Be interesting to see what they do with 1964 and the arrival of the Beatles.
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There will be mentions of the Beatles undoubtedly, but because Apple Corps doesn't allow their recordings in movies, TV shows, or non-Beatles compilations, we definitely won't hear them.
Apple Corps controls the actual recordings, but not the publishing rights, which means we could hear a cover-band doing essentially identical versions of some of the songs. "It's not the Beatles, but an incredible simulation!" Beatlemania, anyone?

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Since they usually skip periods of time between seasons, I think the whole February 1964 British invasion won't even be shown on the series. Though I guess The Beatles were still popular after their appearance on Ed Sullivan. 
Everything I wanted. Just nailed all the points, got Don & Roger back together, Don finds comfort in starting and doing something on his own, and they become mavericks. I LOVED it. Now we get to see how many others follow suit. And it's great seeing them chose Pete over Cosgrove.. pete got his reward after all, as he & Trudy show again why they may have the best relationship out of the bunch. Great stuff.
Don and Peggy's scenes were right on the nose. Great line with "I'll spend the rest of my life trying to hire you." ranks up with "You had me at "Hello"". Heh.
Don knows what it was like to lose a father at a young age, and the impact of a divorce would produce similar feelings for his own children. Heartbreaking stuff.
Glad they found a way to bring Joan back.
Trudy cracked me up when she was eavesdropping and asked Pete to come talk to her during the pitch. Good way to break the tension.
"Peggy, can you get me some coffee?" "No." LOL!
You have to love that Betsy kicks him out of his house, only to leave the kids with the nanny for six weeks as she rides the plane to Reno with her new man Francis. :)
The entire thing was great.
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Duck is at Grey, a major firm but not nearly the size of McCann. You can bet he'll be after Peggy with renewed intensity.
It makes a certain kind of sense. After all, Don won't be there during the day to take care of them -- even less so now, given developments at work. Best to make a clean break and get the kids accustomed to his absence.
What it really highlights is how screwed up divorce law was until not so long ago.
Edited by Michael Reuben - 11/9/09 at 7:50am
Terrific finale.
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Every professional organization needs a guy like Pryce. Otherwise you think you're doing great, but one day you turn around and find you're broke, because expenses have eaten up your profits. But I agree that it's rare for someone in that capacity to get his name on the door. Pryce recognized his moment, and he took it.
Edited by Michael Reuben - 3/23/10 at 11:26am
I know. What woman wouldn't want to be with a man who not only chronically and casually cheats on her, has lied to her for their entire marriage about his past, and whose very identity is fake, but also a man whose exceptional ability to create fiction is very real and the foundation of his very successful career. Only "immature spoiled little child" would reject something like that for good, after giving it a second chance when she first realized who she married.
Man, I gotta say that evidently some things haven't changed as much as we think. ;-)
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Maybe I'm alone here, but I think Betty Draper's story just got more interesting.
First of all, I disagree that she doesn't know what she wants. She does: a husband who's faithful and values her as a person, not a possession. She's finally realized why the man she married can't ever be that, because he's play-acting at being the man who married her. (It's Dick Whitman who's always chasing after dark-haired, slightly bohemian women, not Don Draper.) She's been acting unsure, because, as the evidence keeps piling up that her husband can't be what she wants, she's felt more and more trapped.
But she's about to repeat history. She's about to marry a man she scarcely knows, and she going to do it without taking anything from Don, so that she and her children will be completely dependent on the new husband (Henry Francis). She'd better hope that he's everything she expects (which no one ever is), because she'll be stuck with him. Watching her learn to lie in the bed she's just made should present interesting possibilities for drama.
Me too. I think the "problem" with her character is that her remoteness, perhaps iciness even, makes it hard to relate to her on a gut level. She is far from my favorite character, and I doubt she will be winning any audience popularity polls.
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I know it sounds strange, but that isn't a problem for me. She's part of an entire generation that was raised to believe the world works a certain way and is finding out it works very differently. I'm not just talking about a sheltered daddy's girl (which she certainly was), but whole segments of the population. I don't think it's accidental, as matter of dramatic expression, that Betty's moment of decision occurs immediately after the Kennedy assassination, which was a line of demarcation in so many ways that I can't begin to count them.
Edited by Michael Reuben - 3/20/10 at 8:13am

Maybe I'm alone here, but I think Betty Draper's story just got more interesting.
First of all, I disagree that she doesn't know what she wants. She does: a husband who's faithful and values her as a person, not a possession. She's finally realized why the man she married can't ever be that, because he's play-acting at being the man who married her. (It's Dick Whitman who's always chasing after dark-haired, slightly bohemian women, not Don Draper.) She's been acting unsure, because, as the evidence keeps piling up that her husband can't be what she wants, she's felt more and more trapped.
