Don: We can’t start over; we just started.

Peggy: You always say if you don’t like what they’re saying about you, change the conversation.

Don:  To what? What they’re saying about us is true.

Of course, truth is just a starting point, especially if you’re Don Draper.  And when someone’s been blowing smoke up your ads, the only appropriate response is to blow it right back up theirs. Having been played by Marlboro into thinking they had a chance at a juicy new product, a cigarette aimed at women, all of SCDP’s partners are infuriated, but only Don seeks revenge, writing a full-page ad for the New York Times renouncing all work for tobacco companies and declaring himself thrilled to finally be out from under the guilt of flogging a product that makes people ill and doesn’t even need advertising because it sells itself. (Why do I get the feeling that’s the real sin in Don’s view, since it wastes his gifts?)

Of course we know that Don has many gifts, and making a silk purse out of sow’s ear is one of them (as proved in the Honda deception earlier this season) but apparently we can now add “time travel” to the list, because he obviously got in a time machine and went forward to 1996, watched “Jerry Maguire” and figured out that if you write a “mission statement” declaring your moral superiority over everyone else in your field, your female assistant will think you’re wonderful and you will end up a better and happier person.

Perhaps next season will see that payoff, but the early returns on his gambit aren’t any more promising than they were for Jerry.  The partners are understandably furious that Don’s taken such drastic action without consulting them, and are sure that he’s sunk the firm, which was already taking on water like the Titanic that Trudy compares it to.  “Why would you do this?” they demand of Don. “Because someone had to do something,” he replies as if even a child as young as Pete’s baby should know that answer, scorning the very suggestion that he should have subjected the decision to committee, where it would have been overanalyzed. (And we know how Don hates analysis…at least when it’s not his.)  Pete in turn accuses Don of being the childish one and of throwing a tantrum in print, while Bert is mostly concerned that Don only signed his own name, which makes the rest of the partners look impotent. He’s so upset at the literal representation of his status at the firm (and perhaps biologically) that he takes his shoes and goes home, where presumably he has the luxury of an actual room with walls where he can sit and read all day.

Don seems to have taken seriously a joke by his former paramour Midge, who asks if his new firm is called “Draper, Draper and Draper.” Like all good jokes, it’s based on truth, since any union Don’s involved in is going to be a “me, myself and I” version of collaboration, which seems rooted in his steadfast confidence in his creative ability.  “I will have an exciting idea, I happen to know that,” he tells the Heinz client he’s trying to woo at the start of the episode, in a meeting that’s also been set up behind the partners’ backs.

While enjoying the flirtation, the client puts Don off in what we learn is the ad business’s equivalent of a failed date’s “I’ll call you” kiss-off by saying he’ll check back in six months. This after Don’s endured an Ecclesiastes-type discussion about how there’s a time for beans and a time for ketchup, and to everything there is a season, if you can only turn turn turn the public from condiments to legumes. Of course, beans are difficult because unlike the safely humorous pickle, they’re a joke that dares not speak its name. Even this admiring client thinks Don’s overreaching, advising him that he’s “a hell of an idea man” but should “let the account boys do this part.”  And he's right, because Don's behavior does reek of the desperation that he fears the entire firm is giving off,  and he's unable to hide it under the stink of Stoly the way Roger could.  “I bet I could get a date with your mother right now,“ the Heinz client jokes at Don’s desperation, not realizing how apt the metaphor is, given Don’s mother also sold herself as a prostitute.

Assuming his “if you can’t join’em, beat’em” tactic fails, Don can always blame it on drugs, which have decimated the life of Midge under the influence of her junkie husband, Perry. While it’s a realistic nod to the rise of hard drug addiction in that era, it’s horribly sad to see the formerly strong, independent Midge riding the horse, even if it is helping her to produce paintings that impress and inspire Don. 

