* Nothing worse than someone who interrupts you when you’re reading during your commute. Dude deserved to be cuckolded for that alone.

* I’m really glad this show is not above a bit of comic business involving some schmoe lugging skis and ski poles around. Or as Roger approvingly put it, “And I got to see that!”

* Actually, that echoes his line during Pete and Lane’s fight, doesn’t it? I like the image of Roger as a hedonist observer. All the world’s a stage and he’s got great seats.

* Pete’s skis: the telltale use of orange of the night.

* “No one can keep up. It’s always changing.” Megan gets the Matthew Weiner “this is what this season’s about” line of the evening.

* Guest starring Rory Gilmore as Gloria Trillo!

* At least that’s where I thought it was headed at first, though it turns out Beth was the one slamming the brakes on her dalliance with Pete, not Pete. In fact, I got it backwards: Pete gender-flips Gloria Trillo’s trademark move and initiates the inappropriate incognito meeting with the cuckolded spouse, rather than the other way around. I think what threw me was her wildly inconsistent and inappropriate affect during their initial encounter. She just seemed, you know, potentially mentally ill. But something Salon’s Willa Paskin tweeted made her click for me: She’s just the Betty Draper of a show we’re not watching.

* The Don and Megan Show is so fucking good. It’s only in this episode that I cottoned to why, though: Megan’s an actress! She can fake a rapport with a product and a client (by masking it as a rapport with her husband) naturally, in a way it took Don a long time to master by his own admission.

* Don suggesting Megan work at another advertising firm was the key to that late-night conversation. On the one hand, it’s really, really sweet. He might have changed his tune eventually, but Don’s first instinct when Megan tells him she doesn’t want to work at the agency anymore is not “Oh no, I’m losing her!”, it’s “Oh no, I’ve made things too unpleasant for her at work, but she’s really talented — she’s gotta find another place to do this.” Only upon further thought was I like “Hmmm, maybe he’s concerned that a rejection of his profession as the road to fulfillment is a rejection of him, too?”

* Don plays his true feelings about what he does for a living close to the chest, mostly by expressing very different things about it at different times. He’s been visibly and sincerely thrilled by finding the right line, or when a pitch goes well, or when he won his Clio, but at the same time he’s been dismissive of grand ambition and ars gratia artis. He tells Megan we don’t always get to choose where our talents lie, implying that part of him wishes his own talents lay somewhere else. So in the long run it’s tough to say how he’ll feel about Megan’s departure from SCDP as a reflection of his professional and creative life.

* But it’s perfectly clear how he feels about it short-term and in the gestalt of his marriage: miserable. The hilariously direct dissolve from his slowly deflating smile after dittoing her line about being everything she’d hoped for to his miserable punim during that excruciating Cool Whip test-kitchen pitch with Peggy says it all. Yes, she’s super-duper hot. Yes, she cooks barefoot and plants a steamy kiss on him while she’s at it, while playfully admonishing him not to expect this kind of thing all the time. Yes, she’s honest with him and brings out the honesty in him. Yes, she rolls with his dark side, from his secret identity to his sexual fetishes. But last episode Don told her, with something like awe in his voice, “You’re good at all of it.” Not anymore. No more walking into work together — that part of their life is over. Now she’s definitionally not good at “all of it,” and that disappointment’s going to weigh on Don the same weigh Megan’s realization that following Don’s career path (however legitimately great she might be at it) wasn’t going to fulfill her weighed on her.

* Christina Hendricks is really a master of Joan’s elaborate social kabuki. Listen to her delivery when she asks Don “I mean, she’s not disappearing is she?” A hyperbolic joke covering a straightforward question about whether Megan’s going to make herself a stranger to her former colleagues covering an implied question about Megan’s future with Don.

* Rizzo nails it. “For what? Heinz baked beans.” Peggy’s dilemma is that she can’t blow off the inconsequentiality of what she does for a living and still be (apparently) happy like Rizzo, nor can she cut bait and admit it doesn’t make her happy and go do something else like Megan. Personally I’m not sure whether she really is unhappy, mind you — I think she’s not quite sure. She just hasn’t faced up to the “I’m good at this, and now let me figure out if that means anything or not” internal discussion yet.

* Don’s tin ear for rock music is funny, but I seized on something different in that scene when the guys come in to play him the song the client picked for the commercial: He says “help yourself”, but no one else drinks.

