinz & Don/Megan analysis is just superb. It never occurred to me- but I completely agree. Also, good catch to sistermagpie, on how Don cheating on Heinz Beans mirrors Don's cheating on Megan with Sylvia. To continue, Raymond's SUPER-HAPPY reaction to the Megan's History of Beans pitch, "It's the future. That's all I ever wanted" mirror's Don's OTT "You're good at *everything*" after Megan was literally winning on all Good Wife fronts according to Don- beautiful date and excellent conservationist, advertising genius, advertising partner-in-crime, inspired as an advertising genius because somehow serving dinner to Sally and Bobby as their stepmother creatively touched her. I liked the concept of the Bean Ballet commercial. I think I'd need to see the execution, though. I could see how it could look ugly. I think it would all come down to the visuals and the song selection. However, I do think it would be catchy and put beans on people's minds. However, just a camping trip with kids roasting beans around a fire is very boring and "Home is where the Heinz is" was a cliched tag-line. It was also pretty old-fashioned. Camping trips with wholesome teenagers is a 1950s concept too. Moreover, Peggy flipping out at Raymond was a low point. It really wasn't Don angrily but firmly showing the Dow guys that he knows their product line and market share and their personal distaste for him doesn't amount to a hill of beans (lol) when they've already conceded that they love his work and thoughts. I mean, screw likability- who is making Nepalm and needs an effective public image campaign for that. Or Don angrily telling the Belle Jolie guy what's what with important messages in his rant designed to appeal to the logos of the Belle Jolie executive. "Every woman wants choices, but in the end, none wants to be one of a hundred in a box. She's unique. She makes the choices, and she's chosen him. She wants to tell the world "He's mine". He belongs to me, not you. She marks her man with her lips. He is her possession. You've given every girl that wears your lipstick the gift of total ownership." Peggy had none of that- it was just a tantrum. ETA: I did like Megan's beans idea though. No, it's not modern or earth-shattering. However, there's a story, it's interesting-looking to see a number of families in different guises and history serving beans, right through space. I think a lot of television watchers would both pay attention and leave it with fuzzy, good feelings. And you know, I always felt that while this show embraced the aesthetic of the 1960s, it ultimately landed on a note that the bigger concepts are actually pretty universal. Family, togetherness, the American drive for profit and financial stability, a desire for adventure. People hunger for all of that, whether they're hippies or businessmen. I think that's why maybe Don's aesthetic was more ON POINT in the 1950s and early 1960s but he was a great ad man through the very end of the show because he could still feel or at least, try to understand the universal constant desires of humanity. Edited July 27, 2015 by Melancholy 2 Link to comment
sistermagpie July 27, 2015 Share July 27, 2015 (edited) ETA: I did like Megan's beans idea though. No, it's not modern or earth-shattering. However, there's a story, it's interesting-looking to see a number of families in different guises and history serving beans, right through space. Oh, I thought Megan's ad was great--I mean, it's *exactly* what the guy wanted but couldn't have articulated. It is a great example of the show coming up with an ad that works perfectly for the plot. Neither of Peggy's ads has the emotional content. On this show you can often tell when an ad is supposed to be hitting, and that's the key to it. It's when it seems to tell a story where you can feel the emotion in the pitch. Megan did it with Heinz, Peggy did it with Burger Chef and Beau Jolie, Don did it with Carousel. Whether these ads would have worked well as actual commercials we'll never know. Maybe teenagers would have loved the bean ballet ad just because it was visually appealing. They probably wouldn't have gone much for the Heinz ad. But we understand what Megan's ad is saying and can totally feel that it's the right ad when she says it. The Heinz guy would never have connected to his original idea he said he wanted, because it was what he really didn't want. I think the show definitely took the position that Don's themes of nostalgia were universal and the key to great advertising. I'm not sure that's really true in all advertising, but we can definitely see how it's a powerful theme that would work in commercials. Edited July 27, 2015 by sistermagpie Link to comment
Melancholy July 27, 2015 Share July 27, 2015 (edited) Don's pitches are further-ranging than nostalgia. Aggressively embracing the new even if it means throwing out the old (Madison Square garden), mavericks who upset unlikable entrenched interests are always The Hero even when all solid data indicates that they're losing,(Why I'm Quitting Tobacco), peace, love, authenticity, and multiculturalism (the Coke ad), the individual's desire to improve their life and transcend theirs and their surrounding's limitations (the Accutron pitch), a universal desire for movie-like entertainment in commercials along with the romance of the Western made adorable (Glo-Coat), people's addiction to suspense and how a well-executed drum-roll and slow-roll out can really make something seem high-tech (it'll take a week to actually see the Chevvy car in the ads while the language and crowds build up suspense for the roll-out), control of the family purse strings = being master of your domain (the Executive Accounts), when spoiled Americans travel abroad, they care about maintaining their American creature comforts and that goes for young hamburger consumers and old people who need air conditioning (the Hilton ad) are all transcendent values beyond Don's excellent nostalgia pitches (death of parents = death of childhood so don't smoke, Carousel). BTW, I love or like all of Don's ads....except the nostalgia treacle laden original Hershey pitch (before he blew it up with reality and made it awesome, lol) and the Snowball's chance in hell. Nostalgia doesn't always work- and in the case of Hershey, it was cliched, totally expected, and even if Don *did* have a father who tousled his hair and bought him a Hershey bar after mowing the lawn, why should I care. The Carousel pitch worked with the nostalgia because like the products, Don told his family's story in pictures, and the pictures with the photogenic Drapers epitomized American family life but with their own vignettes of quirky individuality. The "mow the lawn" story had none of that, nor was it as related to Hersheys as the Carousel pictures. Oh, I don't know how finished Don's "farm table with butter" ad idea was with Drunk!Ted- but it was also some unimpressive nostalgia boringness. Edited July 27, 2015 by Melancholy 1 Link to comment
VCRTracking July 27, 2015 Share July 27, 2015 I think that same twistiness existed in Joan's relationship with Don. Pre-Jaguar Joan deeply admired Don professionally and she was very fond of him- although I think Joan had a build-up in thinking that he was a personal mess because of Allison, marrying Megan (with Joan's paranoia that it meant something that Megan didn't invite Joan to the surprise party right when Joan was feeling office politics vulnerable), some judgey vibes that Joan gave off when Sally landed in the office in Three Sundays and The Beautiful Girls. Don's objections to the prostitution created mixed feelings in Joan- some appreciation of the chivalry and an instinct that she could safely drown her sorrows in front of Don and her pain would be understood but not used to humiliate her. However, Don's too dramatic, too late burst into Joan's apartment engendered some paranoia that Don was really judging her and that kind of fear leads to a level of preemptive dislike. When Don fired Jaguar, Joan considered it enough of a betrayal that fed exactly into Joan's emerging paranoia/dislike but also erased Joan's confidence in Don's business acumen and ability to a team player that Joan seemed to work very hard at *hating* Don until some undefined thawing in Time & Life/The Forecast. I like to think finding out Don grew up in a brothel brought those feelings she had about having prostituted herself along even more inescapable. Link to comment
Melancholy July 28, 2015 Share July 28, 2015 (edited) I like to think finding out Don grew up in a brothel brought those feelings she had about having prostituted herself along even more inescapable. You know, even Matt Weiner wasn't going to write a Don/Joan scene where they hashed out why she was so furious and bent on breaking him, it would have been helpful to have Joan in the Hershey pitch so Christina Hendricks could emote. I know Joan's usually not in these pitches- but it could be plausible since Hersheys was such a potentially big get ala Joan in the pitch room during the botched American Airlines pitch. Ironically, Cutler had his own agenda in S6 to turn SC&P into his and Ted's own agency but Cutler was actually on Don's side throughout S6. Cutler didn't have a grievance about Don firing Jaguar, Cutler was enthused about the slap-dash merger, Cutler was totally in favor of killing Ocean Spray for bigger Sunkist billings, Cutler facilitated Don's worst episode of substance abuse with the speed, Cutler wasn't even that phased about Don refusing to work on Chevvy for the next several years, Cutler never weighed in on St. Jospephs but all evidence points to the fact that he'd like to retain the client and up the ad-buy by any means necessary including using Gleason's death. However, Harry Hamlin's utter "swallowing bile" disgust on hearing Don's childhood biography in contrast to Kevin Rahm's odd sympathy and John Slatterly's "It turns out I never knew Don- and I"m creeped out by that" was clear-as-day proof that Cutler would be the primary enemy into the next season, without any need for words. I'm curious how CH would have played it. Maybe she would have included some uncomfortable shame. Although, Joan used the one-night of Jaguar sex to earn financial stability and prosperity and then, Joan used that to further increase her credibility and entitlement to love and stability for herself and Kevin through the end of the show. Joan didn't have to accept some loveless arrangement with Bob Benson and she could control the terms under which Roger saw his son to protect Kevin from the same Roger Sterling love em and leave em flakiness that defined her life for like a decade. UO but I could even *admire* Abigail Whitman for whoring herself out to give Dick and Adam (and herself) a roof over their head and food on the table even if it was in a whorehouse with all of the unhealthiness there because Abigail really didn't have any options. I know that's how Abigail, Heroine of Her Own Story saw it and she has a limited point in that regard. However while it's never good to raise children in a whorehouse, Abigail turned a horrible set of Great Depression circumstances into utter hell practically designed to severely damage both sons with her physical and emotional abuse, neglect of basic needs and safety, or the way she didn't adapt her religious fervor into more open-mindedness even though she was in a life of sin. (I'm not sure how many of these victimized Adam- but I'm pretty sure Abigail hurt him on the last score and she was very cold to Little Boy!Adam when Adam saw Dick on the train.) I'm actually not wild about how S6-7 Joan became obsessed with this rigid, phony workplace propriety and didn't gain empathy with the Peggys of the world and like Abigail, Joan should have adapted with her new status/moral compromises to be more flexible. However, Joan absolutely leveraged one night of being a prostitute into becoming a better protector for Kevin and a fine role model. Edited July 28, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
sistermagpie July 28, 2015 Share July 28, 2015 Don's pitches are further-ranging than nostalgia. Oh, I know Don's supposed to be an all-around great ad-man. He doesn't just have the one commercial he makes over and over. But when the show wants Don to impress the audience and get us caught up in the pitch, it's usually about longing for home and family that maybe never much existed. It's not just a Don thing, it's a show thing. In a way, the show's kind of about that pull between that on the one side, and on the other side longing to leave all your clothes behind and jump into the sea, to grab the new thing that's supposed to fix you. And of course it's an ongoing really interesting thing that Don has this huge blindspot to the death imagery there. He rejects Pete's embrace of the deathwish idea in the pilot (iirc), I don't think he's so taken with Ginsberg's Speck-inspired rape fantasy, he's annoyed at everyone calling his Hawaii ad suicide related. He does ultimately make the fantastic point that you have to die to get to heaven, but for so much of his life he seems in denial about the full meaning of that. He always sees the new beginning as so positive. You know, even Matt Weiner wasn't going to write a Don/Joan scene where they hashed out why she was so furious and bent on breaking him, I think they actually did it when Don dropped Jaguar. Link to comment
Melancholy July 28, 2015 Share July 28, 2015 (edited) And of course it's an ongoing really interesting thing that Don has this huge blindspot to the death imagery there. He rejects Pete's embrace of the deathwish idea in the pilot (iirc), I don't think he's so taken with Ginsberg's Speck-inspired rape fantasy, he's annoyed at everyone calling his Hawaii ad suicide related. He does ultimately make the fantastic point that you have to die to get to heaven, but for so much of his life he seems in denial about the full meaning of that. He always sees the new beginning as so positive. I think Don evolves throughout the series on death. In S1, he's so relentlessly focused on surviving/dominating that he makes it his life's mission statement to indulge himself on every contradictory score. "You're born alone and you die alone and the rest of the world drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget that fact but I never forget. I'm living like there's no tomorrow because there isn't one." That's the emotional underpinning of why he found the death-wish argument "perverse"- he'd much rather just encourage people to smoke without even thinking about the consequences as long as it's toasted and therefore, sounds like it tastes good. Don was determined to never think about death, beyond just a fact of life there to give permission to anyone with the "strength" to do whatever the hell they wanted in whatever time they had. That led to his insensitivity on Betty's mother's death and his willful determination to not see that Adam was alone in the entire world because all of his family died. IMO, with every passing consequence from this attitude like playing a role in Adam's suicide, Betty's shot that she doesn't need him around through Gene's stroke because she knows how Don feels about grieving, Don's assorted near-death experiences from his dangerous lifestyle, Anna's death. Don becomes a little more willing to face the consequences of death and a lifestyle that courts death instead of sweeping them under the rug. However, there's still strains where he's disassociated from death. I.e. being more concerned about his frenemy feud with Roger than JFK's assassination and Betty's grief. Or there's the dynamic where he actually does understand compassion for mourning a little more but he was too emotionally barren and focused on his own "just keep swimming" mentality to competently nurture Sally through Gene's death, but made arguably "too little, too late" gestures like checking on her when she was asleep or finally comforting her about Baby!Gene after she'd been scared of him for days. I would argue that Anna's death was the first death that he healthily (at least for Don) mourned. His benders got worse for a few weeks until a crescendo in The Suitcase- but he realized that he needed a friend to get through the night (even if he passive aggressively baited Peggy into staying), cried, but then picked himself up to live more healthily. In terms of the advertising, it *was* a step forward for a man who was orphaned very young from his parents' violent sudden deaths to ponder and imagine a way to dissuade teenagers from picking up smoking by implying that their parents could die of lung cancer so teenagers mourn their own childhoods and think about what it feels like to be left alone far too early. However, Don backslid in Tomorrowland in his determination to not head back into depression on packing up Anna's house and then, Anna's ring burned a hole in his pocket leading to the pointless second marriage. In S5, Don was pretty relentlessly focused to not focus on death. Usually, this wasn't unreasonable because Don's sole brush with RL death didn't come until Lane's suicide at the end of the season. However, it did have its moments of dysfunction. Don had fever dreams of killing his ex-girlfriend for Megan and he rigorously ignored what that meant. Megan threw her "Why don't you call YOUR mother?" and it was buried under "Every fight diminishes us!" IMO, Lane's death and its similarities to Adam's death triggered an *obsession* with death all over late S5 and S6. However, this resulted in a curious split. Don was obsessed with death- but yet still Don and actually a Don hellbent on engaging in all of his destructive behaviors which have their root in disconnecting from his actual feelings. It led to a split where Don was totally disengaged from *actual* deaths that were happening real-time like MLK's death, Robert Kennedy's death, Roger's mother's death, but instead, dwelling on imaginary potential dream-deaths from Private Dinkin's possible death or his own possible drowning in the LA pool or the possible suicide of the Hawaiian traveler to indulge his angst while at the same time, not living in the real world. It's Don being a total cad at Roger's mother's funeral and acting totally unconcerned with death- while suicide seeps into his ad work unbeknownst to him and Don's obsession with Dr. Rosen's life or death profession as a route to hero worship undermined by cuckolding Rosen. (Ted's genuine mourning of Gleason works as a contrast to Don in S6 where Ted deals with things in a better, healthier way but Ted is hardly just some Good Don Construct of Perfection but a man with real feet of clay who did deal with Gleason's death but it was part and parcel of his own unspooling.) IMO, the In Care Of bar fight was the first real step forward for Don. Most psychologically healthy bar fight ever! Emblematic of Don's personal life mirroring the 1960s, Don realized he really did care about trash-talking MLK and Robert Kennedy's memories and not giving a damn about the death toll in Vietnam. It is tied up in the "The only unpardonable sin is to believe God cannot forgive you." IMO, Don's Accutron pitch actually was Don touching on death in a really good way. "Do you have time to improve your life?" Yes, behind the pitch, Don was super-depressed because he feels old and mortal and like he hasn't done anything and doesn't have anyone so he was querying whether it's even possible to repair the vessel. And as in all of the pitches, getting a watch that will make you interesting can't improve someone's life fundamentally. Inside the pitch, there's some standard Don Draperism feverishness on finding most circumstances depressing and feeling pressure to rise above them and dominate in order to have any worth whatsoever. "The meeting is boring, but you can't be....This watch makes you interesting." However, engaging on whether someone has time to improve their life, acknowledges that life is precious and finite without the hedonism that death can come LITERALLY tomorrow so party as hard as possible today. Acknowledging death as a real endpoint but using it to dwell on how to fundamentally improve your life over as much of a long-term as possible is arguably the healthiest way to engage with death, and arguably a way that most consumers would want to adopt. Edited July 28, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
sistermagpie July 28, 2015 Share July 28, 2015 (edited) IMO, Lane's death and its similarities to Adam's death triggered an *obsession* with death all over late S5 and S6. However, this resulted in a curious split. Don was obsessed with death- but yet still Don and actually a Don hellbent on engaging in all of his destructive behaviors which have their root in disconnecting from his actual feelings. It led to a split where Don was totally disengaged from *actual* deaths that were happening real-time like MLK's death, Robert Kennedy's death, Roger's mother's death, but instead, dwelling on imaginary potential dream-deaths from Private Dinkin's possible death or his own possible drowning in the LA pool or the possible suicide of the Hawaiian traveler to indulge his angst while at the same time, not living in the real world. It's Don being a total cad at Roger's mother's funeral and acting totally unconcerned with death- while suicide seeps into his ad work unbeknownst to him and Don's obsession with Dr. Rosen's life or death profession as a route to hero worship undermined by cuckolding Rosen. This is my favorite part of your post because wow, I can't believe I never thought of this, with Don because so clearly disconnected from all of these deaths. Like it's practically highlighted in every one that we see. And the way that lighter keeps showing up, iirc, kind of drives home that Don's fleeing from thoughts of his own death while holding himself apart from the mourning so many other people are going through. Roger is kind of disconnected from things in his Roger's way early on but then has his catharsis over the death of his shoe guy, but Don has a harder time making those connections. (He does with Anna, and it leads to him being able to openly state what he has lost with her in ways he's not really able to do a lot of other times.) It's funny that this show is so full of people who are sophisticated in the way they speak it really stands out when they speak plainly. Like Don saying he'd lost the only person who really knew him or even more obviously Don when he's listing his sins to Peggy in Person to Person. It makes me think of two things that always interested me in ways that I couldn't completely articulate, which was the juxtaposition of Ken's "Man with the Miniature Orchestra" story with Pete's monologue in The Phantom. Both passages are about Pete's feelings at that point in his life, but Ken's story is so literary and removed, told through the narrator/writer observer with flourishes like death outside clipping his toenails and thoughts about Beethoven, while Pete's is a simple description of emotions that's immediate and felt. (Back when they were airing I remember feeling like Ken was the more disconnected of the two--after all, he's not talking about his own life--just as his explanation of his story about the robot is intellectual while Pete's is emotional, so I thought it was interesting how Ken would up being finally pulled down off that spectator chair and into the muck.) Anyway, yeah, there's so much death imagery in S5 and 6 and looking back it's like S5 was the death part (the many mentions of suicide, the Speck and Whitman murders, Lane's suicide) and then S6 deals more with mourning with people wandering around almost in a state of shock. And no one more so than Don who's so disconnected from everything and just starting to uncover some of his coping methods, like his "whore soup" memory. And I feel like people don't really come out of their fog/numbness until 7B. In 7A they sort of concentrate on other things to distract them, but it's in 7B when people really seem to be able to deal with what they're really feeling and do things about it. That's kind of another reason why I'm glad MW didn't go with the classic hero dad narrative for Don that people expected, where he reacted to Betty's impending death by coming home and taking that role, because that would be another distraction for him really. He'd be throwing himself into playing that part instead of dealing with the reality. Him not focusing on that makes it seem more likely to me that he's going to continue to take steps towards figuring things out. Edited July 30, 2015 by sistermagpie Link to comment
