Mad Men episode 4.05 -- running commentary

[yakalskovich]

• Awww we finally get to see little Baby Gene again. He's oddly cute in his unsmiling way. Of course, as people were firmly of the opinion that men and babies don't mix, he's not part of visitation rights.
• Until the very end of last season, I was firmly of the opinion that Betty was just bored, slightly depressed, and rather overtaxed with the kids. I pitied her, for being Don's wife. But ever since the discovery of Dick Whitman, she's been going from bad to worse. Entitled blonde bitch doesn't even describe it any more. She's well on her way to Dragon Lady.
• Oh damn Roger!!
• Kieran Shipka is really good at what she does, and consistently so. That little lady is absolutely amazing. I don't know if the entire series is 'the prelude to the therapy of Sally Draper in the seventies or eighties' as one blogger wrote, but she's certainly a very important connection between that era and our own. All the grownup characters are old people, or dead, by now. Don Draper was born in the mid-1920s! But Sally would be very alive and kicking in the normal course of events, and would have seen all those changes in society during her lifetime.
• Poor Henry has very bad luck at attempts of getting his rocks off, huh?
• Joan = Past Mistress of Devious! I really, really love her that way! And my inner!Urq so wants to kill off Dr. Douchenozzle...
  
• O hai Smitty!!!
• I thought they weren't filming anything?? Why is Peggy riding around on that red little motorbike-let on a sound stage??
• Uh-oh. They were right. The therapy of Sally Draper starts -- now?
  
• Betty smiles at the doll-house in the therapist's office because she thinks it's cute, never realising, as we'd do now, that it's for showing what's wrong and broken inside the child's family. One of the dolls will represent her, and Sally will show the doctor just how lost and mean her mother is.
  
• They fire people so easily -- why don't the kick out Mrs. Blankenship? She is a catastrophe, and plainly incompetent. She's costing them money.
  

Comments

[marchenland.livejournal.com]

Why is Peggy riding around on that red little motorbike-let on a sound stage??

So it's not quiet and it sounds like they are filming the bike in there.

[yakalskovich]

Oh, yes, that was it - they were pretending, and letting themselves be observed.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I like Miss Blankenship. Don's getting the secretary he's earned. I don't think she's incompetent, I think she takes no crap and is going a bit deaf. I also suspect she changed Roger's diapers when he was a baby, so she has no fear of ANYONE in that office.

[yakalskovich]

She almost failed to deliver the gift from the Honda people. And she hollered loudly about 'Your daughter's therapist' through the whole office.

That's both incompetent by my book.