* When did music become so important? Michael Ginsberg tells Don the song’s making him fucking nauseous and all Don can do is express bafflement at the harsh language, but that’s the kind of thing I’ve said probably hundreds of times. When did this change take place? When did music become the core cultural thing by which cultural-people define themselves? At least I do, and always have, more than film or books or comics or TV or anything else. I assume the first example of this is beat/jazz culture in the ’50s, but I don’t know.

* Joan assumes Megan will be the failed second wife. That’s one of the slots she has available, and she’s gonna make that square peg fit, by god. For my money, Peggy has the right of it: Megan’s gonna be good at what she does. We’ve already seen what an actress she can be.

* Pete tricking his way into his inamorata’s home reminded me of how he pressured the au pair into having sex with him a few seasons ago. When he wants something he has a hard time understanding he can’t always have it.

* The invisible woman at the test kitchen.

* MAD MEN CAN AFFORD THE FUCKING BEATLES MOTHERFUCKER

* In all seriousness, the use of “Tomorrow Never Knows” does more than put paid to all the knowing critic jokes about what songs Mad Men can and can’t afford to use this season, it serves as a declaration of ambition. Not that we didn’t know how ambitious Mad Men already was, mind you — don’t let’s forget it soundtracked a Don-looking-badass shot with “Satisfaction” last season, though obviously Mick & Keith are way more profligate than the Apple corps with the usage rights if the price is right. But to use an original Beatles song, any Beatles song much less a landmark like that one, is to take a run right at a cultural monolith/megamyth. Hell, I was thrilled enough when Don whistled “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” a couple episodes back. Watching him wrestle with “turn off your mind, relax, and float down stream” was a higher order of pop-culture pleasure.

* My favorite thing about it, though? The credits continued the song after Don shut it off, like Matthew Weiner was saying “Okay, Don may not care for it, but this song’s awesome, why don’t we keep listening?” Endearing.

* I can’t remember the last time I found something on a tv show more frightening than that open elevator shaft. That it didn’t pay off in any concrete way made it even scarier. It was a Hitchcocky image, for sure, in an episode that referenced Hitch explicitly (The Birds) and implicitly (Beth had a tortured Vertigo vibe to her), as well as the Hitchock-acolyte elements of David Lynch–there was something Blue Velvet/Laura Palmer about Beth’s tender feminine damage, and the shaft was a flash of the unexplained uncanny as darkly luminescent as the ear on the front lawn or, insofar as it’s a portentous absence, the disappearing angel in picture on Laura Palmer’s wall. The thread will be torn, Mr. Draper, the thread will be torn.

* Whoa: Did you know that if you take the first letter of the first sentence in each “next week on Mad Men” teaser clip this season, it spells out “P-E-T-E-C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L-I-S-G-O-I-N-G-T-C-O-M-M-I-T-S-U”???** I wonder what the next letters are!

** not true, at least as far as I know

* Poor Marten Weiner as Glen Bishop. The Sofia Coppola in Godfather Part III of Mad Men.

* Fun fun casting for Megan’s parents. Career European Ronald Guttman as her philandering Marxist intellectual father? Bien sur. and of course you knew something sexy was gonna happen the moment you recognized Julia Ormond as maman.

* Roger’s ex-wife looks GREAT. I guess he’s not the only Sterling getting a second wind.

* “No, pervert, this is about work,” Megan tells Don when she comes into his office to tell him her great idea for the Heinz baked beans campaign. “You’re good at all of it,” Don tells Megan as they leave the dinner meeting with the Heinz guy where they were supposed to get fired but ended up securing the account because of Megan’s quick thinking and her and Don’s intellectual and emotional rapport. And those two lines in a nutshell are why I insisted last week that Don and Megan are not dysfunctional, not the way Don and Betty were, not by a million miles. (That part of last week’s post got me more “just writing to say I agree” responses than anything I’ve ever written about a show, maybe because so few other people out there seemed to agree?) The sex stuff that seems so powerful and even dark in the moment is something they playfully joke about when the office door is closed, just something else they share along with great ad ideas and Don’s secret identity and Megan’s parents’ dysfunction. (Now that’s a place to use the d-word.) Megan’s good at all of it — working the room, coming up with ideas, delivering them in compelling pitches, adjusting to the facts on the ground, being pretty and supportive, being sexy, soothing Don’s melancholies, mothering the kids, having a mind and personality and drive of her own. They’re great together.