Melancholy July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 (edited) I really like your point on Ken/Pete and the observer. I always had a bit of an aversion to the Man With the Tiny Orchestra for that exact reason. And I feel like people don't really come out of their fog/numbness until 7B. In 7A they sort of concentrate on other things to distract them, but it's in 7B when people really seem to be able to deal with what they're really feeling and do things about it. Hmm, I think there is varying levels of progress in the cast from 7A to 7B. IMO, most of Roger's real growth happened in 7A where he came to terms with his impact on Margaret, started a relationship with Ellery and Kevin, advocated for Don and came to terms with the fact that they're friends no matter what Don's past was like, and took a leadership role in selling the company to great profit. In 7B, Roger came to some acceptance that he was retiring and should put together an equitable will but it's more limited progress. And IMO, Marie Calvet is nothing but a bad distraction. Meanwhile, Pete was the opposite. Pete was in a personal fog in 7A (even though I actually really like Bonnie but just not as much as Trudy). Even though he was still go-getting with the business, Ted, Cutler, and the company's disorganization and inability to communicate with the partners in California clipped Pete's wings. However, yes, Pete made everything happen for him personally and professionally that anyone could want in 7B. Peggy had equal progress in both halves- even though I found her 7A progress more gripping. In 7A, Peggy landed a big account for the first time, reconciled with Don, got over Ted, figured out how to be a good landlady; in 7B, Peggy was a little more flashy but responsive- she moved into McCann under a buy-out that wasn't her choice but with style, she accepted Stan's declaration of love and realized that she loved him too. Meanwhile, 7A/7B is a windy but coherent road for Don. In 7A, Don was about disciplining himself to play according to society's rules instead of merely according to his instincts and immediate desires. Even when he broke a literal or subliminal directive, it was in the spirit of responsibility to his company (crashing the Commander cigarettes meeting) or the duty of a mentor to step aside for a protege instead of mounting his come-back/revenge on her deserved graduation (the Burger Chef). 7B challenges Don on how he finds goodness and connection and value in the structureless, rudderless world that he cast himself in where he's not the custodial parent perennially responsible for nurturing his children, he doesn't have a wife to be faithful to in the first place, he doesn't have a company to manage and employees who rely on him. Don does spacily wander through that and does weird things like hand out a Cadilac or a million dollars or takes the future corporate speech verrrrry seriously and annoys Peggy in the process. However, it's in the vein that he was still searching but constantly had his focus on how to be a better person in a lasting way since In Care Of. Good point that it's reassuring that Don wasn't rushing to play a totally new beginnings of things role with his children at the end. (Although, that has consequences too. I really feel like Don goes back and is a more present father. However, the Draper kids were still dealing with innocence-destroying horror in an disorganized, unattended fashion and IMO, Don, Henry, and Betty all have some blame for that but I blame the guys more than the dying cancer patient.) Ooh, I haven't seen this around but I also think it's Good Writing that Don didn't rush back home to be Super!Dad and get custody because it would fridge Betty. See here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge Killing off a female character to offer a male character some character development comes up more in action-adventure series and comic books. However, it would be a classic example of this sexist writing to kill Betty to give Don some definitive inarguable sunshiney redemption end of him being a single dad to three children or even to give Don some pitch-black "Betty's dying and my kids are orphaned. Well, you're born alone and die alone and I'm not about to have a bunch of rules dropped on me" anti-hero nihilistic ending. Betty's death shouldn't be a plot point to define Don's story and people's perception of him on the final yardline. Quite rightly, Betty's death focused on her own (and Sally's story). We're supposed to judge the success of Don's redemption arc based on his own actions through the series but especially from the last year- and it's deliberately ambiguous for Don's purposes but also to maintain the independence of Betty's story. Edited July 30, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
sistermagpie July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 (edited) Hmm, I think there is varying levels of progress in the cast from 7A to 7B. IMO, most of Roger's real growth happened in 7A where he came to terms with his impact on Margaret, started a relationship with Ellery and Kevin, advocated for Don and came to terms with the fact that they're friends no matter what Don's past was like, and took a leadership role in selling the company to great profit. You know, I said that and you point out all these things and I'm like...what did I even mean by what I said? I think honestly I just preferred 7B so much that I barely thought about 7A besides the fact that it dealt more with practical things like saving the company and Don getting his job back etc. Like MW said, the first half of the season was more the physical side and the second half was more spiritual. So that's I think what I was vaguely remembering. In 7A people make a lot of progress in sorting out their lives. It's in 7A that Peggy, I think, establishes herself in her own mind as an equal to Don when she does the Burger King pitch and of course they patch up their relationship. Roger proves himself to himself when he saves the company. Don works himself back into his job and heals or starts to heal some of the relationships he'd really hurt. Pete figured out that he couldn't run away from himself and his life and that he didn't want to do that. That left them free to think about some bigger questions of life. But as you say, a lot of the work for that was in 7A. I was just not thinking clearly about a lot of characters when I thought back on 7A. Pete's distracting himself in California--very obviously so, and the work he does on his relationships happens in between the seasons because we don't need to see it, we just need to see the results in 7B. Roger faces the reality of his life in 7A. Basically it's in no way as simple as I was vaguely thinking in my mind. And a good thing, too, because it works better with this stuff staggered. Good point that it's reassuring that Don wasn't rushing to play a totally new beginnings of things role with his children at the end. (Although, that has consequences too. I really feel like Don goes back and is a more present father. However, the Draper kids were still dealing with innocence-destroying horror in an disorganized, unattended fashion and IMO, Don, Henry, and Betty all have some blame for that but I blame the guys more than the dying cancer patient.) I agree-I think he does go back and become a more present father, something he's been figuring out along the way too, probably again in part in 7A when he's fixing some of the relationships he destroyed. But I think it's much better for him to continue to do it this way, where he's connecting to the kids honestly as the guy he really is, rather than throwing himself into a savior role. There's ways that Don can probably be really understanding to his kids because he's also an orphan, and he wouldn't have been able to do that back in S1 before he started uncovering this stuff. So really it's better that he can't just play the role of provider/dad instead. I hadn't thought about it in terms of fridging but yeah, that's a great point. One of the main things about the ending was the women in Don's life basically rejecting the idea that they were supporting players in his story. Betty was completely in controlling of how she was dealing with her own death, Sally was controlling her own reactions when she had her own ideas about what was best for the boys. Betty's death story scenes were often about Betty and Sally's relationship to each other more than anyone else, and they were united in what they thought was the most important question: who should raise the boys. Don's opinions weren't worthless, but they had limited importance. Then of course there was Peggy realizing that she wasn't there to react to Don's crisis--and her needing Stan to point that out didn't, imo, take away from it being her own realization. Joan, of course, broke up with Richard because her plans for her own life didn't match up with his and that was okay. And I also really liked how I thought the show made a point of trying to have scenes with Trudy that showed how she had her own story and her own reasons for remarrying Pete and wasn't just picking up where she left off with the same relationship. There wasn't a sense that Trudy had just been sitting in the living room waiting for Pete to work his shit out. They'd both been doing that. I really like your point on Ken/Pete and the observer. I always had a bit of an aversion to the Man With the Tiny Orchestra for that exact reason. I remember at the time of the ep a couple of people were saying how the story showed Ken's compassion because look how he sees Pete's distress when other people don't. And I was like...well, it's compassionate in that it shows his ability to see the distress, but he just takes the insight to use in his art. It's not a kindness to Pete. Edited July 30, 2015 by sistermagpie Link to comment
Melancholy July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 (edited) I agree-I think he does go back and become a more present father, something he's been figuring out along the way too, probably again in part in 7A when he's fixing some of the relationships he destroyed. But I think it's much better for him to continue to do it this way, where he's connecting to the kids honestly as the guy he really is, rather than throwing himself into a savior role. There's ways that Don can probably be really understanding to his kids because he's also an orphan, and he wouldn't have been able to do that back in S1 before he started uncovering this stuff. So really it's better that he can't just play the role of provider/dad instead. Yeah. Don's issue was never that he lacks big dramatic well-intentioned responses to some problem. Like, if Betty was dying in S2 and Don found out about it at the Euro-trash jet set house and Betty said that she'd like to leave the kids with William/Judy or Grandpa Gene, Don would be all "Screw that. They're MY kids." I could totally see an ep where Don, The Amazing Race style, hitches, lies, negotiates, charms his way back to the east coast for his kids even though he didn't have a car or even a suitcase or traveller's checks and credit cards didn't exist in 1962 (I think...). . However, I do suspect that Don couldn't maintain a reliable focus on his kids in 1962. Something terrible would probably happen because of some lapse in his child care, even with Carla in the picture. 1970 Don is tireder- but the main difference is that he was too keenly aware of his own failings and too much restraint to start arguing with Betty on her death bed and strutting in to enforce his view of the world without any clarity. I remember at the time of the ep a couple of people were saying how the story showed Ken's compassion because look how he sees Pete's distress when other people don't. And I was like...well, it's compassionate in that it shows his ability to see the distress, but he just takes the insight to use in his art. It's not a kindness to Pete. I didn't think it was compassionate at all. I think it was artistically jeering. The "tiniest orchestra" feels like a code-word for a sarcastic "playing the world's tiniest tiny violin". Now, that's kind of meta because it's kind of true. Pete wasn't appreciating everything he has, including Trudy (who, IMO, is tied with Sally as the most purely likable, adorable characters in the whole show). However, you know, Pete *was* struggling with some actually difficult things that do try and make people unhappy even if they're upper-middle class and their wife is awesome and they have a healthy baby. Pete's job is stressful and he justifiably felt a lot of pressure to ace accounts and bring in all of the business since Ken was so lackadaisical and Roger was a child only just starting to care about his job. Lane started a fist-fight with Pete and beat him and called him a monster, even though Pete was just one of the three guys who took the the client to the whorehouse at the client's insistence, it's company policy to indulge clients that way and Lane damn well knows that, and Pete wasn't the one who left chewing gum on the guy's pubis or went home that way. Pete was raised as a totally Manhattan Henry James character with parents who were useless at anything pragmatic- but then Trudy pressured him to move to the country where he was under-prepared in basic suburban life skills like fixing things or driving and Pete was trying to learn all of that at an older age. Pete and Don did reach a place of mutual professional loyalty and they did help each other out- but understandably, Pete was a little hurt and desperate that even though they've been through a lot together that Don can't be friends. Some stuff in Pete's life is the ordinary that's too beautiful to bear, but some of his frustration are just real crap that would be universal frustrations. And Ken wrote that just after Ken jumped to conclusions that Pete likely tipped off Roger about Ken's writing side-career. And Ken was furious at Pete and held onto that grudge through the end of the series. So, I didn't view it as compassion at all. Ken was mainly feeling contempt- and he decided to channel it in an artsy way from the point of view of a flawed character. Ken was writing from the point of view of said character so there was some insight and poetically rendering the characters' struggle- but that didn't bear on how Ken viewed or treated Pete in real life from that point on. Edited July 30, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
sistermagpie July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 And Ken wrote that just after Ken jumped to conclusions that Pete likely tipped off Roger about Ken's writing side-career. And Ken was furious at Pete and held onto that grudge through the end of the series. So, I didn't view it as compassion at all. Ken was mainly feeling contempt- and he decided to channel it in an artsy way from the point of view of a flawed character. Ken was writing from the point of view of said character so there was some insight and poetically rendering the characters' struggle- but that didn't bear on how Ken viewed or treated Pete in real life from that point on. Yeah, again at the time a lot of people took Ken's word on the idea that Pete was the one that told but even then it didn't really add up. I mean, there were three people at the party and of course Pete could have been the one to tell since he was there. But we didn't see anything in the ep that showed Pete specifically jealous of Ken's writing in that scene or plotting to get him by going to Roger. And even if he had, why would he ever think Roger would do it? The only reason that Roger tells Ken to quit is because Roger himself is feeling jealous because of his own book--and Pete probably doesn't even know about that. It's just as likely that Don, who was much more friendly with Roger, mentioned the story not intending anything by it at all and Roger himself was totally responsible for telling him to quit. So I actually found it really clever the way it's presumably this that heavily influences Ken to gleefully "get back" at Pete when Dow happens, which is kind of the revelation of Ken's fatal flaw. Without Chevy Ken might not have become so focused on getting his own back that he'd choose to work at Dow rather than be a writer, but he's again choosing a petty revenge that's probably going to cause him more grief than it does his intended victims. Even better, while Ken focuses on Roger and Pete's guilt at not saving him from being fired by McCann, it's ironically Ken's own personality that seems to have gotten him fired, which is wonderfully ironic. There's so many ways that Ken becomes more like Pete as time goes on--he's never going to be Pete, but he obviously becomes more Pete-like--that it's funny that at McCann Pete's ability to be a suck-up makes him "the mayor" at McCann while Ken's snobbishness gets noticed and works against him. Meanwhile Pete and Roger just aren't really that bothered by Ken's power play--and even some of Ken's last little dig at Pete (where he says "Yeah, look at you") doesn't register to Pete as an insult because he's actually become more at peace with himself than Ken is at that moment. It's subtle--it's not some big destruction of Ken or Pete "winning" everything, but there is this sense that Ken's lost his way at a time when Pete's found his. 2 Link to comment
Guest July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 I agree that Ken didn't write it as compassion. However, you brought up the Pete/Lane fight, and I don't think that was for taking the Jaguar guy to the prostitutes. I think it was because of the insults Pete threw Lane's way during that conversation - "He didn't ask you because he thinks you're a homo" "Your value to this company ended the day you fired us" plus things that had been building all season. Link to comment
Melancholy July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 (edited) I agree that Ken didn't write it as compassion. However, you brought up the Pete/Lane fight, and I don't think that was for taking the Jaguar guy to the prostitutes. I think it was because of the insults Pete threw Lane's way during that conversation - "He didn't ask you because he thinks you're a homo" "Your value to this company ended the day you fired us" plus things that had been building all season. Oh, I agree that Pete made himself a target by being an asshole to Lane when Lane confronted the partners. However, IMO, Lane's gaze over-focused on Pete from the beginning which is partly why Pete felt the need to (aggressively and impolitely) defend his actions. And: Pete: He didn't ask you because he thinks you're a homo. Lane: I can't believe the hours I've put into helping you become the monster you've become. Pete's comment was obnoxious- but Pete ascribed those thoughts to the Jaguar guy. And Pete said it as a joke, somewhat making fun of Lane's staid, seemingly weak vibe. Plus, Pete used the most obnoxious short-hand that he could but you know, the Jaguar guy DID think Lane wasn't cool or fun enough to effectively show him a good time. Pete was accurately reporting on contempt, a little like how Don accurately responded that Megan thinks the people at SC are cynical and petty more than "advertising is stupid" in Lady Lazarus.) IMO, Lane dialed up the Lane v. Pete confrontation by a lot by directly stating that LANE BELIEVES that Pete is a monster which cannot be laughed off like "homo." (LOL, as Lane did. "We're not homosexuals! We're divorced!") Then, Pete took that bait and further dragged the fight into Pete making a mean character-judgment of Lane ("Our need for you disappeared when you fired us."). But then, Lane dragged down the fight even more by turning it physical. There were no heroes here but IMO, Lane was more to blame and Lane made a choice to focus on Pete and make these big "monster"/"grimey little pimp" pronouncements of Pete but never threw any of that to Don and Roger who also took the Jaguar guy to the whorehouse. (BTW, I don't even think Roger and especially sexually-abstaining Don deserved Lane's ire. Lane knows that SC does this *all the time*. Just because this Jaguar guy and his whore were idiots and Lane had to sit through a sad phone call doesn't make this any different.) ETA: There actually wasn't much Lane v. Pete stuff before this fight. Pete made the disparaging "Lane couldn't close a car door" behind Lane's back- but they were all smiles to each other's faces. I think you can extrapolate that Lane didn't care for Pete's early S5 brazenness because it was so far out of step with Lane's "keep your head down and humbly work" code of conduct, but uncomfortably edged close to Lane's fantasies of being more assertive than he actually was. Perhaps on the biggest grudges was that Lane was envious that Don put up Pete's partnership contribution while Lane had to liquidate his portfolio and was already under some financial strain by Signal 30. Yeah, again at the time a lot of people took Ken's word on the idea that Pete was the one that told but even then it didn't really add up. I mean, there were three people at the party and of course Pete could have been the one to tell since he was there. But we didn't see anything in the ep that showed Pete specifically jealous of Ken's writing in that scene or plotting to get him by going to Roger. And even if he had, why would he ever think Roger would do it? The only reason that Roger tells Ken to quit is because Roger himself is feeling jealous because of his own book--and Pete probably doesn't even know about that. It's just as likely that Don, who was much more friendly with Roger, mentioned the story not intending anything by it at all and Roger himself was totally responsible for telling him to quit. Yup. The last time Ken's writing came up in the office and with Roger, it was a career plus for Ken. In S1, Roger, himself, was impressed with Ken's discipline and focus to go home and write after a full-time job and Roger liked the prestige of having an Accounts Junior Executive who was also a published writer. Moreover, Pete was jealous in S1 because Pete had these superficial fresh-out-of-Dartmouth aspirations to be a writer and because Pete felt this gave extra career sheen to Ken to impress the higher-ups as a man of substance. However by S5, Pete pretty much gave up on writing (I doubt it was a real passion) and Pete no longer had to impress the higher-ups in the same manner because Pete was a partner, unlike Ken. Pete wanted bragging rights upon getting more business so Pete was a force to be reckoned with in partner meetings, known as integral to their bottom line, and more power in the company to enforce his vision and of course, Pete intellectually understood that he had to get along with as many partners as possible. However, as a partner, Pete was pretty finished with his phase of life of trying to get published, feverishly dance the Charleston, and do whatever to suck up to partners so Pete was just authentically dismissive of Lane, competitive with Roger, cordial to Bert, and in awe of Don. BTW, Ken also told Peggy before Ken's meeting with Roger. However, I agree that probably Don just casually mentioned Ken's writing as a highlight/interesting fact of the evening and assumed Roger felt the same "Pretty cool, Ken!" thoughts that Roger did back in S1 and Don felt in S1 and in Signal 30. Peggy/Megan/Pete really don't have casual chats with Roger that frequently. However, Roger was newly jealous of prolific and published writers after Sterling's Gold failed. For a smaller, possible motive, Roger was also insecure that he didn't have Lucky Strike anymore and he was scrounging around for Accounts to displace Pete as Top Dog but meanwhile, Ken wasn't putting his whole arm into Accounts work while the business was stagnant and Pete's power was annoyingly hegemonic to Roger and Roger was displacing his frustration on Ken that the other Accounts men were ceding the entire field to Pete because Roger had mistakenly done that throughout S4. Edited July 30, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
sistermagpie July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 Re: Pete and Lane, according to MW Pete resented Lane for giving Ken the Head of Accounts job. So I think the way it was somewhat shaking out was that in S5 Pete often gave little digs at Lane about Lane not being needed--like he makes a remark about Lane "going on vacation again" in a partner's meeting. Which Lane was very sensitive about, we know. So we were seeing a lot of anger at Pete that Lane had been bottling up for a while, anger that was provoked by Pete. But from Pete's pov it was Lane who cast the first shot. But still, Lane is totally focusing on Pete from the beginning of the Jaguar thing. Him calling Pete a pimp is especially off base (but also foreshadowing like whoa!) because Pete looked fairly annoyed at having to take the guy to the whorehouse and even looked to Roger to take them to the best place because while Pete's no stranger to whorehouses, Don and Roger are much more regular customers. Not that, as Melancholy said, Lane's remark is warranted with them either because Pete was perfectly right--the client asked for a whorehouse, didn't see Lane as somebody to take him to one, and they do this all the time. Lane would never have challenged Roger or Don to a fight. He knew that he and Pete were the two guys at the low end of the totem pole. So while I think Pete had his own hostility towards Lane, Lane was doing the same to him. I think Pete was genuinely surprised when Lane wanted to beat him up over the whole thing, and hurt that nobody stepped in to save him from a fight he didn't want to have. But I also always thought that fight had other interesting subtext to it. We know Lane was bullied by his father--he definitely seemed to have broken his spirit. Lane's one period of feeling like he'd gotten away from him was when he ran to the US, but when he tried to exorcise his father's control he was humiliated into submission again. I feel like that's kind of the moment when Lane's doomed and there's always that hint of desperation to him afterwards. All his dreams of escape and triumph are just fantasies. The battle against Pete is a false victory because while he's definitely going to win that fight, in life Pete's the one who stood up to his father, held his ground and defines himself as something different. It gives Lane a moment of macho triumph and satisfaction but doesn't solve any of his problems. It doesn't even change his status with the other partners or make Joan open to kissing him. Yup. The last time Ken's writing came up in the office and with Roger, it was a career plus for Ken. In S1, Roger, himself, was impressed with Ken's discipline and focus to go home and write after a full-time job and Roger liked the prestige of having an Accounts Junior Executive who was also a published writer. Moreover, Pete was jealous in S1 because Pete had these superficial fresh-out-of-Dartmouth aspirations to be a writer and because Pete felt this gave extra career sheen to Ken to impress the higher-ups as a man of substance. Yes, in the earlier episode Pete's jealousy is very clearly shown--he's not really a frustrated writer, but there's sort of an immature "He did that--why can't I do that?" to it all. By S5 he's not that reactive. Plus this is in Signal 30, an ep that's very focused on Pete. He's got a ton of stuff going on that's making him feel terrible and Ken simply doesn't seem to be the focus of it. Writing doesn't really symbolize his depression at that point even as much as Don's ability to fix a sink. In fact, I remember thinking that Pete seemed to be missing some of the things Ken was really doing right. Like in that ep, iirc, Ken says how he and Cynthia live in Queens because he doesn't want to live in a house his father in law helped or entirely paid for, just as he doesn't want his father in law involved in his work. Both of those things are choices Pete's made that really aren't good ones. In fact, the end of his marriage will very much put his father in law in the center of everything. Meanwhile Ken later forgets his own good advice and winds up dealing with is father in law at work etc. 1 Link to comment