“Don, let me open your eyes for a minute,” Perry says before showing him Midge’s “Number Four” which is “about what she sees when she closes her eyes.” This Escher-like moment is wonderfully suggestive of the 60’s, in which closed eye introspection did lead to opened eyes, but the opening of social mores also led some to closed eye outcomes like addiction. The point is to think about “what’s more real,” Perry tells Don (clearly not knowing who he’s talking to).  Don nearly chucks the work into the trash before deciding instead to meditate on it (probably because he’s in an emergency).  Under its influence, he repurposes his journal (tossing those pages of introspection into the same trash that the painting avoided) turning it into a draft manifesto against a legal drug, which he pairs with the All-American addiction to making money. Being overly fond of both smoking and success, he sympathetically co-opts Midge’s speech about not being able to quit despite knowing it’s not good for her, although he leaves out her fabulously descriptive explanation that doing heroin feels like “drinking a hundred bottles of whiskey while someone licks your tits.” (Hell, if Don could use a slogan like that, he’d be able to sell anything, even beans out of season.)

In the end, tobacco does kill, at least the jobs of many non-descript SCDP employees we see weeping and skulking to their doom, while the remaining partners have to ante up big bucks to keep the firm afloat for another six months (thus taking us safely to next season, we presume).  Unable to pony up and afraid of losing his partnership, Pete is stunned to find out from Lane that Don has put in his $50,000 share for him, perhaps because he’s taken to heart not just Pete’s anger at his solipsistic decision-making but his argument that he’s the only one bringing in business. With Bert out, will next season bring the far less fluid-sounding “Sterling Draper Pryce Campbell”? 

While Trudy worries about her baby Tammy’s legacy (fearing Pete might break into the kid’s piggy bank), Sally's already inherited from her father the talent for creating a façade in order to get away with things. “She doesn’t care what the truth is as long as I do what she says,” she blithely sums up Betty to her shrink, Dr. Edna, over a game of Go Fish.  Fishing is what the good doctor does, gently pulling information out of Sally while soothing her with the approval that she never gets from her mother. But we’re left to wonder how sincere Sally is even with the doctor that she seems to like when we witness her interludes with Glen, who’s now a sweaty young football player gallantly offering Sally the “backwash” of his Coke. (An icky parallel to the dregs that SCDP is living on.)

Glen seems to have Betty’s number, flatly stating that she doesn’t like kids, and he takes credit for teaching Sally how to kiss Betty’s ass, a cruder but perhaps more accurate description for what Dr. Edna refers to as Sally “behaving well even when (she’s) angry” -- more or less the same type of emotional control that Betty keeps trying to force on her children (in the finest “do as I say, not as I do” tradition). Dr. Edna’s form of social and emotional repression is seductively paired with positive regard, reassuring Sally that she’s not bad, but it’s still about Sally accommodating her emotionally erratic and harsh mother. Dr. Edna herself does the same dance with Betty, tentatively trying to get her to see a shrink of her own, but without confronting her honestly, and acceding immediately to Betty’s denial that she’s using her child’s therapy to discuss the “many concerns” of her own.  But perhaps it’s appropriate that Betty is seeing a child psychiatrist since her actions are often petty and juvenile. Catching Sally in one of her secret meetings with Glen, she’s so infuriated that she suggests to a delighted Henry that they finally move out of Ossining, something she’s fought like a bulldog, and a development which sends Sally to her room, weeping and clutching the lanyard Glen made and gave to her.

