Hornbacher might have watched Lang's M and/or Eisenstein’s Strike before this episode.

Weirdo episode. I didnt get that it was the same story repeating until after Roger's arc was over (I am dumb).

I liked Peggy's storyline, but I didnt like the cinema scene. Peggy just doesnt strike me as the handjob-to-random-stranger-in-public-place giver type of girl. It just seemed a bit out of character. I liked that she got smokes, weed & alcohol. But the HJ seemed like it was there just to shock us or something. Just didnt do it for me.

Roger's storyline was fun, but it's pretty clear that it's just to clear the path to the way more red/Roger's storyline to come. They cleared Joan's husband last week, now Roger's wife. I feel like last week the reason was more elaborated. They couldve done more with this.

Don's storyline is kinda confusing. They seem to build a love/hate relationship between him & Megane that can be very intresting. It's been twice now (first time was the cleaning angry sex after Don's party) that they do this. I really think they can build something good on that. I didnt like that they acted as if everything was normal when they arrived at work, but after some thinking, I like it a lot.

Finally we might have Don do some work and be awesome again (I mean, he always is, but I loved when he presented the work to the clients in early seasons). This season has been light workwise, I can't wait for Don to get back into it.

I thought the diner was a direct reference to Pulp Fiction. All I could think of during this episode was "22 short stories about Springfield"

When Peggy starts the handjob, the line on the movie is something like "He suffered all the agony of a parent of a teenage daughter out on her first date".

Fantastic episode, and a really bad day for SCDP.

Maybe I'm imagining wrong, but didn't she do something along these lines in an earlier season (not HJ-level, but in the ballpark)?

Fsoyars,
I only have minor disagreements with these criticisms, like I didn't care about Roger/Jane, but was still touched by that moment of honesty they had while tripping. However this is not an episode that is great because of where the pieces moved on the board, in fact I am little worried about where some of the pieces ended up, so much so that my infallible trust in Weiner has slightly wavered. It's about how they got there, I was on the edge of my seat for the whole episode and wildly entertained. This episode was full of so many set pieces, that it's hard to have the big character/plot changes that one would expect from a mindblowing episode of tv.

Peggy is a slut. Not surprising behavior at all.

amazing ep , really heavy episode with a ton to digest . will have to watch a few times especially the conversations at the dinner table on "truth"

i really liked the whole whats real / whats not real ...what is the "truth" theme of the whole episode . and when the characters where hit w/ the "reality" of the situation it kind of hit them like a brick wall , (bert cooper telling don the truth , peggy hearing ginsbergs martian story , roger realizing he needs to leave jane

Obviously, Peggy has changed over the years. In the beginning of the show she slept with an engaged man who basically insulted her when they first met. She slept with Pete again, this time in his office, even after he had gotten married and had been rude to her at times. She gave her baby away. She impulsively says what's on her mind even if it's not the optimal thing to say. She had just gotten in a fight with her boyfriend, who felt disappointed in her attitude and participation in their relationship. Then she got kicked off the business because when the client said her idea was very sentimental and that she had not figured out what he wanted, she got oversensitive and told him off.

Maybe it's out of character, probably not though. Is it unbelievable that she would do something out of character after going through what she did?

I haven't caught up on the thread, but my quick first impressions were that the Don and Megan stuff in the second half was a bit too melodramatic for me. We all can agree this show is great overall, but in all honesty it felt like the second half of the episode was pulled from a typical network drama or....gasp....even a Lifetime movie. The rest of the episode was decent. I liked the Roger stuff, and I think there are a lot of interesting angles that can be pursued with the Ginsberg character revelation.

when roger called the proffesor at the dinner table "leary" was he joking or are we supposed to believe that he was timothy leary ?

I thought part of this episode was Peggy turning into Don, Don into Roger, and Roger into urt, at least somewhat on a professional level.

Come on. Let's talk like adults here.

Peggy has moments like this, we've seen them before. They didn't manifest like this, but she's obviously had other instances of letting herself go.

Timothy Leary:

A lot of the stuff I have read is talking about Peggy attempting and failing to become Don, in his absence. Don is her role model/mentor, but she can't emulate him because of her gender. Last week a lot of the discussion was about Pete turning into Ossining-Don, but being unable to engender the respect Don gets. Things really don't look good for Pete/Peggy's bastard (not just a narrative conceit iyam) son.

