sit-in

Description

IS DRAPER GETTING PREDICTABLE? Last week on our show, SteelWheel called that Don would be visiting Anna Draper, and how obvious was it to everyone that he'd try to hit on young Stephanie when he drove her home. Don, who once was such a cagey and unpredictable guy in the early seasons, has now grown all too familiar, and we can start to guess what his patterns of behavior will be. Is this evidence of Don just being really well-realized by Matt Weiner and Jon Hamm, so lifelike that we have now "gotten to know him" over 4 years? Or is the show just starting to run its course and get more predictable? HOLIDAYS Every episode of this season so far has centered around a holiday -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, now New Years. In part, the holidays bring out the saddest and most poignant aspects of Don's current predicament. It's never sadder to have lost your family than at those times of year we're expected to be with our families. But I'd also note how Don's entire experience -- and the reality of each episode -- runs counter to the holiday that's actually being celebrated: COUNTER-CULTURE For the first time, the counter-culture really invaded last night's entire episode. (The trips to LA always remind us that there's a lot more going on in the early '60s in America than we're seeing in button-down establishment Manhattan...) There were numerous little touchstones -- Berkeley sit-in references, smoking "grass," "House of the Rising Sun," and the episode even opened with talk of Joan's use of birth control and prior abortions. Don doesn't really seem all that hostile to the ideas of the counter-culture, at least compared to most of his SDCP colleagues. He likes free love, he smokes pot, he laughs at the comedian's gay jokes, he digs foreign movies, and we all remember that he was against Sterling Cooper taking on the Nixon account back in 1960. Then we get to why he's really hostile towards the young people...their anti-consumerism. Don has based his worldview around the idea that our possessions define us, and Stephanie's rant that advertising is "pollution" and that a world where we don't all spend our lives "buying things" is possible, is a direct threat to Don's entire notion of who he is and what he does. Is this a portent of things to come? Is Don's experiences returning to his "Dick" personality really just another way of seeing the same argument. The suits and the job and the possessions don't really make him more authentically "Don Draper." In fact, what's keeping him as "Don Draper" at all? The kids? Will he ever fully be able to let go of Don Draper and just become the overall happier and more relaxed Dick Whitman? JOAN AND GREG Greg has been one of the series' most consistent boogeymen. He's a rapist, a bully, a professional disappointment, a whiner...someone who we've all come to feel is very unworthy of Joan. And yet this episode seemed to depict him as not all bad, and even competent at his job. (Was Joan's insistence on "doctor-medical ethics" an indication that even she didn't trust him to clean up her wound?) Was this meant to be a redemptive episode for Greg? We feel sympathy for him being obviously not emotionally prepared to go to Vietnam, we see him caring for his wife in a way that's largely unfamiliar, we get a feeling for how good he must be with young patients...Why redeem this guy, and why do it now? Is it so we don't feel as put off when he and Joan actually do start planning a family? Are they setting us up for some big, momentous shift in his and Joan's relationship?