Mad Men, Season 4

See our Magnum Photos gallery on the Mad Men era. Subscribe to our Mad Men TV Club RSS feed.

OK, I'll send around the memo re: Harry Crane not being gay. My money is on Stan making a pass at Cosgrove during a Mountain Dew road show.

Getting back to Julia's question about Bethany's response to Betty. Like many of the commenters, I took Bethany's "Her!?" as an expression of surprise that Betty was an attractive woman who had not let her looks go. When Betty leaves the table with Henry, Bethany sits up straighter and looks at Don with renewed approval. She seems to be making up her mind that Don is a worthy catch, a decision she acts upon by kindly offering to make him more comfortable in the cab. (At the time, the back seats in cabs could be stifling hot. It was nice of Bethany to lean down and adjust the fan.)

And, fellow clubbers, I wonder also whether we were too harsh on Don's live-journaling. I was complaining earlier in the season that Don is too often a blank slate upon which the show hangs all kind of import and that we don't often have a sense of his thoughts. Well, now we get his thoughts, and I call them jejune and unworthy—"shitting on them," as Don would say. The monologue about a man's restless longing for more (spoken while picking up and then discarding the boxes) had a nice line: "We're ruined, because we get these things, and we wish for what we had." You can go swimming, but you'll always be borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Until next week,
Agger

Also in Slate

Ridiculous Parenting Tips From I Don't Know How She Does It
How Does a Rogue Trader Lose So Much Money Without Anyone Noticing?
The Bizarre Conservative Crusade Against the Girl Scouts
Joe McGinniss Defends the Most Outrageous Claims in His Sarah Palin Tell-All