I do think it is too melodramatic in a bubble, but Don is an emotional wreck and the only sleep he had in the past 24 hours was napping in the HoJo. It makes sense that he would act as unhinged as he did and that Megan would fear him as much as she did.

Not so sure if it's the gender or she just isn't as good of a salesman. The first meetings with the Heintz people was set up as Don would command the client to buy the pitch, in the good days. She tried the hammer approach and it blew up in her face, it wasn't done with panache.

It isn't a failing for Peggy that she can't Draper the clients into submission, she shouldn't have to. Very telling how far things have fallen that Don's only thought about the matter was "it makes no difference if I'm sitting there."

Ken also scoring big with his smooth line, "...I don't know, can you?"

also I thought Mr. Heinz was going to slap Peggy for a minute there.

cres,
She can't try the hammer approach because she is a woman.

a lot to process here -

i don't think anyone mentioned how brutal what megan said to don was - there was that shot of him clinging to her after he's returned to the apartment.

'sometimes i think she knows me more than you' - jane says this, but it applies to megan too - megan doesn't realize that don would inevitably come back. he wants the illusion of power in the relationship.

bert is the only person who could say what he said to don. he's getting pressure from his wife and his bosses to perform better at work - will we see a draper moment soon? it's funny to see how peggy's use of the draper moment didn't work - the heinz guy just found it emotionally manipulative.

I was also really struck by how Don allowed his "dirty laundry" to be exposed in public by sitting frantic and disheveled in HoJo's waiting in vain for Megan to return and even speaking honestly about the situation with the waitress and trooper. This is a completely different Don Draper than the beginning of the series who would have bottled everything up, insisted everything was fine to anyone who broached the subject and most likely just waited in the motel room.

I also had a very wierd sense upon the end of the episode that the opening animated sequence we see every week is really how things will end for Don and he'll be tossing himself out a window in the last episode or two. I have absolutely nothing to base this on so I am probably 100% wrong.

While checking comments on hitfix/avclub to see if that was supposed to be Timothy Leary or not (consesus seems to be no). I stumbled upon this comment, which I really like

Posted by one of my Facebook friends:

"This will go down as one of my favorite Mad Men episodes of all time.

I keep hearing people complain about wanting the old Don back. Well, so does everyone at SCDP. In the season opener, Peggy said, “I don’t recognize that man.” Don’s in his far away place — the land of Newlywed Bliss. As Bert Cooper said, he’s “been on love leave.” We like Don most when he’s smoking, drinking, philandering and conquering the world of advertising. We think he has a ***** in his armor when he shows his vulnerability where Megan’s concerned, and we take it out on her.

No one likes Megan because she has turned Don into this new person that no one recognizes. But Megan is not Betty, a kept woman who was content to be Mrs. Draper the homemaker. A little girl who cannot make it in the world alone (like the movie said of the animals). Megan has her own identity and her own mind. She is a younger generation. She gets satisfaction from her work. Most of all, she has her own money, which of course allows her the freedoms that most women didn’t have at the time. Megan’s far away place is Don’s world, which is totally foreign to her generation’s way of thinking.

And speaking of Betty (unseen in this episode), those who think Don and Betty had chemistry are off their rockers. Sure, Betty is from the same old school that Don is… he commands and she obeys, and they both like it that way. But obviously that was not fulfilling for Don as demonstrated by his cheating ways. Megan’s being a challenge has kept Don faithful up to now.

Roger Sterling’s far away place is the Land of LSD. As much as it has altered his mind, it has freed him from his bondage with Jane and will, perhaps focus him back to relevancy within SCDP.

With each episode, Peggy has evolved into the person she wanted to be, which looks a lot like the old Don. She smokes. She drinks. She’s independent. She’s (more and more) respected. And she has sex on speed dial. This is her far away place since few women achieved this in 1966. Of course, her dilemma is how having it all has made it harder for her to find love.

The layers of knowledge, experience and position are so rich in Mad Men. Megan wants to be Peggy. Peggy (and Pete) wants to be Don. Don wants to be Roger. And Roger wants to be happy. Ironically enough, Roger is probably closest to achieving his dream. Thanks to acid "