* Or they would be, if not for the soft underbelly Megan’s dad pierced at the banquet. The signs were there already, of course. There was her discomfort when her Hail Mary pitch is celebrated at the office the next day — seriously, I literally stood up, pumped my fists, and cheered when the Heinz guy okayed the idea, let alone the characters in a world where this actually happened, but Megan just seemed to struggle with the knowledge that she should be happier than she is about it. “This is as good as this job gets,” Peggy tells her, and means it as a compliment; Megan reacts like she’s smelled a fart, like being told you’re a young Peggy Olsen is like being informed you have a chronic medical condition.

* But it was daddy dearest who really shattered the dream of Don and Megan. I was hoping that his line of attack that Megan had given up on her dreams to follow Don’s career footsteps was just a bitter man lashing out because he can’t stand happiness in others when he has so little. But one look at Megan’s total deflation after he tells her she’s given up shows he absolutely nailed it. We’d never really seen this side of Megan before — last season she told Don she wants what he and Peggy have and it seemed sincere, and her mentions of her failed acting career seemed as good-natured as such things could get. Frankly I was surprised to see how effective her dad was in dismantling her this way. But now I’m just really alarmed for her future with Don and his family. I don’t know how you paper that big a problem over with Draper pitches and kinky sex. It never worked for Don himself, after all.

* Speaking of which, those ads for that show The Pitch are unintentional comedy gold in the context of the show during which they’re airing. Jesus, could AMC have missed the point of Mad Men any more spectacularly? (Granted, I say this despite having hollered at the screen like a baseball fan during the World Series when the Don-Megan tag-team pitch landed. Maybe AMC knows me better than I know myself.)

* Peggy getting man advice from Joan feels like she used a time machine to do it. And because it started in that way, that throwback to the mores of the ’50s way, you knew it’d end in tragicomedy. But the comedy was funny. I loved Peggy watching Peggy realize what she’d just said when Abe asked her if she wanted to order and she replied “I do” — the facial-expression equivalent of the sad trombone. And I loved Mrs. Olsen’s inflection as she greeted Peggy’s boyfriend. You don’t have to have grown up Catholic to find hilarious the way a disapproving middle-aged Catholic woman would pronounce the name of her daughter’s live-in boyfriend if that name happened to be something like Abraham…but it helps!

* An adult content warning 3/4 of the way through the episode? Now we’re talkin’!

* Who Killed Donald Draper?

* Seriously, the total devastation of the underpinning of Megan’s marriage to Don by her dad was actually surpassed in dreadful revelatory power by Ken’s father-in-law Ed Baxter, played by the eternally incandescent Ray Wise, telling Don that his career as adman for the powerful is basically over. Again, there’s no way past having made yourself publicly, spectacularly, even proudly untrustworthy in the eyes of the people whose trust you need to survive.

* Like Game of Thrones, which this week took 12-year-old Maisie Williams and put her one on one with Charles freaking Dance because that’s just how good the kid is, Mad Men knows what a resource it has in the form of gifted child actress Kiernan Shipka, and rewarded her and us this week by putting her up against John Slattery’s Roger Sterling. Roger was just what she needed — an adult treating her as one of them — and she was just what he needed — a zero-pressure opportunity to work all his charm muscles without his livelihood and self-worth rising and falling on it. They’re both obnoxious people in a lot of ways, but they’re also both magnetic and funny and interesting, and that’s the side that comes out when the two are juxtaposed. What a pity it ended the way it did. Sally’s a woman of the world to an extent — you have to assume her late-night phone calls with Glen have tackled some taboo topics, I know mine did at that age. But seeing Megan’s mom polishing the sterling did more than expose her to the act itself: It showed her the truth of what all the play-acting about being Roger’s date and implicit equal entails. You wanna be a part of a successful man’s life, being squired around to fancy-dress banquets and becoming his partner in securing new business and all of that? Here’s something else you’ll be doing. That’s a lot to swallow, and oh jesus I promise you I didn’t think of that pun before I wrote it.