This relegation of Betty to not just a domestic but almost infantilized life where her only power lies in thwarting her children’s desires is contrasted with the professional women of SCDP. Don leans on both Peggy and Faye for advice and help, and largely treats them with a respect that he formerly withheld. While he neglects to think of Faye when committing to his manifesto (which forces her firm to drop SCDP as a client), it’s not like he thought of or cared about the impact to any of the men, either. Peggy is sad to see Faye go, considering her a rare female role model in business, and noting that “You do your job so well and they respect you and you don’t have to play any games. I didn’t know that was possible.” Faye’s wry reply, “Is that what it looks like?” reveals that (as always on Mad Men) appearances can be deceiving.  While Faye isn’t duplicitous like Don, just like Sally she's learned to kiss ass and take names for later, postponing or hiding her true feelings in order to succeed (in the old civil rights terminology, “she goes along to get along.”)  Peggy, by contrast, is still full of rough honest edges, such as blurting out her relief that she’s not the one being fired, a loss of control that we’re hard-pressed to imagine coming from Faye. But Peggy’s more natural style is also her strength and her charm, as when she teases Don, “I thought you didn’t go in for those kinds of shenanigans,” about his manifesto, confidently and humorously returning the serve he fired at her months before over Sugarberry Ham.

The spoon or the screaming, take your pick. ~ Betty  

Whether born with a silver spoon in their mouths (Roger, Bert and Pete) or having gained it through hard work (Don), the partners of SCDP have all gotten used to having things their way; now that they’re thwarted, the screaming begins.  Don may have silenced Pete’s complaints with that $50,000, but he’s lost Bert, and Roger and Lane are dangling by a thread. Shocked that no one saw the brilliance of his tactic, Don's failed to sell even his own firm on his ideas, which doesn’t bode well for his ability to sell to clients. “Just get me in a room,” he hisses at Pete, assuming he can pull off the old Don Draper magic any time he chooses. 

But “I’m glad to see you haven’t changed,” Midge tells him, which if true, could spell his doom.  We’ve known for quite a while that the times, they are a-changin’, but Don’s progress to keep up has been halting at best.  The fedora may be gone, but that hair still looks slick, and so does he.  The question remains whether he can make the move into the more natural times about to explode around him, or whether the future belongs to the open souls like Peggy.

I wish you wouldn’t have said that. ~ Glen  

It’s left to Zen master Sally Draper to explain the nature of human existence, when she points out to Glen that the Land o’Lakes Indian maiden holds a box of butter that carries her own image, holding a box of butter, carrying her own image...ad infinitum. Besides being a deliciously accurate portrayal of that terrifying moment in childhood when you begin to grapple with the concept of infinity, that scene perfectly sums up the reflexive and circular nature of life, as well as the hall of mirrors that is the profession of advertising, in which you seem to offer something new and appealing while actually reflecting the same image endlessly. 

In terming creative “the least important most important thing there is,” Don suggests he understands this sleight-of-hand perfectly.  But rather than truly changing the conversation as Peggy’s suggested he do (thus following his own advice), he’s merely made people look at something else, creating a diversion that seems to fool no one other than Megan (who in her Renee Zellweger role says she loved what he wrote) and maybe the American Cancer Society (which smells a good pro bono opportunity).

Don may be sure his best work is ahead of him, but if it just endlessly replicates his past work like that repeating Indian maiden, he’s not going to survive the changes that are coming. Like Betty, who tells Dr. Edna that she learned something while remaining absolutely the same, he still knows himself too little, and rejects most of what he learns (as when he discards his journal), preferring to keeping swimming laps alone, ad infinitum, while oblivious to the impact his actions have on others.  "You know this could work," he argues to Lane, after the other partners have excoriated him, to which Lane quietly suggests the cost to his family of Don's actions.  Pete is blunter in trying to get him to see the impact of his selfishness, sneering “Yes, Don saved the company; now let’s go get rid of half of it." 

With one episode to go in this season, Don's on the hook to pull off a victory that will redeem his precipitous actions.  Only a minor miracle will fulfill that imperative but his advertising magic is beginning to strain credulity as it's pulled out to save the day over and over -- it's the Indian Maiden of the show.  What can he possibly have hidden up his sleeve to wow and surprise us?

As his daughter Sally says when similarly asked if she's holding any aces: "Go fish."

It’s a doggy dog world. ~ Danny