Melancholy July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 (edited) I agree with everything else you wrote but I disagree on two points. First, I don't think Pete's father in law helped pay for the house in Cos Cob. He gave a loan for the apartment (which I would imagine Pete paid back on its sale). Yes, Trudy's father's business was at SC. However, I don't see how that was necessarily a bad idea. Accounts men are supposed to use their personal connections to get business- it's the whole job. Yes, Trudy's father could be difficult and he was an out-and-out asshole in S6 and hypocritically pulled the business. However, Vicks provided five years of billing, their sales were great with SC's advertising, and it was the first account that Pete brought independently which was a stepping stone to him being made partner which put him on his road to being a multi-millionaire. I mean, business gets pulled for silly reasons all the time. Pete's shenanigans to recruit his college friend Ho Ho were a lot shadier and Ho Ho dropping SCDP because Don didn't mention Jai Lai in the interview (along with every other account) was even more out-there-stupid than Trudy's father in law dumping the agency for Pete mistreating his daughter. I don't think Ken was being any smarter or more moral by refusing to even introduce his father in law to the other partners or talk up the agency after Don and Ken's father in law already met at the American Cancer Society meetings. I mean if I really believed that Ken just networking with Dow would hurt his relationship with Cynthia or his father-in-law, I'd have more patience for Ken. However, you know, I think Ken just felt unseemly doing it and that's why he had no interest in even making an introduction right when SCDP just lost Lucky Strike, employees were losing their jobs (and crying in the hall), contractors like Faye were terminated, the partners were bottom-feeding at funerals, and Don was hustling however he could beyond propriety (with Faye, with the "You'd give me your own mother" meeting with Raymond, with The Letter). That's a little gutless for my tastes, especially given Ken's later conduct with Dow when it was just about Ken's revenge instead of loyalty to his company and fellow employees. Also, I don't think Don patronizes whorehouses of his own volition. Way too many memories- which is why he was kind of broody at the bar, in addition to being the strange position of white-knuckling fidelity. In fact, Don only intentionally purchased a prostitute in S4- and it was the same regular prostitute for a specific task to hit and insult him. With Diana and the woman in Person to Person, Don found himself in situations where he thought they were having sex out of pure mutual attraction and found out later that it was prostitution. BTW, that's such a coincidence for that very specific "Oh, I didn't know you were charging for this sex that we just had" dynamic to happen just a few months apart. LOL at Don's life. IMO, Pete and Roger get dragged into whorehouses as part of their accounts job more frequently because they're more responsible for entertaining clients. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if personally and professionally, Roger is just a little more inclined to pick the whorehouse. I mean, personally Roger told that hooker in early S2 that he hasn't paid for sex since the Navy. Although, that could've been a lie. Regardless, I think Roger started paying for it more later, but he'd prefer to just pick women up. (Although, Roger's sex with one of the twins from Double Sided Aluminum was totally prostitution quid pro quo casting couch filth.). Partly, because Roger is a bigger personal lothario. However as an Accounts choice, I think Roger has an Navy attitude soft spot for cheap, sloppy dens of depravity while generally, Pete prefers high class call girls that look like girlfriends in expensive bars or restaurants. (Which, I think was at the heart of Pete's "Roger, I believe this is your opportunity to shine" snark.) Edited July 30, 2015 by Melancholy 2 Link to comment
sistermagpie July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 However, I don't see how that was necessarily a bad idea. Accounts men are supposed to use their personal connections to get business- it's the whole job. Oh, I thought it was a terrible idea---not bad for business but the other way around. I think personally Ken was right--you don't want your father in law, especially a guy like Tom Vogel--involved with you personally and professionally. To me it always seemed like Pete was kind of oblivious to the dangers there, like it was part of the normal challenge for him to be working for Tom's approval. Ken's working on Dow made his home life immediately more irritating. It's not a moral issue, it's more about your in-laws being potentially interfering. Ken was trying to avoid that just as he earlier avoided letting SC take over his mental life. Not having Tom's business would have had a big effect on Pete's career and maybe that made it worth it (for all I know Pete would never have had the success he did without Tom's business), but it still seemed like a terrible thing for his marriage. Not because SCDP having his father in law's business was automatically bad in itself but because as far as this father in law was concerned he was the head of the family and this was just one more way it could be that. Don would probably have sawed his own leg off before he'd be dependent on Gene for anything. I thought it was very deliberate that Trudy's social life seems to so prominently feature her parents (I'll never get over Pete learning he's going to be a father from Tom), they're often mentioned when she and Pete separate, but there's not a single mention of them in 7B that I remember. That was one of the biggest things that made Trudy seem more like a grown-up to me--she no longer seemed to have one foot still in her parents' house. It would have been a problem even without getting business involved, but handing Tom that kind of power was bound to make things worse. Also, I don't think Don patronizes whorehouses of his own volition. I don't know if he actually goes to them much, but I thought it was a given that he used prostitutes. I don't think the one who slapped him was supposed to be the only time Don ordered one. Just more that her willingness to provide him with what he wanted was one reason they were convenient. We know that Don usually doesn't need to pay for sex, but at times it must be the easier thing to do. I thought that's what Don meant when the girl in I think Person to Person asks him if he's never paid for sex and he says he has and probably will again. (I'm not remembering that clearly but I think that was the idea.) Don seems to want sex pretty regularly so it made sense to me that was something he occasionally did. I mean, I think it's pretty established that practically all of the men do it at times, but it would make sense to Don to have more experience with it just as he has more experience with most types of sex on the show. With his appetite he's got a lot of variety. 1 Link to comment
Melancholy July 30, 2015 Share July 30, 2015 Oh, I thought it was a terrible idea---not bad for business but the other way around. I think personally Ken was right--you don't want your father in law, especially a guy like Tom Vogel--involved with you personally and professionally. To me it always seemed like Pete was kind of oblivious to the dangers there, like it was part of the normal challenge for him to be working for Tom's approval. Ken's working on Dow made his home life immediately more irritating. It's not a moral issue, it's more about your in-laws being potentially interfering. Ken was trying to avoid that just as he earlier avoided letting SC take over his mental life. I don't think it was so bad. In terms of account maintenance, it wasn't as shady and practically fraudulent as Ho Ho or Lucky Strike or as humiliating and potentially dangerous to the prestige of the agency as Jaguar or didn't actually put human beings in danger like Chevy. Tom already had a lot of power in the Campbell marriage because he and Trudy were so close and Trudy was so bent on accepting gifts from her parents like the apartment down-payment. Yes, Vicks added some extra pressure. However, it was just like three blow-up fights in five years and a lot of low-grade nudging. It was bad for Pete, at times, but I think Pete getting a place on the map by bringing in an account and then, really showing off partner bona fides by getting Tom to up their billings so he won the conflict contest made it all worth it. I also don't blame the Vogels for the problems in Pete's and Trudy's marriage. They were really a small irritant and potentially, a small irritant that was a key base building block for their fortune. And you know, Tom wasn't nice but he wasn't *terrible* to Pete until S6. I totally get why Trudy still felt close to her parents- they were very sweet to her and treated her like a princess. Plus, Pete was maintaining his relationship with the even weirder and more horrible Dykemans and expected Trudy to be a good daughter-in-law and Trudy totally acceded and did her best. With those demands on Trudy, of course she'd want to include her parents and they'd be important to their marriage. Yes, Don would have refused to rely on Gene for anything. It's a little hard to determine how much sense this would make because Gene was so far afield from Don's career and it's almost a little incomprehensible that Gene would help Don with anything no matter what. However, Don's strategies to WHATEVER IT TAKES to ace business...except ask for help from friends and family with the understanding that it'll mean less power and control is consistently critiqued by this show. I don't know if he actually goes to them much, but I thought it was a given that he used prostitutes. I don't think the one who slapped him was supposed to be the only time Don ordered one. Just more that her willingness to provide him with what he wanted was one reason they were convenient. We know that Don usually doesn't need to pay for sex, but at times it must be the easier thing to do. I thought that's what Don meant when the girl in I think Person to Person asks him if he's never paid for sex and he says he has and probably will again. (I'm not remembering that clearly but I think that was the idea.) Don seems to want sex pretty regularly so it made sense to me that was something he occasionally did. I mean, I think it's pretty established that practically all of the men do it at times, but it would make sense to Don to have more experience with it just as he has more experience with most types of sex on the show. With his appetite he's got a lot of variety. I feel like we know everything there is to know about Don's 1960-1970 sex life. (With the other characters, there's really more left up to mystery.) I dunno, *maybe* there's one night stands and hookers during uncovered swaths of his road trip. . However, his Manhattan sex life is pretty open and shut. I thought his line in Person to Person was some (perhaps wrong) pessimistic outlook that he probably won't get married or even have a long-term girlfriend because he's sucked at i and made himself pay a million dollar penalty to discourage future mistakes like that so he'll be stuck to sating his appetite with one night stands. And probably since even his looks have a limited self-life, he was just accepting that some of them will be hookers which is pretty damn degrading in Don's mind but such is his future in his headspace. 1 Link to comment
sistermagpie July 31, 2015 Share July 31, 2015 (edited) Tom already had a lot of power in the Campbell marriage because he and Trudy were so close and Trudy was so bent on accepting gifts from her parents like the apartment down-payment. Right, that's what I meant. Tom already had too central a place in the marriage and Pete never seemed to see any of it as a problem. All of Tom's gifts came with his name stamped on them even if it wasn't mentioned right away. Even when tom wasn't being awful to Pete, he was still Daddy and that was the problem. It was just as bad, imo, when Tom was buying Pete an approving drink for getting his wife pregnant. I think nudging and the big fights can be huge deals in a young marriage--the last one actually is what ended the marriage when they were on the road to reconciling. Fankly, that's ultimately probably a good thing because a second marriage with a different foundation and both of them spending time apart to figure out what they want is probably better than just papering over the original problems with Pete behaving himself until he's forgiven. But I don't give Tom any credit for that. He made a power play that said Pete had to accept his punishment of humiliation and also protect Tom's reputation because Tom was so important to Trudy and could do things Pete couldn't (and he was furious when Pete tried assert himself). Pete blew up Daddy's reputation and Trudy sided with her father and ended the marriage. I think that's the fight Tom wanted to have all along, establishing that Daddy Vogel > he outsider non-Vogel husband. I don't think we can blame the Vogels for all the problems in their marriage but I'd put the Vogels up as one of the biggest problems in the marriage from he get-go. It's even practically the first thing we hear about Trudy in the pilot when it's set up as if Pete's a gold-digger. Pete was maintaining a relationship with his parents, but he wasn't involving his parents in the marriage the way Tom was involved. I always thought it was interesting, though, that Trudy could very easily have married an actual gold-digger who was happy to suck up to Tom. Instead she married somebody who wanted to make his own way and that seemed to be something she really liked about him. We can only speculate about the story from Trudy's side but I can't help but think her going through some really interesting internal evolution wrt to her father after she and Pete split. I feel like we know everything there is to know about Don's 1960-1970 sex life. That's mostly where I was getting it. Basically, I saw it as Don liking to have sex a lot and mostly he has it with women who want to have sex with him. As we saw in S4, if an occasion arises where he doesn't have a woman handy or it seems better to go to a prostitute, he's not going to have a crisis over calling one. So it was just silly for Lane to act like a whorehouse had to be Pete's doing when Don and Roger just have even bigger and more varied sexual appetites. Don and Roger are the ones who seem to have the most sex (mostly not with professionals). In fact, what all happened in that ep when Don and Lane go out? Edited July 31, 2015 by sistermagpie 1 Link to comment
txhorns79 July 31, 2015 Share July 31, 2015 I also don't blame the Vogels for the problems in Pete's and Trudy's marriage. They were really a small irritant and potentially, a small irritant that was a key base building block for their fortune. And you know, Tom wasn't nice but he wasn't *terrible* to Pete until S6. I blame Tom for some of the early problems. He was so over the line in using the Clearasil account to try and threaten Pete into doing what Trudy wanted that I was honestly surprised Pete and Trudy were able to stay together. Even though I thought Pete was being completely pig headed over the issue, Tom had no right to jump in the way he did. 1 Link to comment
Melancholy July 31, 2015 Share July 31, 2015 (edited) Eh, I don't really know how to present a case that the Vogels were annoying and problematic but not THAT bad and Pete didn't lay up THAT MUCH trouble for himself by also having to deal with Tom as a client compared to Pete's business gains by getting Clearasil. I agree that Tom was annoying and could be even more annoying as a client. However, Pete always had to be deal with Tom being annoying. At least, Pete got millions in billings out of it. Moreover, Pete and Trudy's marriage actually got STRONGER with every passing season when Tom had a lot of power over Pete from the end of S1 through S4. In the show, at least, Tom recedes into the background as less important in S5 and early S6 when things really get terrible between Pete and Trudy. It's hard to blame the Vogels for the Campbells problems when Pete and Trudy's marriage was getting better when the Vogels were a more important part of their life. He made a power play that said Pete had to accept his punishment of humiliation and also protect Tom's reputation because Tom was so important to Trudy and could do things Pete couldn't (and he was furious when Pete tried assert himself). Pete blew up Daddy's reputation and Trudy sided with her father and ended the marriage. I think that's the fight Tom wanted to have all along, establishing that Daddy Vogel > he outsider non-Vogel husband. However, yes, Pete got angry enough at Tom to blurt out his secret to Trudy after Tom dropped SC. However, having Vicks as a client still wasn't responsible for that fight between Pete and Trudy. Pete didn't have to tell Trudy as a condition to keep Vicks. Pete, as an individual, was just angry enough at the hypocrisy that he was separated from Trudy but Trudy still adored her whoring father to tell Trudy. BTW, maybe it felt to Tom like he established that Daddy Vogel > non-Vogel husband. However, in Trudy's mind, she was just rightfully incredulous because she didn't trust Pete and she could totally see Pete's attempt to vengefully trash her dad's reputation to up Pete's own credibility by comparison for the mean-spirited move it was. Pete wasn't exactly out to solve other people's problems with his truth or offer Trudy clarity that she needed. Pete was using painful facts to make himself feel better, despite the pain it could cause Trudy. That's mostly where I was getting it. Basically, I saw it as Don liking to have sex a lot and mostly he has it with women who want to have sex with him. As we saw in S4, if an occasion arises where he doesn't have a woman handy or it seems better to go to a prostitute, he's not going to have a crisis over calling one. So it was just silly for Lane to act like a whorehouse had to be Pete's doing when Don and Roger just have even bigger and more varied sexual appetites. Don and Roger are the ones who seem to have the most sex (mostly not with professionals). In fact, what all happened in that ep when Don and Lane go out? Actually, I think calling a prostitute *is* shameful for Don. He only had the one regular prostitute in S4 who had a specific job to punish and hit him for screwing up his family. It's not a matter of "doesn't have a woman handy." That S4 prostitute was there to punish him. In a better, more confident frame of mind, Don had no interest in the quid pro quo sex with the Double Sided Aluminum Twin or having sex in the whorehouse with Roger and Pete. However, generally, I think Don looks for this big deep soulful connections with mistresses of DRAMATIC conversations and OTT "run away with me" romance or he gets carried away with women who so clearly want to jump his bones for a one-night stand (the flight attendant in S3, the "Are you alone?" girl at the end of S5, the parade in Severance). S4 was a very specific rock-bottom exception. I do agree that Don craves the sheer physical release of sex and the exhaustion that comes with it- but he craves the interesting company, the emotional risk-taking, and the feeling of being genuinely wanted even if it's just for his body. Prostitutes either can't or are limited on providing those last three. IMO, that was the significance behind Don's line in Person to Person. Don wasn't exactly being blase that if he can't pick up a chick, it's all good, he'll hire a whore. I think the audience was supposed to glean that he was admitting defeat or that at least in this frame of mind, he believed he'd have to resort to prostitutes because he lacks the capability to hold onto a relationship long-term and eventually, he'll lack the looks to have however many one-night stands he may want. Don hasn't had to settle on a lot of what he finds engaging about sexual relationships just in pursuit of The Orgasm because of his looks and charm, but also because of his self-centeredness and destructiveness that enabled him to go after whatever, despite other commitments or without pondering what sex could eventually do to the woman even if she was currently consenting. IMO, the Person to Person line was Don admitting defeat and to some extent, saying that he'd try to inflict less of his damage on the rest of the world. Although, certainly one can argue that prostitution is damaging to the prostitutes but at least, THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR. Edited July 31, 2015 by Melancholy 2 Link to comment
sistermagpie August 3, 2015 Share August 3, 2015 However, yes, Pete got angry enough at Tom to blurt out his secret to Trudy after Tom dropped SC. However, having Vicks as a client still wasn't responsible for that fight between Pete and Trudy. Pete didn't have to tell Trudy as a condition to keep Vicks I'm not saying it was the reason for the fight. I'm saying Tom meddled the way he always had meddled, the way Trudy always allowed him to meddle, and in this case it was his meddling that happened to be the thing that ended the marriage. Keeping Vicks wasn't on the table by that point anyway. It was about the hypocrisy by then. Pete could have just lost Vicks and not brought Trudy into it at all, of course. That's what Tom was telling him to do--accept the punishment and the criticism and protect his little girl from sordid details. Maybe I'm not explaining it well, but the problem isn't Tom being annoying. The problem was Tom not respecting the marriage and Trudy (and Pete) allowing him to do that, playing out their own father issues with him. Tom was the patriarch the entire time, always there even when he wasn't doing anything. After they split up almost every time we heard anything about Trudy there was some visit with her parents involved. Until 7B. However, in Trudy's mind, she was just rightfully incredulous because she didn't trust Pete and she could totally see Pete's attempt to vengefully trash her dad's reputation to up Pete's own credibility by comparison for the mean-spirited move it was. I don't think Trudy was incredulous at all, actually. I don't think she thought Pete would make up a story like that (especially one that puts him in a whorehouse too) and it wouldn't be as hurtful to her if it wasn't true. I remember at the time needing MW to explain to me that this had ended the marriage, actually, because I didn't see why a grown woman would be so upset by learning this. And more importantly, I didn't understand how an adult wouldn't *want* to know this. Not that her father was going to prostitutes in general--that's his business--but what he was pulling at work and why. I wouldn't want to be clueless about this kind of thing going on between my father and husband. Especially since this was a season where several adult characters--and adolescent characters--were dealing with having their parents' sexuality shoved in their faces (Don saw his stepmother having sex with Uncle Mack, Pete was privvy to his mother's sexual fantasies--or not--with Manolo, Pete's mother telling Pete about his father's infidelities, Joan's mother's flirting was no surprise to her, Sally walked in on her dad and Sylvia). But then to me, it fits into the whole set up where Trudy and Tom both held on to the trappings of childhood. I tend to imagine that in the end Tom and Trudy's relationship suffered more of a blow in the end than Pete and Trudy's did because I can't imagine Tom and Trudy working towards a more mature understanding like Don and Sally did. (But then, none of this is onscreen so we'll never know.) Actually, I think calling a prostitute *is* shameful for Don. He only had the one regular prostitute in S4 who had a specific job to punish and hit him for screwing up his family. Okay, but that's just what I meant, that we've seen him with a regular prostitute when he needed that for whatever reason, shameful or not. He wasn't more innocent of the business than any of the other partners in the room with Lane. He knew prostitutes existed and how one went to get one and that many people did. And again, maybe I'm not remember this right, but didn't Lane sleep with a prostitute at Don's place when they spent that evening together? A prostitute Don got for him? 1 Link to comment
Inquisitionist August 3, 2015 Share August 3, 2015 And again, maybe I'm not remember this right, but didn't Lane sleep with a prostitute at Don's place when they spent that evening together? A prostitute Don got for him? Yes, and yes, in The Good News. Thought Lane insisted on reimbursing Don (and I'm pretty sure Don told him a lower dollar amount than actually applied). Link to comment