* I loved how that scene ended: with a goddamn tableau. You want on-the-nose, critics who distrust art making its artifice apparent? You got it. Ditto the crash cut to black after Sally pronounces the city “dirty.” Pardon my French twice over, but FIN, MOTHERFUCKERS.

* Finally, I want to take a moment to salute the single funniest thing I’ve seen on TV all year, when Megan’s dad tells Don that one day, “your little girl will spread her legs and fly away.” It’s not even the dad’s comment that does it, despite its turducken structure — a bitter swipe at Don in the form of a dirty joke disguised as a possible trans-language malapropism. Nope, it’s Roger Sterling cracking up about it, laughing loud and hard despite how completely inappropriate and uncomfortable the comment was for everyone else in the room. I was dying, just dying. Roger Sterling’s the Fool, the Joker, the Comedian, and getting the joke is its own reward. Laugh and the world may not laugh with you, but hey, at least you’re having a good time!

* It’s normal to just wave your arms around and cheer in delight several times during an hour-long television episode, right? Happens all the time?

* Big big cheer when I (finally? not sure how I stacked up vs. most viewers) realized what was happening with the narrative. I’d gotten pretty worried when we had that brief glimpse of an obviously distraught Don at a payphone in the middle of the night, asking Peggy if she’d gotten any calls in a cryptically unspecific fashion, hanging up in the middle of her mea culpa for the Heinz debacle. (I realize now that part of what worried me is that the last time I saw a quick cut to an alpha male at a pay phone we never saw him arrive at, telling a woman with whom he has a relationship rife with sublimated parental and romantic feelings about something bad that had happened off-screen, on a show Matthew Weiner worked on, I was watching a Sopranos episode called “Long Term Parking.”) But the next time we see Don he’s cheerfully rebuffing Roger’s attempt to turn a trip to an upstate Howard Johnson’s into an old-school Draper/Sterling debauch (Don: “I love Howard Johnson’s…” Roger: “We’ll try and stop by!”), inviting Megan along instead, so everyone I was worried about while watching that phone call — Don, Megan, Roger — seemed squared away. It wasn’t until the beginning of the third, Don-centric segment of the episode, when we saw conversations repeated from a different perspective, that I understood. And marveled!

* Peggy’s soundtrack was ambient. (Both ambient music and ambient noise — thank you, stereo surround system purchased for us by my college friends as a wedding present for the low bass thrum from the street below as Peggy had her first drink.) Roger’s was found music (including “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” LOL MAD MEN MUSIC CUES). Don’s was traditional orchestral scoring.

* One of my little cheers was for me, I admit, for identifying the role of the color orange on this season early and often, just in time for a metric ton of payoff during the Howard Johnson’s sequence. “We’d have rolled out the orange carpet!” The battle of the orange sherbet! Those gorgeous, ridiculous HoJo-noir night shots against the glowing orange roof! Not since the Godfather movies has orange been such a portent of doom. It was easy for me to believe that something really had happened to Megan, that this was the last Don or we or anyone else would ever see of her, simply because she had a salmon dress on.

* Roger and Jane are advised to look at their acid trip as a boat ride. Don looks around the parking lot for Megan and finds a boat. (Pretty sure that was salmon-colored, too.)

* Roger’s trip (band name alert!) was maybe only the second-most Sopranos thing to happen in the episode, thanks to that Don phonecall, but god was it a great reminder of what made that show so great. Both shows give images the time to play themselves out and then leave you with them, little emotional depth-charges you might not even understand in the moment — lots and lots of shots of the women at the party lying down, crawling, faces obscured, just for example. Both don’t mind being frightening and silly within the same scene, or letting dream logic infect everyday reality. Neither is afraid of taking a message and punching you right in the face with it, because after all, sometimes you really do get punched in the face with a message about your life IRL. What, are they not gonna have Roger fixate on an old-young man in an ad, or reminisce-hallucinate about the Black Sox scandal in a way that makes him seem like a creature from a wholly different century than his young wife? If you were Roger, wouldn’t you?

* Speaking of silly-frightening drug stuff, I caught a heavy “Revolution 9” vibe from the sequence despite it predating that song by, what, two years? I mean, maybe it was just Don whistling “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” later in the episode — and jesus, how’s that for a pop-culture moment, Don Draper Meets the Beatles — that put me in mind of the comparison, but seriously: the full-blast snippets of grand orchestral music, the overlapping and disconnected conversations, the songs played one on top of the other, the occasional goofy sound effect — heck, eventually Roger and Jane became naked!

