* 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.

* If last week was Mad Men at its most David Lynch, this week was Mad Men at its most David Chase. (Which makes me hope that over the course of the next two eps the show will homage David Simon and David Milch, thus running the table on Great TV Davids. Tell me you couldn’t get a great systemic-failure-of-politics episode out of Henry Francis, or that Duck Phillips couldn’t return to the office and tell Don “God is not mocked, you son of a bitch” before stabbing him in the gut.)

* From the opening sequence of scenes — a dialogue-free scene juxtaposing a character watching portentous film with a fixation on a figure of untouchable feminine beauty and youth, segueing into that character being bedeviled by a literal leak of unpleasantness into his life via the house that symbolizes and embodies his supposed success — forward, goddamn was this a Sopranos-y episode, and that’s always a good look for Mad Men. Specifically it reminded me of the Season Six Part II premiere, “Soprano Home Movies,” which like last night’s MM ep was co-written by Matthew Weiner — and it did so during that sweaty, awkward dinner party in a relatively rural setting, quite before we got around to the equally awkward fistfight between two people who had no business fistfighting. Other Sopranos ingredients: the group trip to a house of ill repute, the Tony-esque lament about an ineffable decline from an idealized past (“Things seem so random all of a sudden. Time feels like it’s speeding up,” says Pete’s driver’s-ed Lolita prior to reminsicing about those happy golden bygone days of, like, two years ago), the liminal presence of real-world atrocities from the news, car rides, a high-school setting that recalled “The Test Dream” (I actually thought the initial high-school scene was a dream until we returned to the setting later in the episode). Shit, man, if you worked on the greatest television show of all time, wouldn’t you tip your hat to yourself now and then?

* I suppose the big difference between Mad Men and Davids Lynch and Chase is that the threat of violence here remains an un-serious one, to be sublimated into dreams in the former case and slapstick in the second. (See also Betty shooting the neighbor’s birds, Duck and Don’s drunken swing-and-a-miss-fest, the lawnmower man.)

* Not to be outdone, Stanley Kubrick continues to exert an influence on this season on an atomic level: the black/white/orange color scheme just gets more and more prominent, and it’s joined this time around by lovely lovely Ludwig Van.

* My first thought upon the quick cut to Lane’s ridiculously British pub celebration: “I can’t wait to hear what the Mindless Ones think of this.”

* Kenny on the move? His previously unmentioned pact with Peggy to take her with him if and when he leaves is our most dramatic sign yet that things aren’t going well at SDCP — more even than the no-new-business meeting, I think.

* I am deeply, deeply delighted by the return to the fore of Ken Cosgrove’s writing career, and was so excited by the fact that he’s writing SFF I literally cheered. For one thing, in terms of doing thoughtful work in a frowned-upon field, he’s Game of Thrones. For another, I always find myself…moved, I guess is the best way to put it, by mid-century science fiction — men and women toiling in unappreciated obscurity (or anonymity!) but absolutely drunk on the potential of raw imagination and cutting metaphor.

* Don’s Don, Roger’s Roger, Pete’s Pete, but to Joan, Bert’s still “Mr. Cooper.”

* I’m a huge huge sucker for moments of genuine cooperation and compassion between adults in fiction, so the presentation of Pete and Trudy’s baby to the group had me near tears, for real. Look at Don’s beaming, beaming face when he sees li’l Campbell: He is genuinely delighted by the kid and thrilled for Pete (for Pete!) and Trudy. Then look at Pete’s face, his emasculation by the exploding faucet (“it just blew in my face!” LOL Trudy) and Don’s effortless handling thereof completely evaporated by the pride he takes in his family, the love he feels for them, the gratitude he feels for the obvious affection and admiration shown to him by his coworkers and friends. You put enough scenes like that into a show, you can get as nasty and cynical as you want, and we’ll never feel like you’re saying none of it matters, because you’ve shown us that it does.

* Of course this scene was also essential to setting up Don’s obvious disgust — disappointment, even — over Pete’s behavior at the brothel. There were elements of sanctimony and hypocrisy here, sure, and Pete’s quick to point that out, but ultimately that line of attack rings hollow. Whether or not Don should have appreciated Betty and what he had with her and the kids more back then is irrelevant to the question of whether Pete should appreciate what he has right now. Moreover, we viewers know as well as anyone — better than anyone, most likely — that Don really was unhappy by the time he reached the end of the road his infidelity set him on. Why wouldn’t he try to impart that hard-earned wisdom to this man with whom he’s developed such an unlikely affection?

* Finally — I mean, tangentially but also finally — Don’s apparent fondness for Trudy Campbell and his comparison of Trudy not to Betty but to Megan was a quietly funny reminder that Don Draper has fine taste in brunettes.

* Great episode for ugly jackets, no? This is sort of what I was getting at in my post on the season premiere: As the fashion gets uglier, it’ll be harder for people to cling to the fashion in lieu of confronting the ugliness.

* I’m not going to do a good job commenting on this without sitting the episode and simply transcribing every word out of Roger’s mouth, but that was wonderfully well-written material he was given. After several episodes watching him alternately coast and flail, we not only get a hefty dose of his wit and charm in his instructional interplay with Lane, we also see just how good he was at his job, how important that wit and charm were to what he did and how talented and invaluable he was at doing it. We also get one of our first-act-of-Casino-style glimpses into the process that makes the ad agency work, and the efficiency and flexibility with which Roger can size up a potential client, in effect getting them to tell him exactly what they want from him without ever tipping his hand, is glamorous and enticing just as all of the show’s displays of professional hypercompetence are. Then we get to see that he’s well aware he’s past his prime: “professor emeritus of accounts”; “When this job is good it satisfies every need — believe me, I remember.” Doctor Phil tells me that you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge; I’m not sure Roger will be able to change, but at least he acknowledges that he probably ought to.

* Not that that stops him from bon-motting it up during the Pete/Lane rumble. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course!

* It feels a bit declasse to comment too much on a dude fingering a girl in a high-school driver’s-ed class, but I’m sorry, that was a magnificent little bit, and proof once again that Mad Men does sexy sex better than any show that could throw bare asses at you all the live-long day. He lowers his hand; she parts her legs and leans into him. It’s all about sending the signal that you want someone, and then that person giving themselves to you. No wonder Pete’s crushed by it: He can never have what he wants, since the only thing he ever wants is whatever he can’t have. “Nope. Nope. Okay.”

* What a great episode!