Melancholy August 3, 2015 Share August 3, 2015 (edited) I'm not saying it was the reason for the fight. I'm saying Tom meddled the way he always had meddled, the way Trudy always allowed him to meddle, and in this case it was his meddling that happened to be the thing that ended the marriage. Keeping Vicks wasn't on the table by that point anyway. It was about the hypocrisy by then. Pete could have just lost Vicks and not brought Trudy into it at all, of course. That's what Tom was telling him to do--accept the punishment and the criticism and protect his little girl from sordid details. That's my whole point. Tom's biggest role in harming Trudy's and Pete's marriage had almost nothing to do with Pete's efforts to keep Vicks or his business dealings with Vicks. When Pete was trying to please Tom to keep Vicks in from the end of S1 through S5, Tom was annoying. However, Trudy's and Pete's marriage became strong and stronger in S2-4 when Vicks loomed larger. Tom was annoying- but he was hardly fatal to the marriage. The ONE time that Tom really did play a role in killing the marriage, Pete was pissed off that Tom let go Vicks. However, Pete told Trudy because Pete was angry and wanted to tell Trudy some Hard Truths about her father. Not to keep Vicks. So, again, per my original point, I think the profits from Vicks and the way obtaining that account put Pete on the map at SC 1.0 as a rain-maker beyond the partners' expectations and his age, ultimately helped Pete more than harmed him. don't think Trudy was incredulous at all, actually. I don't think she thought Pete would make up a story like that (especially one that puts him in a whorehouse too) and it wouldn't be as hurtful to her if it wasn't true. Trudy said, "You'll say anything to hurt me, won't you?" I think Trudy was incredulous. It was a surprise. I'm sure Trudy never thought of her father as the kind of person who patronized whorehouses, let alone the kind of person who'd be into 200 pound black prostitutes. I remember at the time needing MW to explain to me that this had ended the marriage, actually, because I didn't see why a grown woman would be so upset by learning this. And more importantly, I didn't understand how an adult wouldn't *want* to know this. Not that her father was going to prostitutes in general--that's his business--but what he was pulling at work and why. First, again, I think Trudy didn't trust the story at first because it was so far afield from how she saw her father. She already saw Pete as a cheater that she still couldn't trust because she had solid evidence of that, even though Trudy hadn't divorced Pete and she was debating trying to forgive him and figure out a way to trust him to keep him with her. However to Trudy, Trudy still had an entire lifetime of seeing her father as a friendly, rosy cheeked jocular doting father who gave her everything. Tom really controlled his image with Trudy. Even more, I think Trudy generally has this bubbly personality that almost pathologically emphatically sees the best in everyone unless she has solid proof otherwise....and only then, the claws and prosecutorial intelligence will come out. LOL, it's kind of funny. As much as Sally IMO discerningly and intelligently loves her father from S3 on, Sally was cross-examining him about Faye at 10 and rooting out the history of Anna with hard-nosed interrogation techniques at 12 with Nancy Drew workmanship even before Sylvia. Also, Trudy suspected Pete based on how he told the story. Trudy criticized Pete for surprising her with a visit. Pete responded that her father pulled his business and he ruined their riches in a manner that made Trudy feel like she was under pressure to pick a side, at best, and resolve this mess, at worst, between her philandering disappointment husband who has caused her lots of heartache in the last year or between her innocent-seeming father and definitely innocent-mother who've likely been supporting her and helping her through Pete's devastation. And then, when Trudy tried expressing that she doesn't want to hear his criticism of her father, Pete completely insensitively went from 0 to 60 mph and just TOTALLY CRITICIZED Tom by immediately going for the most National Enquirer insensitive salacious version of the headline. Pete: I guess it doesn't matter that I caught him in a Midtown whorehouse.Trudy: Just stop it right now. Pete: It's true. With a 200-pound Negro prostitute. Ask him to his face. True or not, I understand why this would end the marriage which was already on beyond thin ice. Okay, but that's just what I meant, that we've seen him with a regular prostitute when he needed that for whatever reason, shameful or not. He wasn't more innocent of the business than any of the other partners in the room with Lane. He knew prostitutes existed and how one went to get one and that many people did. Never said Don was more innocent in the ways of prostitutes and whorehouses. LOL. That's even funny to type. Even the Madam in Signal 30 called him an expert, after he rated how she subtly set up gay sex with a john. LOL. My only point here is that in his pattern of sexual behavior, having sex with a prostitute is humiliating for Don...but he did it in S4 and intends to in the future and accepted the ex post facto terms for prostitution in the Person to Person sex. Also, I see no evidence in show that Don has more prostitute-sex than Pete. In fact, going to whorehouses and sitting with escorts is more a part of Pete's job description than Don's even though Don also entertains clients this way (as in Signal 30 even though Don didn't partake in the sex-part). But whatever, they're both familiar with whorehouses and have had sex with professionals. But I just disagree with your statement: [Lane] calling Pete a pimp is especially off base (but also foreshadowing like whoa!) because Pete looked fairly annoyed at having to take the guy to the whorehouse and even looked to Roger to take them to the best place because while Pete's no stranger to whorehouses, Don and Roger are much more regular customers. I already said above that Lane was wrong to zero in on Pete when Roger and Don also went to the whorehouse. And that Lane was additionally wrong to pick this fight since it's Company Policy to entertain clients in this manner. However, IMO, Don, Pete, and Roger were all on equal footing here...until Pete made himself more a target by being mean to Lane (from Lane zeroing in on Pete). Edited August 3, 2015 by Melancholy 4 Link to comment
sistermagpie August 4, 2015 Share August 4, 2015 (edited) That's my whole point. Tom's biggest role in harming Trudy's and Pete's marriage had almost nothing to do with Pete's efforts to keep Vicks or his business dealings with Vicks. I know. I'm not saying that Vicks was the main problem here--I'm saying the opposite. Tom's whole relationship to Pete and Trudy was problematic but Vicks was almost always the thing that they used to play that out most dramatically. Tom simply taking away the business wouldn't have been that big of a deal. It was Tom taking away business to interfere with the marriage that was the problem. Pete's lost plenty of accounts. Tom took his away as part of a whole "I am the father and you will always be inferior" way. So I think Ken was absolutely right in his original instinct that it was better to be as independent from his rich father in law as possible--personally independent. Trudy said, "You'll say anything to hurt me, won't you?" I think Trudy was incredulous. It was a surprise. I'm sure Trudy never thought of her father as the kind of person who patronized whorehouses, let alone the kind of person who'd be into 200 pound black prostitutes. I'm sure she didn't want to think of him that way at all so never consciously did, but I think any claims that Pete was lying was just Trudy trying to be in denial and failing. He's put the idea in her head even if she could convince herself it was a made up story, but it makes more sense that it's true. When Pete says something she finds offensive but ridiculous I think she's usually more angry than as horrified and shaky as she was at this news. I think she would have loved to have been able to laugh in his face at the very idea. We know the story's true and it didn't seem like it was being played as Trudy being clueless so Pete's attempt at hurting her just backfired at him completely. I thought it was played that he made a consciousness choice to not allow Tom's hypocrisy to stand, which hurt Trudy and ended the marriage, but Pete did get what he wanted in that moment. He did reveal Tom's behavior to her. First, again, I think Trudy didn't trust the story at first because it was so far afield from how she saw her father. I disagree. She already referenced finding a nasty box that her father had once which sounded like it might contain porn. The lesson she took from it was to not ever try to look at things that might hold nasty secrets. Friendly guy who gives her everything does not mean he can't also be a man with sexual appetites, she just didn't want to hear about them. (And I don't think she saw him as that friendly and avuncular either--she just knew she herself could twist him around her little finger.) She and Pete both seemed to go into their marriage following the same script that they was used in the marriages of their own parents: Men cheat and ought to be discreet about it. Trudy acted like her father didn't do things other men did. Tom believed his daughter was the one woman who wouldn't be cheated on because she was his little girl. Pete blew up that fantasy (that neither really believed) for both of them. Even more, I think Trudy generally has this bubbly personality that almost pathologically emphatically sees the best in everyone unless she has solid proof otherwise....and only then, the claws and prosecutorial intelligence will come out. I don't think she always needed proof. She seemed to be openly admitting that she saw him as a cheater before the neighbor shoved it in her face. (She may have even thought he was cheating more than he was.) I don't think that's seeing the best in everyone so much as refusing to acknowledge things she doesn't want. Living with Pete she had to deal with more things up front. Her father preferred to have battles with her husband over his behavior that they both keep secret from Trudy as if she's a child. Also, Trudy suspected Pete based on how he told the story. Trudy criticized Pete for surprising her with a visit. Pete responded that her father pulled his business and he ruined their riches in a manner that made Trudy feel like she was under pressure to pick a side, at best, and resolve this mess, at worst, between her philandering disappointment husband who has caused her lots of heartache in the last year or between her innocent-seeming father and definitely innocent-mother who've likely been supporting her and helping her through Pete's devastation. I thought she was rather friendly about his unexpected visit, since Pete was being so obedient. They'd just earlier had a whole flirty scene in bed. She made it clear she wasn't going to listen to him complain about her father taking away Vicks. But I don't believe for a second she thought Pete actually made up a story about seeing her father with a prostitute. And then, when Trudy tried expressing that she doesn't want to hear his criticism of her father, Pete completely insensitively went from 0 to 60 mph and just TOTALLY CRITICIZED Tom by immediately going for the most National Enquirer insensitive salacious version of the headline. Yes, he did. So very hurtful if it's true and just pathetic if it's not. Over and over on the show women know these things. Trudy was never portrayed as particularly naive. She just strictly policed what things people admitted were true. Maybe I'm totally wrong about Don vs. Pete in their experience with whorehouses--Pete does use them for his job where Don doesn't so maybe that alone puts Pete over the top. I just lumped Don in with Roger since the two of them go out together. The two girls in the diner might not have been actual escorts but they seem like they're in a grey area. Edited August 4, 2015 by sistermagpie 1 Link to comment
Melancholy August 4, 2015 Share August 4, 2015 (edited) I know. I'm not saying that Vicks was the main problem here--I'm saying the opposite. Tom's whole relationship to Pete and Trudy was problematic but Vicks was almost always the thing that they used to play that out most dramatically. Tom simply taking away the business wouldn't have been that big of a deal. It was Tom taking away business to interfere with the marriage that was the problem. Pete's lost plenty of accounts. Tom took his away as part of a whole "I am the father and you will always be inferior" way. So I think Ken was absolutely right in his original instinct that it was better to be as independent from his rich father in law as possible--personally independent. OK, but you agree that the act of holding onto Vicks didn't ruin the marriage. I agree that Tom decided to take away Vicks as part of his powerplay against Pete, as Trudy's Other Important Man. However, still, Pete took on Clearosil back at the end of 1960 and first made his bones as an account man, Pete got the rest of the Vicks business in 1965 to solidify his standing as SCDP's best shark, Vicks was a key client to get SCDP through the difficult stages of being a start-up business and it was helpful as a loyal business after Lucky Strike left but before things somewhat turned around with Mohawk coming back and of course, Jaguar. Pete enjoyed the profits/billings of Vicks for four years when he was a partner. This was all positive and key foundation to Pete's most important goals- to become very rich on his own and to become a respected asset to his company. As Trudy said, Pete had *lots* of choices. Yes, Tom made that power play. However, Pete wasn't backed in a corner entirely from Vicks. Pete could have not cheated and been respectful of Trudy and thus, not trashed his credibility. Pete could have gently broke the news to Trudy, focusing on her feelings instead of his petulance that SCDP lost Vicks and he missed a chance to be very rich. Pete could've not told or delayed telling Trudy, betting that their marriage couldn't survive more turbulence and Trudy didn't need to know her father's sexual proclivities. Or Pete could have considered telling Trudy- but backed off when Trudy said that she didn't care about the business stuff. Or Pete could've just called Trudy right after he saw her father in the whorehouse if he really valued her right to know, instead of sitting on the information primarily worried about losing Vicks. Tom was a challenge with his power play but the solution here was not to time-travel back so Pete never took on Clearasil in 1960. The problem was the same problems that caused Trudy to throw Pete out in the first place. Pete's pride and business and petulance about whether he was the Biggest Man made Pete put Trudy's feelings last. As for Ken, we never really got to know his father-in-law well. However, Ken's first instinct to not get involved in Dow will always be tainted by his later actions to take on Dow. My impression is that Ken didn't share Pete's intense goals to become fabulously wealthy and well-respected at work so Ken didn't want to compromise his home life for that. On one level- that would be fine for Ken to make that choice if he stuck to it even though Pete's choice should also be respected. Ken and Pete both had reasonable, understandable goals. Pete wanted to be super-rich while Ken was happy with his current income. To achieve those goals, it makes sense that Ken wanted to leave stones unturned while Pete wanted to pursue every lead possible. It wouldn't be a condemnation of either guy so much as just an understanding, that they wanted different things out of life. However, as it turns out, revenge ended up being Ken's asking price to mix his home and business life and frankly, I respect ambition to become rich more than revenge any day of the week. Pete's craven ambition became a lot more endearing to me than Ken's instinct to vengefully hurt his peers and call that justice. Also, later events do show Ken's father-in-law as annoying but I never got the impression that he really hurt Ken's life or marriage just because he represented Dow. Ironically despite the fact that Dow was one of SC's evilest clients especially in the context of the later '60s, they seemed pretty low-maintenance by SC big-client standards....until Ken became Dow's liaison to SC&P. When you add in that Ken's marriage wasn't harmed by Dow but his own choices, it really seems pathetic/assholic that Ken would not use his connection with Dow to try to climb the ladder of success and become a partner or to rescue SCDP after Lucky Strike left and fired employees were weeping in the hallway or to just make the mildest connection after Don and Pete already met the father in law at the American Cancer Society so that non-profit work could bear a little fruit- but instead, Ken just used his Dow connections for revenge. I don't know what more to say about whether Trudy believed Pete's story at the time. Can we agree to disagree on that point? Maybe I'm totally wrong about Don vs. Pete in their experience with whorehouses--Pete does use them for his job where Don doesn't so maybe that alone puts Pete over the top. I just lumped Don in with Roger since the two of them go out together. The two girls in the diner might not have been actual escorts but they seem like they're in a grey area. I don't know if the Severance diner girls were escorts. Could've been. It's ambiguous. There was no discussion that they were hookers- but they were very young and the whole conversation focused on how they were quite taken by Roger's and Don's money. On one hand, you have to wonder why Roger felt the need to throw around money and tips like that if these girls were already bought and paid for- but this is Roger. I could totally see him over-spending to impress hookers that he's already paid for like the one in S2 that he took to a fancy restaurant after the sex. Also, maybe this is unfair personal taste, but IMO, Roger's S7 mustache and S7 vibe drains away so much of his sex appeal. As a twenty something, I find S1-6 Roger so sexy and I totally get why he could pick up much younger girls easily without money changing hands. However, in S7, I'm much more dubious about Roger's ability to pick up girls. I don't care if his facial hair and clothes were trendy- it's just wrong on him. However, Don still made excellent bait, to quote Roger in Long Weekend. And Roger's gift of the gab is legendary and he has decades of sweet-talking hound experience However, pointedly, Don went back to his apartment ALONE that night still in the mood for sex. He didn't bring White Jumpsuit Girl home. Don called his messaging service looking for women who called him for a genuine night of passion and ended up picking a favorite stewardess who was on layover and was also looking for sex. In some ways, ironically, it's the best argument that those diner girls were escorts. One of the paramount factors or probably the *biggest* factor behind Don's sexual escapades is that he craves genuine attention and being wanted as a way to keep bolstering his low-self-worth and he constantly chases that first blush of a successful seduction where he really feels desired and wanted before the relationship settles and he picks it apart. Prostitutes don't provide that from the get-go- everyone knows that they're only there for the money and Don REALLY feels that. That's why the S4 prostitute represented a specific self-harm rather than Don legitimately just scratching a standard dirty guy's desire for regular sex- Don felt he needed to be hit and yelled at and to feel the humiliation of having to pay someone for sex. Ironically with the "You're my king!" scene, I actually think that Pete does feel proud enough of his money and expense account job that well-executed prostitute sex did artificially bolster his confidence. Pete can bask in being the well-heeled, powerful guy that can toss some spare change and get a woman to role-play anything he wants. Pete is a lot more straight-forwardly proud of his wealth and status than Don. However while Pete remained affirmatively proud of his wealth and status, Pete ended up figuring out that using it to pay for one-night whores or impress one-night stands or even have a "I like you in California but not in New York" vacation-girlfriend (and I LOVE Bonnie but she was wrong for Pete) only provided a superficial burst of confidence compared to using that money to enrich the lives of people he loves (Tammy and Trudy). ETA: Oooh, on another topic on Things I've Been Dying to Get Off My Chest, the S7 stipulations on Don's contract are hilariously poorly written and legally vague, especially in light of what comes up later in the seasons. You are not allowed to be alone with clients.You are to stick to the script in meetings and that means the script will be approved by the people in this room. What did the partners define as "meetings"? "Meetings" could mean anything from an official pitch to Don discussing Scouts Honor mainly and the work tangentially over Mary Jane with Stan. Based on The Strategy, the partners legally can't mean partnership meetings where Don regained his right to vote according to his choices as long as he wasn't on leave. (Don votes for Harry to become partner, along with everyone but Joan and Roger. Don votes to merge with McCann and convinces Ted on his own script.) You could say that "meetings" should mean meetings with clients, based on how it comes directly after the first condition and it's a logical way to limit the construction of the word instead of unreasonably expecting the partners to review a script for every interaction Don has. However, in that case, Don did not violate his contract. Neither the computer guy nor Commander Cigarettes were clients at the time. Basically, Don first clearly violated his contract (other than the CHUG CHUG CHUG of The Monolith) was when he gave Peggy the Burger Chef presentation. Also, I guess Don's tenure under these stipulations was short and Lou put him Junior Copywriter mode to limit his exposure to actual client-pitch meetings. However, if this occurred over the long-term and Don got drawn more and more into client-interactions, I highly doubt that these partners reviewed a script. I can't even imagine how a script would work beyond just the original pitch. Clients ask questions or push back at all of these meetings, and even if Lou was there to do all of the spontaneous talking, there's no way most clients wouldn't be directly posing their questions to Don instead of Lou. At all times. Outside of client hospitality, there will be no drinking in the office. Jesus Christ. IT WAS 1969. From S5 on, there were totally period appropriate jokes about SC&P regularly smelled like weed, especially in the creative part. These idiots couldn't even add "No drinking OR RECREATIONAL DRUG USE" in the office like any boiler plate employment contract. I mean, did Cutler still want to keep his options to push speed on everyone, including Don, because he learned nothing about how he endangered the entire office and their work on brand new, demanding, most important client Chevy in a manner that IMO, made Don's Hershey pitch look like a small mistake? You'll be in Lane's old office. And you will report to Lou. I guess they get location and hierarchy correct. However even "report to Lou" is an unavoidable conflict of interest since Don was still a voting partner. Plus, they limited the conditions here, Roger reproached Don for being late in the next ep as a no no- but I didn't hear punctuality in the list. Of course, I consider this sloppiness a feature instead of a bug. These conditions were slopped together in the few hours that Don was waiting in the Creative Lounge. In fact, not even in that time- first Roger had to sail in, the partners all had to calm themselves, they all had to bicker about whether to take Don back in the first place, and then, they got around to this hodge-podge compromise without consulting a lawyer. Don's influence lurks in how the conditions were slopped together to begin with. They were all accustomed to their agency being intellectually-and strategically motored by Don and his Tarzan-swinging-from-vine-to-vine tactics. That's SC&P's brand, whether Don was there or not because he built it that way. Except you have to be a genius and frankly, dysfunctionally into risk play this game. BTW, I think Cooper actually probably is a genius- but he's a genius who thinks deeply but isn't particularly nimble-minded from either age or his particular intellect. Moreover, it's emblematic of how the rules were bullshit. In the back of their minds, Bert and Roger didn't want to waste lawyer time and money on this or prolong this matter. Roger just wanted Don back- and reasonably assumed all of the other partners did too except Cutler and maybe Ted. Roger was wrong about Joan- but essentially correct about everyone else. Bert just wanted to set up some humility-making rules and be rude to Don so Don could be humbled and then, Bert would still want to keep Don around because of loyalty. Joan and Cutler were the two who really intellectually failed at achieving their goals and using this golden opportunity to put together some unwinnable, cast iron but clear restrictions on Don that he'd inevitably fail at so they could get rid of him while absorbing his partnership shares. They had that goal and they were hoping for a big pay day to absorb Don's shares. It's moronic that they didn't consult an attorney or write more provisions or give it some thought before hand. Like, they should hear Don's Milk and Honey Route speech of "I know YOU THINK you know how to hustle...". However, this also realistic. Cutler has a cunning but his mind is very disorganized and unlike Don or Roger who also have disorganized minds, Cutler can't even buckle down and get his thoughts straight. Maybe it's the speed. However, Cutler just lurches from "Don't take the McCann deal....it's a lot of money!" (Waterloo), we see exactly how big a 1969 computer was but Cutler didn't have Clue 1 that SC&P didn't have one and something tells me that Cutler was alone there, Cutler lurched from "We can't afford Don to" to "Let's buy out Don and then let's get a computer!" Meanwhile, Joan actually does have an organized mind. It's her greatest virtue. However, when she's angry but also feels very powerful, she's undisciplined and loses her temper. And IMO, she's good at short-term planning but not long-term planning and frankly, she doesn't get how Creative and frequently, Accounts works. So Joan has her little grievances- CH prissily delivers the "drinking in the office line" but with Cutler as her protector running the show, Joan failed to really pick apart of the wording of the addendum, Edited August 4, 2015 by Melancholy 2 Link to comment
sistermagpie August 12, 2015 Share August 12, 2015 (edited) Season 5: Toss-up between Tea Leaves and Lady Lazarus. I hate them both equally. Tea Leaves is a little poignant knowing how Betty's story would end in Season 7, so I guess Lady Lazarus. I hate the Pete/Beth story. She was such a flat, lifeless character. I took that from the Least favorite eps thread because it reminded me of something that struck me earlier. I was just thinking about patterns of people dealing with death. In some ways all the characters deal with death all the time because aging/death is so central to the show. Many deal with it in metaphorical ways, for instance. But when it comes to dead people we'd been talking about how Don has this ongoing arc with death throughout the series that leads to a lot of dead people (he feels responsible for Adam and for Lane, Anna dies, Betty eventually will die, he imagines the soldier dying, Don Draper died, Rachel dies, his father died when he was young, his mother died in childbirth...). Betty, too, has a lot of moments where she seems to be confronting death itself in different ways: we start with her mother having died, Gene dies, her friend in Tea Leaves is dying, Sally's friend's mother has died, Glen comes to her before going to Vietnam. And then I also thought Pete tends to have a subtler thing with that too, at times: both his parents die on the show, but throughout S5 there was a feeling that either he or Lane would commit suicide and they have that fight that ties them together before Lane's suicide, and he also has the whole Beth scene, and she was suicidal. This isn't a complete list of all the deaths mentioned in the series, of course, but it seems like an interesting pattern, especially since they're all so different. Peggy's baby is dealt with as kind of a death and she then uses that to give advice to Stan about grieving for his cousin. Roger has trouble even feeling anything after his mother's death until the death of his shoe guy gives him an easier inroad. But the other three are just kind of interesting to me because they're all so different. Don's got a really complicated relationship with death, of course. Betty's is very connected to people dying of illnesses who know they are going to die, and also dead parents who leave children behind. Pete's the one tied more with suicide (Don's very tied to suicide victims Lane and Adam, but in his case he feels guilty, he doesn't identify with them), but usually in the sense that these people accept death while Pete plods along. Beth seems to almost embrace an Eternal Sunshine repeating cycle with her treatments, never progressing because her experiences are erased, Lane kills himself. Even Pete's ending in TM&HR is a direct contrast to Betty--she accepts that her life is over just as Pete realizes his life is not. I don't know where I'm going with this except that I think with a lot of these things if the characters have a pattern for dealing with death it's reflected in how they end up, and they're all very different from each other. ETA: oh and I forgot to add there's something really interesting about the real possibility that both Glen and Betty will die young and not too far from each other. If Glen doesn't die he'll probably hold Betty in his mind as an ideal ghost forever but if he does it's like they were weirdly tied together by fate. Edited August 12, 2015 by sistermagpie 3 Link to comment
