“We had this catastrophic end to the first season, and there were consequences to it, and these are what the consequences are.” -Matthew Weiner

I’m glad most of the gang is back, but geez, I felt so out of sorts in the new setting and in the new time. Season three’s finale - the start of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce - was just before Christmas 1963, and we’ve  jumped to Thanksgiving, 1964. The sixties were like dog years (or so my History of the 1960s professor Bob Collins told me), so that one year makes a huge difference in terms of modernity, and in this case, the beginnings of post-modernity. Cases in point: Don being forced to create a narrative for himself and his company and thereby abandoning his old “work speaks for itself,” traditional ways; Peggy and Pete, who have long been the forward-thinkers of the old Sterling Cooper bunch, embracing the now too-common practice of “making” news to generate buzz and ultimately sell a product, as they did with the staged fight for ham. It’s so… cynical for that time,  and yet so normal today. Before this episode, modes of advertising seemed far more simple, direct. And as Midwestern Don explained, his upbringing taught him you weren’t supposed to “brand” yourself, just your clients.

And I really want to talk about Don. Oh, Don. Sigh. Two moments made me feel deeply sad for our complicated protagonist: when he asked his call girl to keep slapping him in the face (self-loathing, much?) and later, when he found himself sitting in his old chair, in his old house, waiting on his ex-wife to return (talk about role reversal, which she made clear - “I’ve waited for you plenty of times,” Betty said.) Now that the previous three seasons solved the literal mystery of Draper’s identity, this season sets us up to observe the more abstract question of who he is. How will he deal with the changes to his “perfect” life he so carefully cultivated and guarded for a decade? Who’s Don Draper, after losing what he THOUGHT he wanted? Is he really changed, now that the facade has fallen away? Sally’s teacher observed in season  three that he was a deeply sad person, and now,  with the whole hot wife/three kids/house in the burbs artifice stripped away, he should be relieved, right? But it just seems like he’s even sadder.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS

-Aaron Staton, the actor who  plays Ken Cosgrove, is still credited in the show open. (Michael Gladis, who played the overweening Paul Kinsey, is not.) We obviously didn’t see Cosgrove in episode one, but I’m looking forward to finding out what happened to the leftovers at Sterling Cooper.

-Favorite Roger Sterling one-liners of the night: The one about V.D., and the one about the butter spraying everywhere.

So… what did y’all think? Weigh in and don’t forget to sign it so we know who’s writing what.

To chicken kiev,

Elise