But she's about to repeat history. She's about to marry a man she scarcely knows, and she going to do it without taking anything from Don, so that she and her children will be completely dependent on the new husband (Henry Francis). She'd better hope that he's everything she expects (which no one ever is), because she'll be stuck with him. Watching her learn to lie in the bed she's just made should present interesting possibilities for drama.
I think you assign too many good motives to Betsy. Betsy has always flirted with straying from her marriage. She flirted with the boy at the stable, she had an affair in the bar.. she had considered leaving Don repeatedly before this, only to be won over with big gifts, trips, etc.
In the end, she's leaving Don not because of the lie. She was breaking into the drawer to give her a reason to blow up the marriage, she wanted out long before she knew the lie. The lie was simply the convenience to allow her to feel justified in doing it, to give her the moral high ground. The moment she met Francis, and knew he was enamored with her, she was enchanted. This was her chance to move up the social hierarchy. Don had been relegated to another cog inside of PPL. He had been made into Conrad Hilton's whipping boy.. he wasn't the champion of his own ship anymore. He didn't offer her the chance at power and forward movement... he would be where he was.
Meanwhile, Francis offered her all the things she wanted. Political clout and power. Old money. She was unsure where Don was heading so she bailed. The moment things started to go south with Connie, her plot to get out was full speed ahead.
Now, with Francis, you're right.. interesting drama lies ahead. She may find Francis is less accepting of her capricious parenting methods then Don was. She doesn't have any idea right now.

I know. What woman wouldn't want to be with a man who not only chronically and casually cheats on her, has lied to her for their entire marriage about his past, and whose very identity is fake, but also a man whose exceptional ability to create fiction is very real and the foundation of his very successful career. Only "immature spoiled little child" would reject something like that for good, after giving it a second chance when she first realized who she married.
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I think you assign too many good motives to Betsy. Betsy has always flirted with straying from her marriage. She flirted with the boy at the stable, she had an affair in the bar.. she had considered leaving Don repeatedly before this, only to be won over with big gifts, trips, etc.
In the end, she's leaving Don not because of the lie. She was breaking into the drawer to give her a reason to blow up the marriage, she wanted out long before she knew the lie. The lie was simply the convenience to allow her to feel justified in doing it, to give her the moral high ground. The moment she met Francis, and knew he was enamored with her, she was enchanted. This was her chance to move up the social hierarchy. Don had been relegated to another cog inside of PPL. He had been made into Conrad Hilton's whipping boy.. he wasn't the champion of his own ship anymore. He didn't offer her the chance at power and forward movement... he would be where he was.
Meanwhile, Francis offered her all the things she wanted. Political clout and power. Old money. She was unsure where Don was heading so she bailed. The moment things started to go south with Connie, her plot to get out was full speed ahead.
We are not watching the same show.
When in the first season did Betty Draper "flirt with straying from her marriage"? Her discontent began when she discovered, in the final episode of season 1, that her "therapy" was really just a pretext for Don to spy on her. That was when she began to realize that she was a possession to be managed, not a partner in a marriage of equals. The flirtation with the younger man (hardly a "boy") at the stable followed after that in season 2, and it was just that: a flirtation.
As for the anonymous one-time encounter in the final episode of season 2, calling it an "affair" stretches the meaning of the term beyond recognition. And let's consider the circumstances. By that point, she was certain that Don was having an affair with Bobbie Barrett (which he was), and that this wasn't the first time. He'd also pulled his California disappearing act. And she'd just discovered that she was pregnant again, thereby making it a particularly difficult time to proceed with seeking a divorce (if one makes the correct historical adjustments). That very uncharacteristic fling was an act of rebellion, a giant "fuck you!" to her faithless husband (and January Jones reportedly got huge fan mail from the female viewership after that episode aired).
"She was breaking into the drawer to give her a reason to blow up the marriage"? If that was her motive, she'd hire a P.I. to tail her husband. The simpler explanation is that she was tired of being lied to. Breaking into the drawer was a continuation of her opening the phone bill at the end of season 1. I'm not assigning Betty a "good" motive or a "bad" motive; I'm just identifying the obvious motive. And how does Betty know what's happening with Hilton or where Don's career is heading? It's not as if he actually talks to her about anything.
Finally, how do we know that Henry Francis is "old money"? And when has Betty ever shown any interest in power or political clout? (The reservoir issue was something she stumbled into.) Her entire focus is and always has been on her private life.