Melancholy August 12, 2015 Share August 12, 2015 (edited) Interesting points. I feel like Don and Betty started out with opposite ways of dealing with death- and they don't quite meet in the middle at the end but they evolve past their own extremes. The start of the series defines that Don rigorously tries to move past death without any mourning or dwelling on the deceased and resents it in others. I discussed this above. Meanwhile, early!Betty did *obsess* over death. She constantly brought up Ruth and her death to anyone who would listen even if the conversation had nothing to do with Ruth, basically begged Mona to start caring on a powder room trip, resented Gloria in every single conversation, was all I'M AN ORPHAN after Gene had a stroke to the point that her childhood nanny looked askance, had a fit because her brother and his wife moved some ugly urn of Ruth's, was so caught up in her grief over Gene that she slammed the door on Sally outside and then, was all GO WATCH TV when Sally was upset, had to eat the peaches that sat with Gene's corpse in a locked car all day, insisted on naming the baby Gene, and IMO, her choice to leave Don was greatly influenced by Gene's and JFK's deaths in S3. We can go chicken-or-egg with Betty. Was her S1-3 strange attitude toward with death brought on by : (a) an extreme reaction to how much Don emphatically banned mourning and resented the Hofstadt influence and had all of this pressure on both of them to maintain this storybook picture perfect suburban life where he was the only one with work/Lothario/creative about town/double life releases or (b) an immature personality issue in Betty where her parents had a strange hold on her pain and obsession because they managed to both wound her and claim full ownership on how they shaped her even when Betty defied them (modeling, marrying Don)? Don and Betty's S7 attitudes towards death do represent a positive change in both of them...while at the same time, it's hardly perfect and they're still odd-ducks. You can interpret Don's instinct to confess to his part in killing Don Draper 1.0 as growth to reach for the cleansing honest experience of talking about it and dealing with his guilt. However, I do feel like it's particularly....Don-like to crave the teetering-on-the-edge of a cliff feeling of telling a bunch of VFW strangers who just admitted to cannibalizing folks while admitting to perfect strangers who he'll never see again or have to live with some permanency that they'll always know that he caused another man's death. Like if Don told Peggy, Don wouldn't be in any danger but Peggy would always have that damaging fact to potentially think less of him on a daily basis (in Don's mind). Although, I could be too harsh on Don there because Don's whole "I'm not the man you think I am" phone call in Person to Person was exactly ABOUT him looking for the honest hit of Peggy thinking less of him because she knows the truth and IMO, Don was vague on that phone call because he was just saying the ahem, highlights. Don really honors Bert's memory by casting Bert as a mentor conscience who gives good advice- "The best things in life are free", "What's in Racine? Maybe some waitress who doesn't care about you? You shouldn't do that.") That's growth- instead of Don experiencing his ghosts as abusive or scary figures (with the brief five second exception of Anna with her suitcase)- see Archie, Adam, Private Dinkins. However, as Don does, he did idealize Bert Cooper as a conscience in order to put him on that pedestal that Bert never occupied for Don when Bert was alive (even though I think Don respected Bert in life but Don never trusted him). Also, Don still views the deceased as ghosts. I scoff at fannish theories that Don seeing "ghosts" is a sign of a stroke or insanity from syphilis or something like that but it's not normal. It's some cross between his torturedness and his cinematic approach to life. Meanwhile, Betty gained like a saintliness (for lack of a better word) in death because she bravely accepted a fatal lung cancer diagnosis when she was still so young with a lot of dignity for such an indignity... Her focus was a refusal to dwell on death or make Sally dwell on death but instead knowing "when it's time to move on." I actually don't blame Betty really at all for the disarray in Person to Person- I blame Henry and Don for all unnecessary ugliness for the children and possibly, William and Judy if they were informed. IMO, Betty was speaking from a more adult perspective that Bobby and Gene would be better off with a woman in their lives than with Henry. Sally, in her grief and goodness and innocence, was making herself and her youth a sacrificial lamb to Be Betty for her brothers so they could stay in the same bed and at the same school and in the same neighborhood. (Big aside: The more I consider Person to Person, the more I'm sure that Henry was never these children's *father*. Sally puts advocating for Gene and Bobby's *bed* continuity ahead of advocating for Henry as their caretaker. And I don't think Sally minimized Henry's role on the phone to spare Don's feelings. Sally already risked hurting Don's feelings to pursue Sally's greater good goals by rejecting Don's suggestion to take them in to instead leave them with the stepfather. In Sally's mind, she'd be the caretaker ala Betty. Frankly, Sally was deafeningly silent on whether Henry wanted the boys even as Sally was asking Don to weigh in on this debate in support of living the boys at the Francis residence. I wouldn't be surprised if that was just a small consideration in Sally's mind, because Sally was just so emotionally insistent on caring for the boys in exchange for their consistency of friends and school. Meanwhile in Betty's mind, Betty knew that she did practically all of the day-to-day parenting of the children while Henry pursued his career and his own family and friends as a typical stepfather of his times and Betty wanted more for Sally than for Sally to get drafted into becoming a parent before her time.) But anyway, Betty's rigorous insistence to face death and do her best to avoid her family dwelling on it or feeling DRAMA because of it is growth- but it has ugly results in Person to Person because Betty can't stop her ugly realities from infecting those nearest to her no matter how bravely she soldiers on. Still though, as the patient, it's Betty's choice to soldier on and it should have been up to all other adults to decrease the fallout from that. I wish I had more to say about Pete- but I'm coming up blank. But yeah, death is important to his character too. Edited August 12, 2015 by Melancholy 1 Link to comment
sistermagpie August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 I don't know if Sally's not talking about Henry as their father to Don means Henry wasn't actually their father figure. Henry wasn't *Sally's* father ever but that always made her stand apart from the two boys. I mean, I think Sally is clearly seeing herself as taking over for Betty in many ways, but she wasn't going to quit school and live in Rye and be anybody's mother. She would just have more responsibility as the big sister. The boys would be living with Henry if she had her way (with Sally still at Miss Porter's), and I think she was probably more just using the continuity of things like school as a metaphor for the much more important continuity of Henry. If Henry wanted to move a year later Sally probably wouldn't object or think it would be so hard on the boys. Henry never seemed like a father to Sally but when it came to the boys there were a couple of times when the show seemed to be lampshading that Bobby and Gene did see him in that role, like when Bobby worries to Don about Henry being assassinated and Don saying that Gene would think Henry was his father since he wouldn't even remember Don in that role. I mean, I don't think the message here is some awesome celebration of Henry as father or anything like that. I don't think he's supposed to be superdad or that he's stolen the kids' affections completely. But I don't think Sally would ever suggest that boys would be better off living with him if they didn't see him as family and somebody they needed to deal with Betty's death. Plus, I think Sally would know better than to tell Don that they should be with Henry because Henry is their father, because that would be a mean thing to rub in to Don and her point there isn't to hurt Don. The very fact that she's telling him she doesn't expect him to be their caretaker implies she doesn't think of him as the kind of father that Henry is. She probably doesn't even think about Henry and the boys in a touchy-feely enough way to make a speech about how much they need him. Much easier to stick with the practical stuff and let the other stuff go unsaid. ...and thinking about it now I think they're both influenced by their relationship with Don in what they want. Betty thinks it's important for them to have a woman in their life--maybe because in her mind men simply aren't the primary caretakers ever. If the kids live with her brother then her sister in law will be taking care of them. Men worry about their work etc. Where as Sally is the kid who was really upset by the way her own father left her, telling Glen she even missed seeing him in the hallway and wanting move so she would no longer be looking for him. She blamed Betty for causing Don to leave and chased after him. So it's possible that just as Betty didn't even trust Henry to take on being a single parent being a man, Sally instinctively wanted to protect her brothers from being expected to adjust to a new father and mother instead of just dealing with the loss of the person who died. i had forgotten how obsessed Betty was with death early on. She was sort of like Sally yelling at everyone to not laugh after Gene died, a child who wanted somebody to listen to her and care. But then when her father tried to talk about death she didn't want that either. She was pretty messed up! But again, I feel like it adds an eeriness to it when you think about it knowing that Betty is doomed to die young. It almost makes it seem like she knows this on some level and is coming to terms with it without realizing it. I don't know what to say about Pete either. it definitely seems like something there, but I don't know what it says except that he keeps trying or something. I did always love that moment in Signal 30 when they're watching the gruesome film and he laughs. Love that Campbell black humor. (Just reminded me that he told that joke about the plane crash right before learning his father was on it.) 1 Link to comment
Melancholy August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 (edited) I don't know if Sally's not talking about Henry as their father to Don means Henry wasn't actually their father figure. Henry wasn't *Sally's* father ever but that always made her stand apart from the two boys. I mean, I think Sally is clearly seeing herself as taking over for Betty in many ways, but she wasn't going to quit school and live in Rye and be anybody's mother. She would just have more responsibility as the big sister. The boys would be living with Henry if she had her way (with Sally still at Miss Porter's), and I think she was probably more just using the continuity of things like school as a metaphor for the much more important continuity of Henry. If Henry wanted to move a year later Sally probably wouldn't object or think it would be so hard on the boys. Henry never seemed like a father to Sally but when it came to the boys there were a couple of times when the show seemed to be lampshading that Bobby and Gene did see him in that role, like when Bobby worries to Don about Henry being assassinated and Don saying that Gene would think Henry was his father since he wouldn't even remember Don in that role. I think Bobby loved Henry but he was clear that Don was his father and Bobby loved Don too. And frankly, Bobby felt bereft of attention from every adult because Don was an "every other weekend" parent, Henry was a "I'll meet you at dinner" parent, and I think Field Trip/The Runaways, showed that Henry and Betty were both so focused on Henry's political career that quite a bit of nurturing fell to Loretta in the later '60s. However, Betty was by far the main caretaker. Gene is a question mark. We assume that a very young, non-verbal seven year old will gravitate to the man currently occupying the house as the "father" and Don didn't have any scenes connecting with Gene as he did with Sally and Bobby. Although even with Gene, he did come to the visitation weekends and Don always considered Gene as much his child as Bobby and Sally and never relinquished Gene to Henry. Don doesn't organically relate to babies so he was distant from Gene, compared to Bobby and certainly Sally. We don't know about Gene's and Henry's relationship- because they NEVER interacted one-on-one and Gene never talked. Gene's whole parental relationship was cuddling with Betty. I never thought that moment in The Flood was Bobby seeing Henry as his father or certainly more of his father than Don. It's logical that a Bobby that cared about Henry would fear Henry getting shot...because Henry was a political figure. Just a few scenes earlier in that ep, Henry announced that he was heading into the riots with Lindsey as part of his political aid duties and Betty and the kids were scared. Henry up and told everyone that he was heading into danger that Don with his "write a prose poem to a potato chip" career just doesn't face. I could more easily believe that Bobby was more paranoid about Henry's safety than Don's because Bobby loved Henry more if there wasn't a scene before establishing that Henry was heading into danger as part of his job. Frankly, I think that Sally's arithmetic was that the boys loved Henry AND Don but neither of them were going to be the caretakers. So six of one, half dozen of another- there was little point in angsting about who's the father figure or who the boys love more in Sally's mind. As men, both of them were negligible in this crisis. Sally broke the tie between them because Henry was the one with the boys' house in their neighborhood with their school and stuff and probably Loretta who would all of the caretaker when Sally was at Miss Porters. Meanwhile, Don didn't even have a home- he was a wealthy hobo, actually living Sally's dream but with no base to raise children and with six years of living in increasingly dangerous, seedy Manhattan. Sally really could have said that she preferred Henry for the boys because Henry is more of a father or because Henry asked for them or they're more used to Henry. Instead, Sally emphasized Rye and the house and resignedly accepted Henry's and Don's non-presence in Person to Person in favor of her doing the care-taking work. It set up Sally's expectations for how things would go- the boys would try to scrape by without Betty by themselves or perhaps with their maid (still Loretta?) and Sally would try to be everywhere but no one would make demands on Henry or Don to change their schedules to take care of things. Based on Person to Person, that model seemed depressing and not really sustainable. Also, Betty and Don poorly reviewed William's and Judy's parenting skills in the early seasons. Supposedly, their children were very poorly behaved but William openly hit them to the point that Betty with her own "spare the rod, spoil the child" inclinations criticized William in therapy. Betty could have been gravitating to some Hofstadt Family Values in her hour of desperation- but Sally has no interest in Hofstadt "Daddy used to fine us for small talk" family values. Plus, I think Sally would know better than to tell Don that they should be with Henry because Henry is their father, because that would be a mean thing to rub in to Don and her point there isn't to hurt Don. The very fact that she's telling him she doesn't expect him to be their caretaker implies she doesn't think of him as the kind of father that Henry is. She probably doesn't even think about Henry and the boys in a touchy-feely enough way to make a speech about how much they need him. Much easier to stick with the practical stuff and let the other stuff go unsaid. I mean, Sally was already telling Don to back away from his instincts to take and raise his kids because the boys should get to stay in their bed and their neighborhood. Sally already said the harsh thing that would definitely hurt Don's feelings in an effort to get Don to weigh in on Sally's side to give Bobby and Gene stability. The damage was done to Don's feelings to achieve Sally's greater good goals to offer Bobby and Gene some stability. I don't think Sally would have hurt Don's feelings any more than she did by saying that Henry said that he wanted the boys or the boys were really attached to Henry. Sally doesn't say any of that- including the crucial factoid of Henry's opinions, especially after Don's "Adults make these decisions." Sally already asked Don to forget about his belief that he needs to take the kids as their father in favor of bed and neighborhood continuity. Sally really wasn't sparing Don's feelings here. Which is fine- there are more important things at stake. ...and thinking about it now I think they're both influenced by their relationship with Don in what they want. Betty thinks it's important for them to have a woman in their life--maybe because in her mind men simply aren't the primary caretakers ever. If the kids live with her brother then her sister in law will be taking care of them. Men worry about their work etc. Where as Sally is the kid who was really upset by the way her own father left her, telling Glen she even missed seeing him in the hallway and wanting move so she would no longer be looking for him. She blamed Betty for causing Don to leave and chased after him. So it's possible that just as Betty didn't even trust Henry to take on being a single parent being a man, Sally instinctively wanted to protect her brothers from being expected to adjust to a new father and mother instead of just dealing with the loss of the person who died. There were many scenes as Casa de Francis that just featured Betty alone or Betty alone with the kids. Henry, as a man of his times, either indicated to Betty or probably *said outright* that he wouldn't be a single parent. Seriously, I'd think that Henry would have had this conversation with Betty and probably Sally if he wanted the children. It's the first natural thing that comes up- it was the first thing that *Don* thought of in the thyroid scare and here. It speaks volumes that neither Betty nor Sally said that Henry said he wanted custody of the children or that Henry was prepared to take the children. Sally trying to be everywhere to raise her brothers in their stable environment in S7 is a little bit of a mirror of Sally proposing that all the Draper kids relocate to Don's Greenwich Village pad where she'll watch her little brothers in The Beautiful Girls. It's a shift where Sally's opinion evolved to the point that Sally no longer considered Don enough of a hero of a father that just his mere custody would somehow render his Greenwich Village mancave into more of a warm and welcoming home than the Ossining McMansion. Plus, Sally wasn't trying to run away *from* Betty. However, in both cases, it still feels like Sally taking on too much of a burden on herself to be the caretaker in an off-base bizarre custody arrangement where Sally just assumes that the guy (Don in S4, Henry in S7) will just accept it because Sally's nurturing should overcome the men's workaholism, etc. Edited August 13, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
small potatoes August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 My own understanding of the relevant phone call between Don and Sally is that she was taking care of her father. Sally knows he'd do the right thing but doesn't believe he wants to be tied down. In her heart of hearts Sally would wish for nothing more than for her dad to become an involved parent on a day to day level but not if it comes at the expense of his muse. She's trying to take care of him just as much as she's trying to take care of her brothers. As for Betty wanting to leave the kids with William and Judy, I think she was bluffing. Betty couldn't stand them and neither could Don. She pushed one of his buttons. With the wisdom of Solomon, Betty knew Don would clean up his act rather than let Sally and her siblings live with the hated brother and sister in law. Right or wrong, this is the only interpretation that allows me to sleep at night, and I do think it's consistent with the characters of Sally and Betty as we've come to know them over the course of the series. Link to comment
txhorns79 August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 As for Betty wanting to leave the kids with William and Judy, I think she was bluffing. Betty couldn't stand them and neither could Don. She pushed one of his buttons. With the wisdom of Solomon, Betty knew Don would clean up his act rather than let Sally and her siblings live with the hated brother and sister in law. I don't get any sense from that scene that Betty was bluffing. Even if she didn't care for William and Judy, I thought her logic in sending the kids to live with them was pretty sound. Don loves his kids, but he is not a reliable parent. William and Judy could provide them with a stability that Don couldn't, and after Betty dies, that is what they will need more than anything. 1 Link to comment
Melancholy August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 I don't think Sally really cares about Don's "muse", such as it was needed because Don was retired at that point in the story. Sally's focus was where it should have been- on the well-being of her brothers (although Sally didn't think about herself and her own youth as much as she should have). And Betty doesn't really play these reverse-psychology games, let alone at the end of her life. By the way, I think William was a mediocre little man (especially compared to unusually successful Don and Henry) who, like most men of his time, over-used corporal punishment but without gravitas because of his milquetoast personality- but he wasn't mean-spirited and he had a responsibility to family. His Hofstadt breeding and aura of Main Line money allowed him to luck out and get a sweet, pretty wife who seemed like a real asset to him. William & Judy were an OK couple and OK parents by the standards of the time- but Betty's own snobbishness, competitiveness over control of Gene and his estate, and her desire to prove that she got the better marriage and household because she was actually unhappy with Don made Betty paint William and Judy as worse then they appeared to the unbiased viewer's eye. In their confrontations, Betty was pretty much always the bitchy aggressor. At some point, I think Betty got that perspective- maybe during her far better marriage to Henry, maybe after Gene's estate was dispersed and there weren't any parents to bicker over, maybe when Betty knew that she was going to die soon and she needed to set her kids up with a mother in her family. I think Betty and Sally were honestly thinking about the best outcome for the children. Although, I think Betty was over-valuing traditional gender roles to require a mother, especially when Don was *retired* and had enough to money to never have to work again. And I think Sally was doing an independent teenagery thing and over-valuing friends and continuity of school over the need for fully present parents, preferably bio-parents. Now, of course, if Don was a present parent who they could always rely on, his biological parenthood could have won out over these other considerations in Sally's and/or Betty's minds. It's a statement on Don's absence that Sally and Betty arrived at different conclusions on where the boys should go- but no one wanted the children with Don. Still, I think of all of the parental contestants, Don is not only the biological parent, but IMO, he's the one who loves the kids the most. Henry was a good step-parent and he took to the kids and maybe distantly loved the boys like an extended family member- but I never got that Henry really loved any of the children like a father. And they are Don's responsibility. Unless Henry really wants them (and the last two eps didn't indicate that all), it feels unfair to make Henry figure out how to raise two young boys alone because his seven-year marriage ended early or it's unfair to make financial-resource limited William and Judy take on more kids from their sister who seems to have always spurned them. Don had these kids- they're his responsibility. Even if Don went back to McCann, unlike Henry or William, I think Don is in an enviable position of having more control over his hours and work since his monetary incentive changed into just waiting for the rest of his money to vest instead of his S1 incentive to stay on top of the salaried employee heap at Roger's and Bert's pleasure, his S2-6 partnership profit/reputation incentive for a new business for four of those years, his 7.0 incentive regain his former footing at his own agency, or even his pre-Lost Horizon incentive to jointly manage the creative wing of their McCann subsidiary with just Ted. Henry was still in the political rat race, last hoping to be to Rockefeller's Attorney General- last we heard. William is likely a middle-class salaried employee somewhere. 1 Link to comment
VCRTracking August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 Henry was a good step-parent and he took to the kids and maybe distantly loved the boys like an extended family member- but I never got that Henry really loved any of the children like a father. I think he loved them. He was concerned over what happened with Bobby after his trip to the farm with Betty. Link to comment