* Roger hears the words of his guide and sees Don. I think that’s a lot more complex a hallucination than the “haha he idolizes Don” sight gag suggests. He idolizes Don, he fears Don, he envies Don, he likes Don…but he also made Don. Don exists because Roger thought him up, essentially, saying okay, this guy has some talent, let’s see what he can do. The hallucination is, quite literally, a reflection of that reality. And since Roger’s the elder, he can never acknowledge any of these feelings, not to anyone else, not even to himself without the help of LSD, without violating a tremendous taboo against being less self-sufficient than the generation that follows you. That is some magnificent burrow-deep-down drug writing right there.

* I’d pretty much accepted the implication that Jane simply didn’t remember her decision to divorce Roger during the trip, but it occurs to me now — it’s just as possible Roger hallucinated her entire side of the conversation, isn’t it?

* The irony there, while we still have the dawn of Roger and Don’s relationship on our minds, is that it began under similar circumstances. The morning after their first liquid lunch, Don shows up to work, telling an amnesiac Roger that he hired him the day before.

* “I say we postpone this conversation until after we turn on.” I laughed hard at that.

* Shit, this is a sexy fucking show. Peggy’s movie-theater handjob may be top dawg. “Just watch the movie.” Yowza.

* Peggy awoken by the Dawn.

* Regarding the super-fake car rides: This is a show that could make car rides look convincing if it wanted to. This wasn’t them trying to shoot perfectly natural-looking car rides and failing.

* Ginsberg born in a concentration camp? This revelation dropped into the middle of a story about being a Martian from which he never breaks character, peppered with portentous quote-unquote jokes like not being able to find any others like him and receiving the instruction simply to stay where he is and wait? Peggy gets her Jewish reporter boyfriend to fact-check the story during a booty call — she’s nothing if not efficient — but it’s not Ginzo the person within this world I wonder after, it’s Ginzo the device within this show. Mad Men‘s just given him an origin story that echoes Don’s in nearly every particular — both orphans raised by a non-biological parent, both shaped by war in a formative way — but trumps it over and over. He’ll see your whore and raise you a Holocaust victim. He’ll beat your army-grunt identity switch by never having been known by his original identity. He’ll take your Korea and give you a World War Fucking II. Who is this guy?

* I’ve already talked a bit about how plausible Don’s morbid ideation about Megan’s post-fight fate were made to seem by the filmmaking in the episode, but of course the other half of that equation is that all of us have gone on similar flights of terrifying fantasy any time our significant other takes too long getting back from getting prescription filled or whatever. I’m pretty sure I don’t talk enough about Jon Hamm as an actor, but good lord did he nail the moment when he discovers their apartment’s been locked from the inside — that moment when some little thing, the tip of a vast iceberg of relief and gratitude, tips us off that our loved one is safe and sound after all. The shuddering release of breath, the momentary jellyfish-jiggle as your nervous system hits the “she’s okay” button as hard as it possibly can.

* This is why I think it’s a big mistake to view Don and Megan’s relationship as dysfunctional, at least as I understand it. Look at the way the fight ends, with Don clinging to her like a life raft — not to their life, not to the idea of her, not to what she represents as a signpost of the life he’s made for himself, but really to her, to this person named Megan. Look at the way her look and touch absolves him, accepts his apology, expresses regret as she comes to understand how upset he truly was. I don’t wish to deny how titanic and terrifying as the fight’s climax was, with Don chasing her around the apartment like a madman — that’s not romantic, that’s threatening, although I don’t get the sense that Megan felt truly in danger, just that she in that moment was horrified by the prospect of being close to Don at all. His actions “diminish” what they have, she says. They do not fight well, that’s clear; their fights are tied into the May-December sexual kink they share and thus can ricochet off in hugely inappropriate and hurtful directions (Don’s chase is just an ugly goes-to-eleven distortion of their earlier dom-sub shenanigans) unless the combination is calibrated exactly right. But the way even the nastiest, scariest, most rage-fueled fight dissipated into near-nothingness the moment they realized how hurt they both were rang very true. In that moment the immensity of their love dwarfed their anger at one another, so they just swatted it away. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that depicted on film before.