Go back to Season 2 and look at what Betty went through before finally kicking Don out of the house. How she knew for fact that he was cheating, looked everywhere for evidence without success, and how he, knowing how much he was hurting her, would stand there, and not only lie (that's normal enough for anyone in that situation), but do it in the most sneering, patronizing, condescending and contemptuous way (paraphrasing) "YOU are the problem, not me; now go get some rest".
There is an exchange which perfectly sums it up in one of those S2 episodes, when she spent the whole day going through his stuff and found nothing. She told him that when he came home, and then she said: "Why are you doing this to me? I would never do this to you." I found that utterly heartbreaking: She was not asking why he was cheating on her. She was asking why he could still stand there denying her the release of vindication for what they both knew was true. At that point, it was no longer the adultery, it was Don's (necessary) cruelty in the face of suffering he caused.
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I guess we perceive this totally differently. You're moment wehre she said "Why aer you doing this to me? I would never do this to you?" framed it to me as though she was so dishonest she was holding Don to a standard completely different then her own. After all, by the time this conversation occurred, we had several rumors of her having affairs, and then, within that episode if memory serves, she followed through in full view, nailing a random guy in a bar.
I guess I saw that situation totally differently. My wife had a much more negative view of Betty then I did. I'm not saying she's a gold digger, Francis doesn't have more money necessarily then Don. But he has prestige. He comes from a better "lineage", which she now knows Don doesn't have.
Betty's cruel and somewhat demented behavior toward her kids, open flirting and nailing of strays doesn't necessarily make her white as the driven snow.
What I found more telling about that scene wasn't that Don had done something terrible and lied about it. It was that Betty was putting forward a crazily hypocritical standard on him, in light of all her actions the past seasons, which she didn't tell him. It was kind of pot-kettle-black "I'd never do this to you" except she did just that all season long.
Combine that up with her behavior toward her own kids.. and think that's going to improve with Don out of the picture? Now they will be the kids of the man she regrets.. more reason to neglect them and treat them badly.
Yeah, I have no sympathy at all for Betty. Don may sleep around. But I never watched eps where he grabbed the hypocritical perch while treating his kids like crap.
Child abusers are pretty low on my list of those who need sympathy. I mean, I guess locking your kids in the closets, slamming doors at them, and berating them ...
I Love January Jones in the role. I think it's difficult to play such a polarizing figure. This isn't saying I think Don's an angel. I think he too is a man of incredible faults who has been a douchebag off and on. Thing about Don, though, is we keep seeing redeeming acts of charity... bailing Peggy out, providing for the man who's life he assumed, even moments where he works with his kids while Betty roles her eyes and dissapears.
Just me. I understand how others feel differently. But she's a great character I love to hate. :)
Last 2 episodes were really great. I watched the last 3 just now back to back and the final 2 made for a couple great hours of television.
oh yea, and Petes wife is simply beautiful. What kind of whack job would cheat on her?
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You've got to be kidding. Don lives on the hypocritical perch. For all of the first two seasons, and much of the third, he was a hypocrite every time he set foot in that house. And as for treating his kids like crap, again we're watching different shows. I'd rather have Betty as a mother than Don as a father. He's hardly there, and when he is, he barely pays attention to his kids. That was not uncommon for the era, but that doesn't make it admirable.
So now Betty's a child abuser because she disciplines her kids in ways that were fairly common at the time (and may still be, for all I know)? It's interesting when people are willing to make the proper "period" adjustments for some characters' behavior but not for others.
Toward everyone except the people to whom he most owes it: his own family. Because they're really not his family, but rather a bunch of possessions he picked up along the way of creating an alternate identity. His real family, as he's now come to realize, lives in the memories that kept flashing back to him throughout season 3, and those are the emotional sources that fuel him in everything he does with any genuine passion -- including leading Sterling, Cooper and Price in their charge out the agency doors. All this makes him a fascinating character, but a shit for a husband.
You've got to be kidding. Don lives on the hypocritical perch. For all of the first two seasons, and much of the third, he was a hypocrite every time he set foot in that house. And as for treating his kids like crap, again we're watching different shows. I'd rather have Betty as a mother than Don as a father. He's hardly there, and when he is, he barely pays attention to his kids. That was not uncommon for the era, but that doesn't make it admirable.
I'm not sure how you see this.. hypocritical for walking into his own house? Because he had an affair? I guess I don't see it. Meanwhile, Betty kept up affairs of sorts, lied openly about them, and then used her faked chastity as a means to berate Don "I'd never do this to you.." as Holadem noted, except she did EXACTLY that for the first two season.. as far as 'barely pays attention to his kids' are we also watching different shows?