sistermagpie August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 (edited) I think Bobby loved Henry but he was clear that Don was his father and Bobby loved Don too. Sure-I didn't mean to imply that Don was no longer their father. To me, one of the things that was so surprising and 70s about the ending (in a good way) was that it seemed like everybody was saying look, Don, we know who you are. You don't have to be a father by being the guy you pretended to be in the 50s, the solid guy in the suit who comes home to the suburbs like Father Knows Best. Sally, more than any of the other kids, has learned to let go of whatever ways she thinks Don should be and still see a rich relationship she can have with the man who's her father. She didn't do it by living with him. She showed up begging to live with him once and he sent her home. But I think there were a lot of points made that Henry was there in the role that he had so leaving the kids with Henry was leaving them with family. Betty was the main caretaker (as a woman was expected to be then anyway), and Henry was the dad who filled the 50s dad role. Scenes of Betty dealing with the kids alone don't really tell us anything in the 60s. The scene in The Flood, to me, wasn't saying that Don was no longer Bobby's father--he'd always be that. But Henry was a day to day figure that he would truly miss enough to make that connection of politics=assassination=loss. I think MW even said as much in the Inside the Ep about that episode--that it's a moment where that's brought home to Don because Bobby casually brings Henry up as this presence in his life he thinks about that way. Likewise that scene where Don leaves the kids having their milkshakes in the kitchen sets up the dynamic. Don and the boys have just had a day together, a day that probably means a lot to his sons. They want to spend time with them and probably cherish those times. But it's also natural for Bobby to think of Henry having a milkshake because Henry's naturally in his mind in the kitchen as well, and when Don looks back at the Francises he's seeing a family unit. Not one that's rejected him or kicked him out, but one that isn't missing him either. When he goes away, it's normal. I think that's exactly why the writer put in a line about Henry getting a milkshake too. I think all those little moments intentionally led up to the ending of Betty and Sally both telling Don that neither of their visions of what was best for the boys included him as the caretaker. Not because either of them were mad at him or didn't want him in the boys' lives or didn't see him as a father (or saw him as a failure as a father) but because he wasn't that personality. Don not being there was part of normal. He's still their father, but he's never going to be pinned down. Sally really could have said that she preferred Henry for the boys because Henry is more of a father or because Henry asked for them or they're more used to Henry. Instead, Sally emphasized Rye and the house and resignedly accepted Henry's and Don's non-presence in Person to Person in favor of her doing the care-taking work. I don't think Henry was a non-presence in Person-to-Person. He wasn't there in the scenes but he Bobby had learned about Betty's illness listening to Betty and Henry fight over it. Henry was emotionally freaking out about Betty's illness--he was part of the family drama just as Bobby was and Don wasn't. I don't think Sally thinks the boys love Henry more or that Henry is more of a father than Don because Sally herself doesn't feel that way and I don't think it's really true. If she said something like that to him it would be like starting a fight and criticizing Don, which isn't something on her mind. It would be totally counterproductive, sending Don into a fit of self-loathing or making him prove himself by demanding the boys. I just think Henry's the natural subtext of everything she says about their lives staying the same because she'd never consider him an appropriate guardian, whatever house he lived in, if she didn't think the boys would be happy/relieved to be with him. I don't think we're actually disagreeing about what she's saying, actually. It's not that Henry is now their father and Don is not. That almost seems to go against a lot of the themes of the series, actually. It's that Henry is the stable presence and Don isn't. That's what he always brought to the table. Don doesn't have to play the role of what people say a father should be in order to have a relationship with his kids. Henry should be the caretaker because it's more his natural personality to be responsible for other people. Don's spent the entire series struggling with that. He's probably destined to have a much better relationship with his kids this way. It's really just like a lot of the other characters' relationships. In the last few eps a lot of characters had other people give them a more objective view of themselves than they themselves had at that moment. Everyone was being seen for the way they'd proved themselves to be before then. If you look at the men and their children, Joan had allowed Roger to have a relationship with Kevin and he'd proved himself by continuing to be a regular but not constant or demanding presence--enough that Joan could now accept him putting Kevin in his will. Pete had upped his visitation to make himself much more of a constant presence, one that his daughter focused on when he wasn't there. Don hadn't yet defined his role completely--but he'd shown certain things that he wasn't. I mean, Sally was already telling Don to back away from his instincts to take and raise his kids because the boys should get to stay in their bed and their neighborhood. Sally already said the harsh thing that would definitely hurt Don's feelings in an effort to get Don to weigh in on Sally's side to give Bobby and Gene stability. I think there's a big difference between Sally brushing off Don's automatic response that he'd take care of the kids--something both she and Betty felt he'd proved over and over again he didn't want to do--and Sally feeling the need to tell Don that Henry was their father and not Don. I honestly think she was trying to avoid this exact binary choice, that Don either had to turn into someone else and be a father or be replaced. It wasn't about Don. It was their problem. There were many scenes as Casa de Francis that just featured Betty alone or Betty alone with the kids. Of course--Betty is the mom and the primary caretaker. Henry was 50s Dad who went to work, came home in the evenings and did dad things like mow the lawn or go to get the Christmas tree with the kids and talk at dinner. Now he's a widower who, if he had the kids, would probably hire a housekeeper/nanny or even eventually get married again. That would be Henry continuing to be the father figure he was, taking on more emotional weight without Betty. Neither Henry nor Don was going to turn into a modern dad, but Henry's more stable as 50s dad. I don't get any sense from that scene that Betty was bluffing. Me neither. And obviously Sally didn't. It seemed like a genuine disagreement where they both had good points to make. But I tend to side with Sally's continuity argument--and I think she may have had a better perspective on that being a child herself. I don't think Betty was trying to get any kind of reaction at all from Don. The biggest theme of their interactions with him was to tell him over and over it wasn't about him. He could just keep doing what he was doing and that was enough. Still, I think of all of the parental contestants, Don is not only the biological parent, but IMO, he's the one who loves the kids the most. Henry was a good step-parent and he took to the kids and maybe distantly loved the boys like an extended family member- but I never got that Henry really loved any of the children like a father. And they are Don's responsibility. Unless Henry really wants them (and the last two eps didn't indicate that all), it feels unfair to make Henry figure out how to raise two young boys alone because his seven-year marriage ended early or it's unfair to make financial-resource limited William and Judy take on more kids from their sister who seems to have always spurned them. I don't think the last few eps indicated Henry's not wanting the kids at all or how how deeply or distantly he loved them. It didn't make a case that he did want them either, it's true, but I never got the impression he'd stop being the guy who felt a responsibility for the kids. If Sally knows what Betty wants for the boys she might have been privvy to discussions about it and maybe even been part of them and know Henry's up for it. That said, I think the bigger issue is that it doesn't always come down to who loves the kids more but who they are. Sure Don has the financial security (and presumably he will be paying for the kids regardless--neither Henry nor William has to take that on with Don alive and well and involved) and the freedom to do whatever he wants. But he's had that for years and always chose to be unreliable even for every other weekend. If he's retired in the last few eps he's chosen to spend his retirement on the road with weekly phone calls. I think that's where both Sally and Betty are coming from. They don't believe that new, dramatic circumstances will turn Don into somebody else--that's the kind of fantasy Don sort of went into with Megan. I think they both might even think that doing it this way, with Don continuing to be a limited presence--offers more hope for stability. There's no reason at all to think that Don would suddenly use his flexibility to focus on his children. I doubt it would even occur to any of them that they needed to compete for who would become the most like what they'd consider a housewife. Don's work and private life take up a lot of time--and did even when he was living with the kids. Basically we saw everybody in the last ep reacting to Don "being Don"--and that meaning Don not being there. "He does that" Roger cheerfully tells everybody at McCann. And the solution to this problem was...that it wasn't a problem. Just accept it and if you can't don't deal with Don. Just let him go and eventually he'd come back. McCann learned that, Peggy had that pointed out to her by Stan. But as Don was at McCann so he was with his family. Everybody learned to let him go and trust he'd come back instead of trying to get him to be reliable by chasing him or coddling him or being disappointed by him. Just enjoy the Coke ads. Edited August 13, 2015 by sistermagpie 2 Link to comment
small potatoes August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 I don't get any sense from that scene that Betty was bluffing. Even if she didn't care for William and Judy, I thought her logic in sending the kids to live with them was pretty sound. Don loves his kids, but he is not a reliable parent. William and Judy could provide them with a stability that Don couldn't, and after Betty dies, that is what they will need more than anything. I didn't get the sense that she was bluffing, either. She's that good at it. As for what they will need more than anything, who is to say what they need? And if it's stability, do we even know that William and Judy have a happy marriage? Also, they probably don't have the financial wherewithal to take care of two more children, so Don will have to pay for them to stay there. Melancholy, I started to say "at the expense of Don's happiness" but happiness seemed too much to ask of Don Draper so I substituted "his muse." I agree with you that Sally was not taking her own needs into consideration nearly enough, but I don't think it's up to Sally to make the decision. Your last paragraph supports my belief that they are better off with Don than with the solutions proposed by Sally and Betty. 1 Link to comment
Melancholy August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 (edited) Sure-I didn't mean to imply that Don was no longer their father. To me, one of the things that was so surprising and 70s about the ending (in a good way) was that it seemed like everybody was saying look, Don, we know who you are. You don't have to be a father by being the guy you pretended to be in the 50s, the solid guy in the suit who comes home to the suburbs like Father Knows Best. Sally, more than any of the other kids, has learned to let go of whatever ways she thinks Don should be and still see a rich relationship she can have with the man who's her father. She didn't do it by living with him. She showed up begging to live with him once and he sent her home. I agree that the scene in The Flood indicated that Bobby really cared about Henry and even loved him. I'm just saying that it, nor really any other scene, was powerful or really exclusive of Don enough that it indicated that Henry should be picked over Don for custody if Betty died. I could see S3 Sally getting emotional at the thought of Grandpa Gene dying (ahem, before he died). It absolutely would show that Sally loved her grandfather. It wouldn't be an indication that if Betty died in S3, Sally should go live with Grandpa Gene instead of Don. I even agree in New Business that Don saw the Francis family unit with his kids and ex-wife. However, Betty was the unmistakable glue there. The entire reason that Don didn't fill the father role in the kitchen was because he and Betty got divorced. Just because Henry looked like he fit in the family with an alive, vibrant Betty acting as the glue and facilitator doesn't mean that it would continue on Betty's passing. I don't think Henry was a non-presence in Person-to-Person. He wasn't there in the scenes but he Bobby had learned about Betty's illness listening to Betty and Henry fight over it. Henry was emotionally freaking out about Betty's illness--he was part of the family drama just as Bobby was and Don wasn't. I don't think Sally thinks the boys love Henry more or that Henry is more of a father than Don because Sally herself doesn't feel that way and I don't think it's really true. If she said something like that to him it would be like starting a fight and criticizing Don, which isn't something on her mind. It would be totally counterproductive, sending Don into a fit of self-loathing or making him prove himself by demanding the boys. I just think Henry's the natural subtext of everything she says about their lives staying the same because she'd never consider him an appropriate guardian, whatever house he lived in, if she didn't think the boys would be happy/relieved to be with him. Henry was glaringly absent in Person to Person. BTW, Don actually was part of the family drama because Sally took it upon herself to break Betty's confidence to tell him. That is love and that's Sally relying on Don. I also think that's why Sally never stated Henry himself as a REASON for why the kids should stay in Rye instead of going to Don's next residence. I agree that Sally believed Henry would be appropriate guardian and that Bobby and Gene would be happy with him- but Sally never said that Henry made for a better caretaker or she could count on Henry where she couldn't count on Don because it's just not true. Henry's pluses were exactly what Sally said- most of the boys' life centered around Betty and their kid lives of school and friends and neighborhood. They're about to tragically lose Betty- but at least, Henry provides the other stuff that makes up a 1970 suburban child's life by virtue of owning their childhood home. BTW, I absolutely do think that Sally would change her position if Henry was going to sell the house and move on Betty's death. Sally didn't come up with the benefits of the house and neighborhood continuity as just a polite way of saying Henry was her favored father-figure for the boys. Sally emoted the importance of the boys keeping the rest of their non-Betty lives intact. If Henry upped and moved to Albany to be Rockefeller's AG or got a job in Washington DC far away from Miss Porters or even got an apartment in Manhattan, I think Sally would change her vote in an instant. Henry never trumped Don as an individual in Sally's mind. Henry trumped Don because he retained the non-Betty stuff in the boys' lives and Sally intended (and IMO, was over ambitious) to try to fill Betty's role as much as possible. I don't think the last few eps indicated Henry's not wanting the kids at all or how how deeply or distantly he loved them. It didn't make a case that he did want them either, it's true, but I never got the impression he'd stop being the guy who felt a responsibility for the kids. IMO, it was up to the show to prove the extent of Henry's love and desire for the children since Henry did come in as a stepfather. The show consistently showed Henry as a very good 1950s stepfather who was protective of the kids, really liked the idea of coming home to the young, adorable children that came with the young, beautiful second wife, could very responsibly relate to the children when there was danger (Grandma Ida), and really in his best step-fathering moments, cared so much about nurturing *Betty* that he was a good influence on her as a mother. Henry >>>>>>>> Megan in terms of step-parents. However, I never really got a moment where I felt that Henry *loved* the children as a father. Absolutely, Henry is responsible person who felt a responsibility to the children since they were such a big part of his wife's life and naturally, their life together. However, it's a whole 'nother kettle of fish that Henry would feel a "responsibility" to insist on keeping the children away from their alive, wealthy biological dad who said that he wanted them or their aunt and uncle when his wife/their mother's dying wish was for them to have custody. It's almost *irresponsible* for Henry to contravene the wishes of both of the biological parents. For me to believe in that, I'd need the show to give some indication that Henry wanted and craved the children so deeply that he'd ally with Sally and disagree with the kids' parents. The fact that Sally was looking to Don come onto her "Give up the idea of raising them so I can raise them between classes in Rye" side without saying if Henry was even fine with that indicated that Sally was desperately looking for Don to give up his rights to trigger Henry's responsibility to the children so Sally could maintain the boys' Rye-based stability. I think all those little moments intentionally led up to the ending of Betty and Sally both telling Don that neither of their visions of what was best for the boys included him as the caretaker. Not because either of them were mad at him or didn't want him in the boys' lives or didn't see him as a father (or saw him as a failure as a father) but because he wasn't that personality. Don not being there was part of normal. He's still their father, but he's never going to be pinned down. I read the Coke commercial/implication that Don went to McCann to be an ad man as Don agreeing to be pinned down once and for all. A five year contract with McCann was the apotheosis of being pinned down to a soulless corporation, according to Don. And unlike Waterloo, Don isn't even going to McCann blind or with the supposition that McCann is just going to pay SC&P partners to be a subsidiary in their own Time Life building, with their own partners, with Roger Sterling as their "No rules, just right" King. Don saw McCann in all of its structured, boxed lunch, "corporate mumbo-jumbo doesn't equal witty badinage" hell- and apparently, went back to it. Basically, it's unfathomable that Don would allow himself to be pinned down by Jim Hobart/McCann but not by custody of his children. ;-) That said, I think the bigger issue is that it doesn't always come down to who loves the kids more but who they are. Sure Don has the financial security (and presumably he will be paying for the kids regardless--neither Henry nor William has to take that on with Don alive and well and involved) and the freedom to do whatever he wants. But he's had that for years and always chose to be unreliable even for every other weekend. If he's retired in the last few eps he's chosen to spend his retirement on the road with weekly phone calls. I think that's where both Sally and Betty are coming from. They don't believe that new, dramatic circumstances will turn Don into somebody else--that's the kind of fantasy Don sort of went into with Megan. I think they both might even think that doing it this way, with Don continuing to be a limited presence--offers more hope for stability. There's no reason at all to think that Don would suddenly use his flexibility to focus on his children. I doubt it would even occur to any of them that they needed to compete for who would become the most like what they'd consider a housewife. Don's work and private life take up a lot of time--and did even when he was living with the kids. I do think new, dramatic circumstances change people, though, and they change Don. LOL, Don is the epitome of "Man went to war and came back a whole other person!" Don's Hershey pitch and being expelled from SC&P changed him. A straight reading of Person to Person shows him changed from his road trip/Esalen. Moreover, I think there are scores of examples of less active parents who suddenly became hands-on parents because their child's main caretaker died or left. I don't really have statistics- but I think it's the natural evolution. A father can be less involved if there is a stay-at-home-mom around- but most of the time, if the mother dies, the father picks up the parenting slack. In Don's case, it would particularly easier because the necessary pressures of his high-powered career dissipated, even on going back to McCann, and IMO, Don made himself pay a million dollars in basically punitive damages to Megan to discourage future waste-of-time-marriages. IMO, Don made more quality time for the kids when he and Betty got divorced than when he lived with them, except for his Long Night of the Dark Soul in S6. I mostly think Don was pretty good as a 1960s divorced father in S4-5 and S7 within his and Betty's limited custody arrangement that we don't know exactly how it came to be. There were, like several, memorable fuck-ups that seemed worse because its relation to Don's recent nadir in S6. Edited August 13, 2015 by Melancholy 1 Link to comment
small potatoes August 13, 2015 Share August 13, 2015 Melancholy said: "Basically, it's unfathomable that Don would allow himself to be pinned down by Jim Hobart/McCann but not by custody of his children. ;-)" Exactly! Bingo! I could not agree more! Person to Person forces us to make this assumption. 2 Link to comment
sistermagpie August 14, 2015 Share August 14, 2015 (edited) I agree that the scene in The Flood indicated that Bobby really cared about Henry and even loved him. I'm just saying that it, nor really any other scene, was powerful or really exclusive of Don enough that it indicated that Henry should be picked over Don for custody if Betty died. But Henry's not being picked for custody on the basis of love. He's being picked based on his having been there when needed for 7 years. He's reliable, the kids are used to him and they trust him to be there for him. Don may not realize it, but he's been auditioning for the role of custodial parent if Betty died for years and he's always made it clear that the role wasn't for him. So he's not in the running in their minds. Henry was glaringly absent in Person to Person. BTW, Don actually was part of the family drama because Sally took it upon herself to break Betty's confidence to tell him. But she only told him because she needed him to back up her strong feeling that Henry should be the custodial parent over Mark. She and Betty both made it clear to Don that he didn't need to do more than what he was doing now. I thought Henry was only absent because he's a minor character and the story was about the original Drapers more than the Francises. The Francis story was the previous week. And that story was still more importantly about Betty and Sally. Plus, of course, Betty wasn't allowing the boys to be told so of course the three kids had to have their own private discussion about it. For Henry to suddenly come in and have scenes with these kids alone would be a real change in his role as a character. His reliability as a stepfather has always just been there. In the cancer story on the whole Henry was no more absent than Don himself in his two phone calls. However, it's a whole 'nother kettle of fish that Henry would feel a "responsibility" to insist on keeping the children away from their alive, wealthy biological dad who said that he wanted them or their aunt and uncle when his wife/their mother's dying wish was for them to have custody Definitely a different kettle of fish which I don't think the story really brings up. There's no custody battle going on so there's no reason to think Henry would ever try to win the kids from Don. I don't think Henry would fight either man for custody since they're both blood family and he's not. I do assume that Henry was quite willing to continue to care for the boys he's been raising since Sally sees him as an option--I don't see the point of making Sally naively mistaken about Henry being an option when we're never going to find out that she was wrong. Don not demanding the kids either. He tells Sally they'll live with him as soon as he hears the news as if she's looking to him for that reassurance and she brushes that off because she wasn't. I thought that when Betty told him he'd continue to see the kids as much as he had before and that him not being there was what she wanted since he wasn't usually there was something that Don saw the truth in. The story wasn't written with the kids longing for Don to come and rescue them or Don figuring out that this is exactly what he wants/where he should be. To me it seemed like this was an important truth for Don, that he had to define himself as something other than the rescuer. I do think new, dramatic circumstances change people, though, and they change Don. I think saying that dramatic circumstances change people *in this way* goes against everything the finale and final season was saying. It's Tomorrowland II where Don sees the scene before him--sad children who've lost their mother and need their father to make everything all right, and envisions himself stepping into the part and redeeming himself. He's had a lot of dramatic circumstances in his life and none of them has turned him into that guy. MW was often accused of having contempt for the counter-culture of the 60s, as if he preferred the 50s world. I never thought that was true since even if he thinks a lot of it was stupid he grew up post-60s and takes a lot of the improvements it brought for granted as good things. The show starts with everyone living or aspiring to live the same conformist life. The show ends with people creating relationships based not on the roles society assigned them but their individual selves. Roger, Kevin and Joan have a completely odd set up but it's one that works for them. It's based, among other things, on Roger's patterns and limitations. As he proved himself trustworthy he gained more trust. First he figured out that he really and truly wanted a relationship with Kevin enough to earn it by showing up and proving himself and then he did it. But not in a way that recreated the Margaret situation. With this situation it's saying that Don can spend the entire run of the show having serious issues that keep him from being reliable with his family--he was not a pretty good 1960s divorced father that I remember. I don't think he was ever presented as being reliable. Things were always coming up. His problems were more than once explained as a problem he had as a person and not just an anomaly that happened in S6. (Many people at the time even in S4 he was a completely dreadful divorced father when he was single), Betty seems to consider his unreliability a habit, telling him she knows he's hoping to use the riots as a chance to get out of taking the kids for the weekend. I think that's around the same time Sally says she knew Don wouldn't go with them to the vigil. Or Megan saying she and the kids were all in the same boat. "Loving you is the worst way to get to you" applies to all of them. When he gets the news about Betty's cancer he's missed probably at least 2 weekends with the kids for a spontaneous trip because he felt like it. (I assume Don feels like Pete did at the end of S6 that no one will notice a difference if he's gone--but they do, as Pete learned.) I actually can't think of any time on the show when Don didn't have some problems with this. None of that is just going to magically go away because of a dramatic situation. Nobody on the show seems to think this stuff would be fixed by Betty dying--including Don. If he was going to actually change, I'd need to see it to believe it. I would never just assume he did it. The show itself doesn't even end with anything pointing in that direction. After the phone call with Betty Don's alone with his many issues and then he gets the idea for the Coke ad. Person to Person forces us to make this assumption. But Don isn't being "pinned down" by McCann at all. He walked out in the middle of a meeting, disappeared for over a month, and now wants to waltz back into make one of the best ads in history despite Hobart tearing his hair out. If McCann wants Don's genius, they need to let him have his freedom. Hobart failed to pin him down to the amusement of everyone from SCDP. There's no reason whatsoever to think that Don wouldn't walk again the next time he felt antsy or bored. That's what he does. Don gets the same deal with his family--he has his freedom. He's not a company man. He's not a family man. He's always part-hobo. And the people around him now plan for that and aren't surprised when he disappears. Edited August 14, 2015 by sistermagpie 3 Link to comment
small potatoes August 14, 2015 Share August 14, 2015 Sister Magpie said: "Don gets the same deal with his family--he has his freedom. He's not a company man. He's not a family man. He's always part-hobo. And the people around him now plan for that and aren't surprised when he disappears." Except he is a company man and he is a family man. He was a key employee and later a principal at Sterling Cooper. As a family man, he and Betty raised Sally to be the awesome person she became. The jury is still out on the boys. Saying he's not a family man is kind of absurd. It's his family we're talking about. Of the three options discussed- 1) I don't think Henry has much interest in the children apart from Betty. Although we had every reason to believe he loved his wife, evidence of Henry bonding in a deep way with the the Draper children is notably scarce. I can see them staying at the mausoleum but I don't believe that's what any of them really want. 2) William and Judy are out of the question. My hands are covering my ears. I can't hear you. 3) Draper returns and they work out an arrangement. As you said, "The show ends with people creating relationships based not on the roles society assigned them but their individual selves. Roger, Kevin and Joan have a completely odd set up but it's one that works for them." I feel certain the Draper's can find a similar creative solution, even one that involves Don becoming the custodial parent. 1 Link to comment
Melancholy August 14, 2015 Share August 14, 2015 (edited) But Henry's not being picked for custody on the basis of love. He's being picked based on his having been there when needed for 7 years. He's reliable, the kids are used to him and they trust him to be there for him. Don may not realize it, but he's been auditioning for the role of custodial parent if Betty died for years and he's always made it clear that the role wasn't for him. So he's not in the running in their minds. The kids are used to Don. Don has been in their lives since they were born. Don has been flakey about weekend visits on rare occasions, and more frequently in 1968. However, Don has given every indication that he loves his children and would want to be there for them in a crisis. Yes, Don can't live with them because Betty didn't want to continue to live with Don but Henry did live with them. Sally quite literally said why she was picking Henry over Don. Henry came with the house and neighborhood that formed a larger portion of certainly Bobby's childhood than Henry's presence. Sally did not say that she was picking Henry because he was more reliable or because she trusted that Henry would be there and Don wouldn't. And Sally absolutely could have said that. But she only told him because she needed him to back up her strong feeling that Henry should be the custodial parent over Mark. She and Betty both made it clear to Don that he didn't need to do more than what he was doing now. I thought Henry was only absent because he's a minor character and the story was about the original Drapers more than the Francises. The Francis story was the previous week. And that story was still more importantly about Betty and Sally. Plus, of course, Betty wasn't allowing the boys to be told so of course the three kids had to have their own private discussion about it. For Henry to suddenly come in and have scenes with these kids alone would be a real change in his role as a character. His reliability as a stepfather has always just been there. In the cancer story on the whole Henry was no more absent than Don himself in his two phone calls. Henry was absent to show that things are pretty fucking bleak for the remnants of the Draper family right now. The rest of the final scenes for the characters paint some picture of happiness that we're supposed to take as a guide-post for their future. Meanwhile, Sally/Betty/Bobby scenes show that the unavoidable tragedy of Betty's death is horrible, and the custody issues and secret-keeping are making the situation even worse. As a glimpse of what a Henry-run household looks like, it's a disaster. Now, Don is also at fault for not immediately getting his ass back to NY. However, the Don-scenes also show him totally spiralling and becoming a total bereft ghost of a person after he heard that Betty was dying and no one wanted him back to take custody but then, responding very well to Esalen therapy and directly confronting this core epiphany issue of accepting and giving love with all signs to him returning to NY in the final scene. I comprehend that Don's parental role and how he responds to therapy long-term is left up to question. However, Don's absence hardly portends stability and normalcy in Casa de Francis. More responsible and traditional Henry and Judy/William are THERE or in town, but the Francis household looked like depressing chaos without a healthy Betty and there's only so much slack that Sally can pull when she's still a child herself at boarding school. The whole thing makes *my* heart cry out for a restored Don on the right track to go back and rescue his kids because I'm not left feeling that the favored custodial figures who are in town are up to the task or really care about staying up to the task partly because I'm not sure that William/Judy/Henry even love or want the kids. I do assume that Henry was quite willing to continue to care for the boys he's been raising since Sally sees him as an option--I don't see the point of making Sally naively mistaken about Henry being an option when we're never going to find out that she was wrong. I think it's not clear- but certainly weird that Sally didn't argue that Henry wants the kids and Betty was so firm that William and Judy should raise the boys even though Betty had the most frank conversations with Henry compared to anyone. Don not demanding the kids either. He tells Sally they'll live with him as soon as he hears the news as if she's looking to him for that reassurance and she brushes that off because she wasn't. I thought that when Betty told him he'd continue to see the kids as much as he had before and that him not being there was what she wanted since he wasn't usually there was something that Don saw the truth in. The story wasn't written with the kids longing for Don to come and rescue them or Don figuring out that this is exactly what he wants/where he should be. To me it seemed like this was an important truth for Don, that he had to define himself as something other than the rescuer. Don demanded the kids with Sally. Then when Sally said no, he called Betty and re-demanded the kids. When Betty made her "when was the last time you saw them?" comment, yes, Don saw the truth there and IMO, felt huge guilt and self-loathing that he's hasn't been present enough and there's a consensus that he has to give up his hold on his own children even more. Don didn't want to fight Betty after Betty tearfully said that leaving the kids with William and Judy was her last dying wish and she can't spend her final days arguing about this. However, I didn't really see a thread where Don realized that he had to define himself as something other than the rescuer. Don still had a craving to be a rescuer- see his next scenes with Stephanie. Don still looked up at right the moment that Leonard described how he doesn't feel love from his family but they're trying but Leonard just can't recognize what "it" is. Then, Don had this impulse to step out of his zone to comfort Leonard. IMO, there's a big tragedy in Person to Person where Don's story and the kid's story makes them feel like puzzle pieces that who need each other to fit. Don was craving meaning and family and a chance to do something with his life. The kids were craving a healthy parental figure who loved them. Yes, it's up for the debate- but IMO, the finale gives me the inexorable feeling that these are puzzle pieces about to fit together. With this situation it's saying that Don can spend the entire run of the show having serious issues that keep him from being reliable with his family--he was not a pretty good 1960s divorced father that I remember. I don't think he was ever presented as being reliable. Things were always coming up. His problems were more than once explained as a problem he had as a person and not just an anomaly that happened in S6. (Many people at the time even in S4 he was a completely dreadful divorced father when he was single), Betty seems to consider his unreliability a habit, telling him she knows he's hoping to use the riots as a chance to get out of taking the kids for the weekend. I think that's around the same time Sally says she knew Don wouldn't go with them to the vigil. Or Megan saying she and the kids were all in the same boat. "Loving you is the worst way to get to you" applies to all of them. When he gets the news about Betty's cancer he's missed probably at least 2 weekends with the kids for a spontaneous trip because he felt like it. (I assume Don feels like Pete did at the end of S6 that no one will notice a difference if he's gone--but they do, as Pete learned.) In S4, Don had perfectly adequate visitation in Public Relations, bought them more Christmas presents than they asked for with Sally's "Dear Santa" letter indicating shared memories and stories, and Don made preliminary plans with Anna to take the kids to California in The Good News. The kids weren't mentioned in The Rejected. Don did screw up by having a date on his visitation weekend in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword- but he also defended Sally when Betty hit her and when Betty was already calling her a fast girl. Really, Betty could snit all she wants about whores watching the kids but it was a NURSE and Betty could bitch all she wants about Don's total lack of interest in Sally's issues, but Don was worrying about Sally and his performance as a father to Faye. I mean, Betty totally has her reasons to be bitter but IMO, it's part of a long list of when people unfairly talk shit about Don. I really feel like one needs to examine each "talk shit about Don" comment on its merits because many characters have their own understandable and less understandable to want to throw mud on Don. Don screwed up even more blacking out and not picking up the kids in Waldorf Stories. The kids weren't mentioned in The Suitcase. Then in The Summer Man, Don crashed Gene's birthday, fretted about Gene in his diary and on his date to Faye, and Don apparently spends enough time with his kids in Ossining that Carlton makes "that sad bastard" remarks. Don and Sally actually ended up making a pretty lovely evening and day out of her runaway trip to NY- except for when Don, with good intentions but crappy execution, tried getting Faye to make Sally OK with abiding by the custody arrangement instead of doing it himself. In that ep, Sally said "I didn't want to wait two weekends" like the visitation typically happens like clockwork. Then, Don bribed Sally with Beatles tickets in Hands and Knees, because he missed Sally last weekend also indicating that visitation is regular and a weekend absence from Sally is felt. The kids don't come up in Chinese Wall and Blowing Smoke. The Disneyland weekend in Tomorrowland was idyllic by "Don and his kids" standards, but marred by what a mistake Don/Megan turned out to be. I already diagrammed Don's relationship with his kids in S5 in the Don and His Women Thread. Actually, I don't think it's as rich a season in terms of these relationships- but it really paints that the kids came for regular visitation without many problems. IMO, Don was severely depressed and broken from the start of the series. However, he employed a lot of coping mechanisms to be functional and even, appear like a total Life Winner because there is a determination in him to do well in life even his inner soul would like to curl up in a fetal position or can't decide if he wants to ride the rails or throw himself on train tracks. In S4-5, Don manages to be a functional, divorced dad- but at points, where external events (the new divorce, Anna's incipient death) bears down on him, his inner sickness metastasized into a straight-up failure with his children ala back to back The Chrysanthemum and the Sword/Waldorf Stories. He also, even in the good times in S4-5, interacted with his kids on a surfacey level because he can't be himself with anyone but Anna. However, S6 was a specific life event where Don was pretty much DONE with rising above his internal issues or desires to put people at ease or live up to his recognized responsibilities. (Brought on by his issues with Megan, Lane's suicide which called back to Adam's suicide, Peggy leaving, and the fact that Don was always a ticking time bomb for a S6.) In a strange way, his outward behavior matched his inner anger and sadness more reliably and it got ugly. Ironically, one of the few bright spots was that Bobby could organically make Don deeply happy enough and Sally's plight with Grandma Ida could make Don deeply empathetic enough because he remembered what it like to be a child and blame yourself because an adult visited an evil, scary crime on you that Don could do something positive with authenticity. However, sure, other than that, Don wanted to glumly zone out in front of the TV and worry about Sylvia- not fetch his kids. Don wanted to depressively fold in on himself and Not Deal with Sally catching him and Sylvia. I did believe Betty's frustration in The Flood that Don had been skipping out on his visitation. Season 6 was the season where Don pointedly did NOT rise above his internal issues but just stayed bogged down where in a limited sense, the packaging matched what's inside. Megan can kind of bite me in that In Care Of scene. Megan was upset that Don wasn't going to go through with the plan to leave for California. I get why Megan was upset for Megan- but IMO, that plan was bad for the children. A summer in LA doesn't equal regular weekends and being in driving distance when other stuff comes up. So, Megan said the crappy thing that was actually on her mind with the "You just want to be here alone with your liquor, and your ex-wife and your screwed up kids" and then, you know, *listened to herself* and decided to take up their mantle or whatever. Megan had good reasons to be hurt in S6 (and she didn't even know about Betty and Sylvia)- but Don could have skated out hearing that entirely if he pursue the worse parenting option that Megan wanted. If he was going to actually change, I'd need to see it to believe it. I would never just assume he did it. The show itself doesn't even end with anything pointing in that direction. After the phone call with Betty Don's alone with his many issues and then he gets the idea for the Coke ad. It does point there. Don openly spent S7 longing for family and IMO, trying hard to hold onto Megan or his kids in the limited way he could. However, Megan was done with him and his kids were busy in their own lives. In the time in between Don's phone call with Betty and the Coke ad, Don gave up on his car racing project, tried reaching out to Stephanie but then she rebuffed him as Not Family, and had a genuine epiphany with Leonard that directly spoke to his issues recognizing love and giving love in a demonstrable way that doesn't make other people feel ignored. And the Coke song says that he wants to buy the world a home and furnish it with love. To me, all of this plus the desperate and pitiable scene with the kids makes me believe that he'll come back and eventually, get custody or a trial run of split custody to prove stability. But Don isn't being "pinned down" by McCann at all. He walked out in the middle of a meeting, disappeared for over a month, and now wants to waltz back into make one of the best ads in history despite Hobart tearing his hair out. If McCann wants Don's genius, they need to let him have his freedom. Hobart failed to pin him down to the amusement of everyone from SCDP. There's no reason whatsoever to think that Don wouldn't walk again the next time he felt antsy or bored. That's what he does. First, Don actually doesn't run because of boredom or even antsiness. I think Don literally runs long-distance out of fear of himself or real lurking external consequences (Nixon v. Kennedy, Hands and Knees, Seven Twenty Three, the proposed California move in In Care Of) or on a quest to find answers to solve depression (The Jet Set/The Mountain King, Lost Horizon). Second, we'll never know how Don treated McCann or how McCann treated Don. But really, Don went back to back to McCann and its world of boxed lunches, wrinkled shirt sleeve conference room tables of Creative Directors. That's a huge sign that Don went back, looking for stability on his terms. I can't picture S1-6 Don spending some time at McCann and then, going back. We have zero idea if Pete will like Witchita any more than Cos Cob and I've doubted whether Joan is well-suited to this brand-new one-woman production company that seems far afield from her expertise and work history. However, there's something to the fact that Don has been declining/scoffing at McCann since S1, saw the belly of the beast and hated it, but his final epiphany apparently took him back. Don really accepted Don Draper's responsibilities and station in life with any intimation that he'd go back to McCann to be an ad man. By contrast, taking his kids is by far the sweeter "pill" to swallow to a man seemingly looking ahead to fully inhabit his world and contracts even if it's also at McCann. Edited August 14, 2015 by Melancholy 1 Link to comment
sistermagpie August 14, 2015 Share August 14, 2015 (edited) In S4, Don had perfectly adequate visitation in Public Relations, bought them more Christmas presents than they asked for with Sally's "Dear Santa" letter indicating shared memories and stories, and Don made preliminary plans with Anna to take the kids to California in The Good News. Adequate is Don when things are going well, yes. Good 60s Dad is the attitude Henry describes himself as having--weekends with his daughter were sacrosanct and a reference to "so many trips to Playland"--iow, weekends arrange to focus on his kid that the kid can count on. This is the same kind of set up that's established with the Campbells in 7B. This is what everyone refers to as Don not doing throughout the show. It's always more fraught with him. He's never just Dad who's there for the kid's sake and gets something out of that. This is a different thing than saying that Don doesn't care about his kids, or has no relationship with them, or has a bad relationship with them or never shares stories with them or has never done anything with them at all, like plan trips because he wants them to meet Anna or taking them to Disneyland when he's taking a trip to California. If the show wanted to establish that Don was usually more like Henry described it would have done that. Instead it examines Don's anxieties about the whole thing as described to Faye and to Megan. The kids are pleasantly surprised when he joins them for things. Bobby and Sally ambush him for special time together. Don hires a (perfectly fine) babysitter during one of his weekends. The kids fall through the cracks in The Crash. Don suggests they shouldn't come one weekend. Don takes off during a birthday party. Don does work while the kids watch TV. Don takes off for a road trip for weeks. None of these things show him as a terrible father (I argued against that idea when people accused him of it) but I think they're obviously supposed to be leading up to those phone calls with Betty and Sally in Person to Person. Megan can kind of bite me in that In Care Of scene. Megan was upset that Don wasn't going to go through with the plan to leave for California. I get why Megan was upset for Megan- but IMO, that plan was bad for the children. Yes, Megan was upset at Don for letting her down, not thinking about the children. But if the plans were bad for the children then Don didn't care about that any more than Megan did. He was the one who originally planned to go and he changed his mind for reasons unrelated to the kids. It does point there. Don openly spent S7 longing for family and IMO, trying hard to hold onto Megan or his kids in the limited way he could. However, Megan was done with him and his kids were busy in their own lives. I don't understand what this is referring to. Don has three kids, one of whom has grown old enough to be more independent and one of whom is 7. To hold onto them in a limited way he simply needs to be there, reliably, and focus on them when they're together, something that throughout the show he's had trouble doing because of his issues. In the episode where Betty has cancer he's on a road trip. Don's longing for a family doesn't matter much if it's just about Don longing or wanting the kids to make him feel right--which is a pattern with Don and relationships. (I don't actually remember what the longing for a family stuff in S7 is referring to. Aren't the boys just there as always? He's in a bad place with Sally that he needs to talk out if he wants to make it better--and Sally winds up being the one that makes that happen rather than Don.) To me, all of this plus the desperate and pitiable scene with the kids makes me believe that he'll come back and eventually, get custody or a trial run of split custody to prove stability. It took me a second to figure out what the desperate and pitiable scene with the kids was. If it's the one where Sally teaches Bobby to make a sandwich that seemed pitiable due to the sad situation but not particularly desperate. The kids are being there for each other while the custodial parents are reeling from the cancer diagnosis. None of them are desperately needing Don in that moment. They're not talking about Don, and Don has not rushed to their side--he's out in California trying to learn how to accept himself. His epiphany leads him to the Coke ad, which has nothing to do with the kids. As JH says in that interview, his first step to accepting himself is "I'm an ad man." Not "I"m a father" or "I want to get full custody of my kids." Don isn't focusing on his kids as central to his identity and the kids aren't at all focusing on Don as central to their solutions. So I honestly don't get why I would read the ending as Don deciding to fight for a custody situation that he has never wanted and never said he wanted in a meaningful way. I thought the show thought Sally's and Betty's and Stephanie's dismissals of Don to be a good thing that kept him from going into that pattern and instead dealing with his own issues. Which led him to Coke--which echoes the one phone call he had where the woman on the other end told him his place WAS actually there. All those women told him he had a place in their lives, but the place Peggy described was more present. Second, we'll never know how Don treated McCann or how McCann treated Don. But really, Don went back to back to McCann and its world of boxed lunches, wrinkled shirt sleeve conference room tables of Creative Directors. And one of the most famous commercials of all time. He goes back for the work. We have zero idea if Pete will like Witchita any more than Cos Cob and I've doubted whether Joan is well-suited to this brand-new one-woman production company that seems far afield from her expertise and work history. Yeah, but we see Pete becoming an involved father, having a good relationship with Trudy, realizing he wants the home life with them, pursuing it and winning it. We see Joan being a good organizer, wanting respect at work, getting experience in more executive jobs, realizing she wants to run this company and being hard at work on it. The show ends with Don smiling and getting the idea for the Coke ad while his kids thousands of miles away taking care of each other and live out their last days with Betty. So that's more like if Joan's stories were more personal than work-focused the past few seasons (the kids have always been one of Don's focuses, of course, but not in terms of building towards him being their caretaker) and then she ended the show with a glimpse of her jetting off at Richard's side and saying this meant that she after that developed a desire to start her own business and did it. Why would I think she was doing that when the show chose to show me completely different things? Everything after the Coke moment on the hilltop is just fanfic either way, but the show told us Don was thinking about a commercial in his last moments and that he would go back to advertising and that was the end of his story. By contrast, taking his kids is by far the sweeter "pill" to swallow to a man seemingly looking ahead to fully inhabit his world and contracts even if it's also at McCann. That some viewers might consider it a sweeter pill doesn't mean that's where Don's headed or that the things that have prevented him from doing in the past will magically disappear. Don can very much fully inhabit his world without being a full-time custodial parent. Edited August 14, 2015 by sistermagpie 2 Link to comment