Repeatedly Betsy called for the harshest punishments, and Don refused. When she asked him to take a belt to the kid, he refused, and gave her the story of how he was beaten as a kid, and it accomplished nothing, and he wouldn't be hated by his own kids. Let's remember these fine moments:
Bobby plays with and breaks household items. In a huff, Betsy repeatedly berates the kid and hauls him off to the hospital for a minor burn at one point, because he "can't deal" with her daughter, who then goes to work with Don. Later, when Bobby plays with a toy at dinner, Betsy demands he starts beating the kids. Don explains he doesn't believe in it, because all that happened to him was that he wanted to "kill his own father" for beating him.
The message doesn't at all sink in on Betsy, who then complains to her therapist that Don's a big wuss for not beating the kids. (S1). And Betsy's reactions got continuously weirder.. in season 1, she used her own daughter's riding lessons as an excuse to get close and flirt with a fellow jockey.
So, as far as hypocrisy, it cuts both ways. If being a hypocrit is stepping foot in the house while you're cheating, Betsy has been guilty from the first few episodes in the show, and her other baggage is far more disturbing to me.
Now, if the argument is, "he's a hypocrit for living as Don Draper, not Dick Whitman".. I don't see any hypocrisy there at all. He never espoused the virtues of living one's own identity, so hard to be hypocritical on that issue.. it just is what it is.
So now Betty's a child abuser because she disciplines her kids in ways that were fairly common at the time (and may still be, for all I know)? It's interesting when people are willing to make the proper "period" adjustments for some characters' behavior but not for others.
No, no matter what the time period, some behavior is repugnant. What Don did in assuming an identity is a sad story that has problems; then again, no physical person was hurt and the widow was taken care of... so I don't hold that against him in any way. Don's affairs.. again, not his brightest spot.. but then again, he never went using some sort of measuring stick to chastise Betsy "I'd never do that to you" while he was doing it.. she did that.
As far as being away from the kids/etc.. um, let's remember, outside of him being the defender of the kids in several instances, he also was the only one paying enough attention to the kids to realize their daughter was having a difficult time with death (Grandpa) and the naming of the kid was creeping her out. More then that, he tried to offer the kid solace while Betsy went batshit on the kid and just blew up on her.
Toward everyone except the people to whom he most owes it: his own family. Because they're really not his family, but rather a bunch of possessions he picked up along the way of creating an alternate identity. His real family, as he's now come to realize, lives in the memories that kept flashing back to him throughout season 3, and those are the emotional sources that fuel him in everything he does with any genuine passion -- including leading Sterling, Cooper and Price in their charge out the agency doors. All this makes him a fascinating character, but a shit for a husband.
Hmm. Again, I understand the viewpoint that he's a womanizer. Then again, you can find tons of men through history who were womanizers. I don't see a lot of people going "that scumbag JFK, what a womanizer". As far as the though "they aren't his family" I guess I always see Betty as having that viewpoint. She has treated her kids as complete trophies from Season 1. They are a nuisance to be fobbed off on a nanny unless she needs them to get her close to a man or needs to vent frustration. When her kids have needed serious help, I can't think of an episode where they have run to Betsy. Bobby having trouble with sleeping and anger. Does he talk to Betsy? No, because she refuses to talk to him.
I agree with the "shit of a husband" bit.. I'm not going to encourage what Don has done over the past three seasons.. but we paint far too rosey of an image of Betsy to make Don a scumbag.
Betsy's hitched her wagon now.. and it will be interesting where it goes.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on how we see the Draper marriage ;)
The Kennedy assassination is reverberating throughout these characters' lives. Things that they recently thought they could never do now seem more accessible. The world has changed, and characters seem to be saying "Screw it; the world sucks and I'm going to break through this wall I thought was there." Betty leaving Don. Don, Roger and the others starting a new agency. Lane taking matters into his own hands and allowing the creation of the new firm. And so on.
This is a tremendous series, easily on a par with the Sopranos as one of the very best things to come to the small screen.
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I'm not sure how you see this.. hypocritical for walking into his own house? Because he had an affair?
You keep trying to limit it to the womanizing, which is only a symptom. I'm talking about the lying and the fact that he's never really been present for either the marriage or the family, a fact that even Don himself has come to realize. The hypocrisy is playing Don Draper, husband and father, when that's no more real than an ad campaign he's constructed to sell a product.
Quote:

Now, if the argument is, "he's a hypocrit for living as Don Draper, not Dick Whitman".. I don't see any hypocrisy there at all. He never espoused the virtues of living one's own identity, so hard to be hypocritical on that issue.. it just is what it is.
Well there we have it. I find that attitude more disturbing than any behavior exhibited by Betty Draper in the show's three seasons.
Question: You keep referring to Betty's "affairs of sorts". What exactly are you talking about? What are you trying to equate with Don's multiple prowlings? I think it would be interesting to flesh out the double standard here.
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