txhorns79 August 14, 2015 Share August 14, 2015 Don takes off for a road trip for weeks. I'd suggest that Don showed some maturity with the road trip, at least in that he kept in contact with his kids during that time and they had a general idea where he was. This was as opposed to the season 2 trip to California where he literally walked away from everything for three weeks, leaving everyone in the dark. However, I still believe that Betty was right not to want him to have the kids. He's just too unreliable. I still believe one of the most astute comments about Don came from Faye at the end of Season 4, that he only likes the beginning of things. That's his pattern with nearly everything. We see in Season 4, and again in Seasons 6/7, Don hits rock bottom, has his epiphany and tries to build himself back up. Link to comment
Melancholy August 14, 2015 Share August 14, 2015 (edited) Adequate is Don when things are going well, yes. Good 60s Dad is the attitude Henry describes himself as having--weekends with his daughter were sacrosanct and a reference to "so many trips to Playland"--iow, weekends arrange to focus on his kid that the kid can count on. This is the same kind of set up that's established with the Campbells in 7B. This is what everyone refers to as Don not doing throughout the show. It's always more fraught with him. He's never just Dad who's there for the kid's sake and gets something out of that. I had fantastic, focused parents who stayed married and raised me in the helicopter 1990s-2000s years. Only a few special weekends with them were doing these jamboree "buying out a toy store" 100 percent focused on Little Me events. I get that there's a dynamic of divorced-parent-guilt. But I can't even imagine some picturesque childhood where you're assured of some big outing and tons of presents every other weekend like it's your g-d given right. My divorced friends in school got some extra presents- but they also recounted split custody stays with their dads where they didn't do much. Most of my childhood weekends were spent attending to the business of life from chores to errands to my parents catching up on their work at home and I was expected to entertain myself with TV and books. By the way, I'd defend Betty and her GO WATCH TV along similar lines. It could be horrible ala when Sally was crying out for attention after Grandpa Gene's death and yes, Betty kind of over-used it. However, it was also true to life. Only off-screen parents like both Trudy and even 7B Pete or Henry, As He Envisioned Himself can be Mary Poppins and Bert 24/7. There's a lot of worth in different parenting styles- and Don had cause for his more reserved style where he did plan some outings (Macys, Disneyland, the Museum of Natural History, the Beatles, his childhood home, etc.) but he also had a lot of time where the kids were supposed to entertain themselves and if they wanted a conversation with him, he'd engage. Yes, he was too reserved and remote and sometimes, he just failed in S4 and more frequently in S6. However, he needed to modify his parenting style, not overhaul it or be cut out of keeping his kids because of it. Be that as it may, you get the parents you get. I wouldn't dream of saying that Betty should have had her custody rights stripped because she was harsh or she relied too much on the GO WATCH TV or GO TO BED or Bobby was sadly over-excited at having her on his field trip and actually having a conversation with her. Betty loved her kids, wanted them, and provided them a stable, good home. That's enough for her to keep them. I mean, Sally kind of wanted to fire Betty as her mother a number of times too and I saw Sally's point but Sally was wrong there. I kind of shrug at these arguments that there was a weekend where Don was working and the kids watched TV or there was another weekend where Don went to the office at 3:30 and said he'd be back for dinner but he got caught up in competing with Ginsberg or there was another ep where Don had a date during one of his visitation weekends. None of that adds up to solid reasons on why he shouldn't get custody of his own children. Much like Betty, I think Don was a flawed parent and he was even a bad parent in S6. However, I think they were OK for the time period and perfectly fit to raise children. Yes, Megan was upset at Don for letting her down, not thinking about the children. But if the plans were bad for the children then Don didn't care about that any more than Megan did. He was the one who originally planned to go and he changed his mind for reasons unrelated to the kids. Don originally planned to go- and then, realized that going to California was not the way to turn over a new leaf but instead, a selfish action where he was screwing over others to get his own change in scenery. IMO, the Hershey pitch, Don helping Ted protect his first marriage and relationship with Ted's kids, and then, Don being honest with his own children and spending Thanksgiving with them in the mirror-reverse of The Wheel driven by his efforts to be a better influence on Sally after she got suspended for drinking and using a fake ID are all connected. Still, this was all going on in Don's head. I was objecting to you saying that Don was obviously an unfit parent because Expert Witnesses like Megan criticized him. Megan's testimonies on Don's parenting frequently feel like cheap shots to me instead of informed unimpeachable observations that should contravene any of the love between Don and his kids that I see with my own two eyes. And that was the case here where Megan changed her mind in five seconds between criticizing Don for wanting stay there with his screwed up kids and calling his kids just more victims of him....and his new obstinacy about not going to California as Megan wanted. It took me a second to figure out what the desperate and pitiable scene with the kids was. If it's the one where Sally teaches Bobby to make a sandwich that seemed pitiable due to the sad situation but not particularly desperate. The kids are being there for each other while the custodial parents are reeling from the cancer diagnosis. None of them are desperately needing Don in that moment. The Francis house seemed desperate. Bobby knew that Betty was dying- but the grown-ups were so busy keeping the secret and acting like it was supposed to be a secret that Bobby was supposed to just sit on this knowledge waiting for a grown-up to talk to him. The house was a mess. Bobby started a fire when making dinner because he didn't know how- and he and Gene were lucky enough to get a cooked dinner because Sally happened to be back from boarding school at that time. Betty's incipient death would always be a tragedy that would make for some unhappy children as she was dying, but IMO, the Francis house just looked particularly disorganized and bereft of adults to help the children through a difficult time. IMO, the situation at the Francis house looked sick and pitiable in a way that Don's lapses with the date in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and working while the kids were in his apartment some times didn't. Don working while his kids read or watched TV or even Don taking a date to Benijana on the eve of Honda coming in felt somehow normal, although imperfect. The Person to Person scenario where Betty was visibly dying and decaying in every scene but there were no adults to comfort or talk to the children and Bobby had to figure out how to make dinner for himself and Gene when no one ever taught him did not feel normal. (As did Don taking speed, especially when his kids were in his apartment.) It felt like a harbinger of how these supposedly more stable Parental Contestants like Henry and William/Judy weren't getting off to a good start and Don shouldn't have been told stay away. I never really wanted to call Child Protective Services on Don's visitation (except for The Crash) but I wanted to call them on Henry in Person to Person. Yeah, but we see Pete becoming an involved father, having a good relationship with Trudy, realizing he wants the home life with them, pursuing it and winning it. We see Joan being a good organizer, wanting respect at work, getting experience in more executive jobs, realizing she wants to run this company and being hard at work on it. Prior to Person to Person, Don became a better father after his S6 nadir. He addressed his surfacey interactions with them by bringing them to his childhood home. He wrongly put up with Sally's boycott on visitation after Sylvia- but then, immediately took advantage of the first time that Sally came by to repair his relationship with her even if it meant apologizing or over-sharing or dealing with her being upset and contemptuous with him with no signs on when the unpleasantness would end. Before the road-trip, I got the impression that he went back to his S4 mode of regular biweekly visitation with the children but without Megan as a buffer but with more pedestrian involvement because he and Betty now had a truce where he could be at their house without rancor. Particularly since I think Don would make an adequate custodial parent in S4-5 if need be, I thought S7 made clear that Don course-corrected his poor S6 treatment of the kids and actually evolved to a point with Bobby and Sally where he felt better able to relate to them as developing older children and felt more at ease being honest with them than almost anyone else. Just because Person to Person didn't fridge Betty and took Don to a nadir where he was rejected by his kids to end up with a more conceptual ambiguous ending that could serve as a statement on Don's growth as well as on the social and capitalism ambiguities in the 1960s and the American Experience doesn't mean that it's some kind of definitive ending that precludes Don as a custodial parent. hey're not talking about Don, and Don has not rushed to their side--he's out in California trying to learn how to accept himself. His epiphany leads him to the Coke ad, which has nothing to do with the kids. As JH says in that interview, his first step to accepting himself is "I'm an ad man." Not "I"m a father" or "I want to get full custody of my kids." Don isn't focusing on his kids as central to his identity and the kids aren't at all focusing on Don as central to their solutions. Don was focusing on the kids in California. After Sally/Betty rejected him, he went wandering for a family substitute in Stephanie. Then, he tried to make Stephanie feel OK with the guilt she felt at abandoning her kid with "it'll get easier as you move forward" so he could feel the same about not being his kids' custodial parent- but Stephanie disagreed and Don felt the truth there. Don's guilt to Peggy focused on breaking his vows (which wrecked his family), scandalizing Sally, and making nothing of his life (which IMO, centered on him feeling rejected as a father.) Leonard got Don's attention when Leonard brought up that he feels like his family doesn't love him. Yes, Don didn't rush to them and actively disobeyed Betty's dying wishes to not mount a custody battle in her final days. I think Don *should* have (although as I argued earlier, I do like that the show didn't fridge Betty to give Don some unambiguous redemption). However, you know, the Coke ad came at the very end and we saw external visual clues around Esalen. However, the vast majority of Don's internal turmoil at Esalen was about his family. Yes, everything after the Coke commercial is fanfiction. However, imagining the custody of the children is fanfiction any way you slice it. Between Betty and Sally, they hadn't resolved whether the kids would go to Henry or Judy/William. But then, the other biological parent, Don, who actually would have ALL of the rights and decision-making power in the eyes of the law when Betty died never reversed his position that he wanted his own children to live with him and never said that the children should live with Henry or William/Judy. And of the Parental Contestants, I only heard Don ask that the children live with him. And yes, Don was the main character, swinging existential hero and/or anti-hero of the piece- but Don was the only one searching through S7 to resolve his "Best things in life are free", Accepting and Giving Love Refrigerator speech that IMO, basically indicates that children are a necessary part of the finished journey off-screen. Edited August 14, 2015 by Melancholy Link to comment
sistermagpie August 15, 2015 Share August 15, 2015 (edited) I had fantastic, focused parents who stayed married and raised me in the helicopter 1990s-2000s years. Only a few special weekends with them were doing these jamboree "buying out a toy store" 100 percent focused on Little Me events. I get that there's a dynamic of divorced-parent-guilt. Yeah, I get that too. It's exactly the argument I made when people claimed that Don was being a *bad* parent by not taking his kids to these activities. I agree with you that you don't need to do that kind of stuff. But that's not what the show is saying. It's pointing out that these divorced dads, having only limited time with their kids, arranged that time around their kids. They wanted that time to be special and focused on the two of them. Don, otoh, has far more time spent on times when he's not doing that, and having people telling him he's not doing that, and people pointing out that it's connected to his problems doing that with people in general. When you see your kids every other weekend it's not just guilt that makes you not tell the kids to entertain themselves while you catch up on work. That's why people noticed the milkshake scene so much. It really did show Don spending the day focused on his kids. And then he disappeared again and had weekly check-ins by phone instead. This has nothing to do with Don being expected to be Mary Poppins or never distracted, or saying that everybody else on the show is always perfect. It's about ignoring a pretty consistent subject on the show. I mean, you've described Henry, whose role on the show has mostly been simply to be the guy in who's there with Betty and the kids regularly, as glaringly absent in this last ep when he's got a pretty obvious excuse for being distracted, and suggesting that this means the kids need Don who is even more absent. The Francis house seemed desperate. Bobby knew that Betty was dying- but the grown-ups were so busy keeping the secret and acting like it was supposed to be a secret that Bobby was supposed to just sit on this knowledge waiting for a grown-up to talk to him. Well, yeah, but that's about adults dealing with genuinely traumatic situation and they get cut some slack for that. At least as much slack as Don when he's getting black out drunk and forgetting he's supposed to come get the kids. Just because Person to Person didn't fridge Betty and took Don to a nadir where he was rejected by his kids to end up with a more conceptual ambiguous ending that could serve as a statement on Don's growth as well as on the social and capitalism ambiguities in the 1960s and the American Experience doesn't mean that it's some kind of definitive ending that precludes Don as a custodial parent. Yeah, I agree. If we're talking about what happens after the show is over it's all speculation. If you imagine that later Don became a great single dad and full-time custodial parent etc. I'm not telling you you're wrong. I'm disagreeing that this is the implied point of Don's ending on the show. Other characters' situations with their kids are made pretty clear in Person-to-Person. The Draper kids' future situation is unknown. Them not being with Don is a valid possibility. It can't be ambiguous if we're all supposed to assume, as we usually are in 2015, that of course the fulfillment of any journey is your kids. But the ambiguity is in large part due to Don's past behavior--more than anything else. That seems related to what MW was saying in that last interview about how everyone has their ready-made excuses for why their life turned out in ways they weren't supposed to and they're often not true. The divorce and the kids having busy lives were not the reasons Sally and Betty didn't think of Don as the obvious choice (or any choice) for caretaker. You absent yourself and people learn to live without you. Can you work your way back in? Sure. But not in one dramatic swoop. It's not just Megan criticizing him that time and what does she know (she's just somebody who tried being his wife for a few years). Accepting and Giving Love Refrigerator speech that IMO, basically indicates that children are a necessary part of the finished journey off-screen. But the children and custody of the children are not the same thing. Maybe Don starting to heal himself will indeed mean he'll do that. But even then I think he'd have to work up to slowly. This show's always been pretty adamant about epiphanies having limited effectiveness. Whatever Don does in the future, MW thought the natural ending to Don's development up to that point was that he made the Coke commercial. And I think it was more focused on Don's problems of self-worth that didn't have a clear resolution. On this show, when women tell men no, they usually mean it and they're usually right. Sometimes the men then go away and work on it and get something more reasonable, but rarely are the women just wrong about their experience. In this case Betty and Sally are the two people who tried the most to get this from him and saw they had to accept him for what he was instead. Edited August 15, 2015 by sistermagpie 1 Link to comment
Melancholy August 15, 2015 Share August 15, 2015 (edited) Matt Weiner gave this March 2015 interview to The New Yorker- http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/filling-the-hole This is the excerpt where he talked about the show's parenting: Bad parenting. “Oh,” he said, crestfallen. “No. No. That certainly wasn’t the focus.” He frowned. “Pete and Trudy are trying to be good parents. Are Don and Betty bad parents? I don’t think Betty should have had kids, but I think Don is actually a pretty good dad, if you allow for his generation. That was a comment I’d get a lot—‘Don reminds me of my dad. I never know what he’s thinking.’ ” “Still picking, dear?” the waitress asked, and Weiner put a protective hand over the flattened chicken. He went on, “Look, there is definitely some bad parenting in the show, but there’s no drama in good parenting. And plenty of the bad-parenting moments didn’t come from me. You hear the stories in the writers’ room—they laugh when they tell them—and you realize, Oh, you became a writer because you told a joke when you were five and everybody stopped hitting you.” So, there you have it. At least, it was Matt Weiner's intention that Don was a good dad for his generation. Between that comment and between the Draper kids' weekends with Don reminding me somewhat of my own weekends with my parents which I never resented, I think Don was a good dad for his generation. I bet Henry was a good dad to his daughter too during the divorced years- but I have a hunch he overstated how much their weekends were sacrosanct and how he bought out Playland because he was aggressively putting himself on Betty's side against Don so Henry had the credibility to get to his core point which was to get Betty to let up on Sally. In 7B, we saw Pete and Tammy coming back from a very fun apple-picking outing but I see no evidence that every Sunday was like that for Pete and Tammy just as much as Don didn't take his kids to Disneyland or to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium for every visitation. The point was just that Pete was newly committed to spending his visitation with Tammy and taking an interest in her school, after his "You saw your daughter for the year" absence in LA. And Tammy enjoyed that and they built up their relationship from Tammy being afraid of Pete like a stranger in The Strategy to Tammy talking about Pete constantly through the week by The Milk and Honey Route. Which would be very normal to me. The MM set are particularly wealthy and Don/past S4 Pete are executives which means they can control their hours more than average workers- but they're still not immune from needing a large part of their weekend for work and pedestrian unfun activities and business networking and even catching up on sleep and zoning out time. I do think Don is generally a closed-off person who holds people at arms length- and that's a core point of his character. He's supposed to typify the Silent Generation- but at this extreme, iconoclastic level. His closed-offness keeps coming up because it's a function of every single part of his life- romantic, social, family- and it's writ large with his career and secret identity and non-stop string of affairs. This makes him uniquely dysfunctional because most Silent Generation guys had SOMEONE (usually a wife or set of buddies) that they could be open with. Not Don- he was secretive and limited with everyone except Anna. However, IMO, Don's relationship with his kids is more critiqued along the lines that mid 20th century men, in general, gave a lot of the child-rearing work to their wives and played a specific masculine role for their children even if that wasn't the one they were suited for or were best for the kids or in light of MW actually criticizing Betty's parenting the most in The New Yorker article, should have occurred with a problematic mother at the switch. At least, MW didn't intend to tell a story that Don was such a particularly unstable dad for his generation that his custody rights should be stripped and handed to Henry Francis. There's a balancing act where Don is a verrrry unique guy for better and for worse, but Don does embody an entire generation of men instead of just existing as his own bizarre "should lose his own rights as a biological father" individual. However, his problems aside, Weiner's comment that Don is a pretty good dad for his generation is completely borne out by how I read his scenes and pretty solid proof that Henry doesn't outstrip Don so much as a stable father that Henry deserves custody more or the kids need to be with Henry because Don isn't a focused father. And frankly, per my original point, I saw that borne out in how Sally and Betty approached the custody issue. Betty wanted the boys with a couple because she felt they needed a woman. Sally wanted the boys with Henry because Henry comes with their childhood home and neighborhood and Sally intended on being as much their feminine caretaker as possible. That's why people noticed the milkshake scene so much. It really did show Don spending the day focused on his kids. And then he disappeared again and had weekly check-ins by phone instead. It was unusual because (a) usually when the show steps out of its main advertising world for Don's relationship with his kids, it's to feature Sally and (b) it surprised me that Don and Betty's truce extended to him having a friendly invitation to stay at the house. I think we're meant to assume that Don's been visiting his sons off-screen. The scene indicates a jokey pattern: Don: The blender was broken at the diner.Betty: And you wouldn't dare deprive them of dessert. And after that scene, I didn't get the impression that Don disappeared to phone calls until he left on his trip. The show is an ensemble and focuses on the advertising. However, in just the three eps between New Business and Don's departure in Lost Horizon, Don took Sally and her friends out to dinner before she left on a long road trip and Don went to the Francis residence (again with the appearance of habit) to drive Sally back to school and see his sons. Well, yeah, but that's about adults dealing with genuinely traumatic situation and they get cut some slack for that. At least as much slack as Don when he's getting black out drunk and forgetting he's supposed to come get the kids. I agree with that- Henry and certainly Betty had more immediately sympathetic reasons for their chaos and any appearance that they checked out. (Although, I don't know if "sympathetic" is exactly the right word. I found Don's early S4 spiral, especially after learning that Anna was dying, and his lost weekend in S6 from the speed and rape flashbacks also really sympathetic. The Henry/Betty cancer storyline was more normal and relatable in its universal awfulness for anyone and it appeared like unique circumstances while Don's periodic spirals occur in his own big ball of weird.) I totally excuse Betty- even if I disagreed with her not telling the children or her choice in leaving the kids with William/Judy. However, Don had the excuse that there were other people there for the kids and the show didn't end at that point. Meanwhile with Person to Person, I'm stuck wondering if Henry would ever able to pull himself out his tragic depression at Betty dying or his habits to just be a "see you at dinner" parent and more importantly, I'm stuck wondering if Henry really loved and wanted the kids as a father or if he felt dutiful to them as his beloved Betty's life. Meanwhile, Judy and William are just giant question marks. All I read from them was (somewhat justified) irritation with Don and Betty back in the early '60s. Sure, Don's ability to be a full-time single parent is as much up to question as Henry's ability to fill even some of Betty's caretaker shoes. But at least with Don, I'm sure that he loves the kids and feels responsible to them as HIS KIDS, whether Betty is there or not. Which is correct- they are more Don's responsibility than anyone else's besides dying Betty. But the children and custody of the children are not the same thing. Maybe Don starting to heal himself will indeed mean he'll do that. But even then I think he'd have to work up to slowly. This show's always been pretty adamant about epiphanies having limited effectiveness. Don did have an epiphany in Person to Person but I read him as an OK father in S4-5 (I don't even know if I'd use Weiner's "good") who had a Terrible No Good Very Bad Year in S6 that still had parenting bright spots. Then in S7, IMO, Don was healing slowly and consistently for the entire season. I thought it was have been In Character for him to immediately head back in Person to Person to take his children. He actually somewhat disappointed my expectations by having his detour (although, it was understandable since Betty and Sally told him NOT to come back and Betty made it a dying wish of hers). Don ended up having an epiphany that I really believed in and got right to the heart of his issues- but IMO, I don't hang my belief that he went back and eventually took full custody just based on the last ten minutes of Person to Person. Edited August 15, 2015 by Melancholy 1 Link to comment
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