* Just finished Season Three, Disc Two. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* I’ll admit it: I’m looking forward to being able to type “Mad Men” into Google and go berserk the moment I finish the series so far almost as much as I’m looking forward to the act of finishing the series itself. For years now I’ve been very studious in avoiding talk about the series (I lead a life lived in terror of spoilers, basically.) But even so, some things slip through the cracks — and sad to say, Roger Sterling in blackface was one of those things. Because I’m usually so careful I have no idea how I came across the image, but sure enough, a couple of weeks ago a Google image search revealed Roger doing his best Al Jolson. I winced for many reasons, but “Aw, shit — that would have come as a complete shock otherwise” was not least among them.

* Fortunately (if that’s the right word), enough time had passed that I sort of forgot the moment was coming, and when it did come it was more than shocking enough on its own terms. Literally jaw-droppingly shocking in fact. I sat there on the train staring at my laptop catching flies as dapper, jolly, funny, skeevy, charming Roger Sterling serenaded his bonnie bride with centuries of unthinking racial animus and privilege smeared all over his face. I think my main thought was “blarrrrrrgggghhh.”

* I think that was Don’s main thought, too. The big question, I suppose, was what made Don more uncomfortable: Roger’s heedless racism, or his heedless foolishness? It’s the foolishness that Don smacks Roger around for at the end of the episode, but his conversation with the incognito Conrad Hilton at the club’s abandoned bar indicates a lingering sense of solidarity with the help, no matter who they are. As was perhaps the case when he ignored Sal’s hotel-room indiscretion, I get the sense that the only thing that makes Don judge a person is incompetence. Insofar as bigotry blinds one to the feelings of a class of other people who could otherwise be engaged and thereby communicated to as an audience, bigotry is a form of incompetence, and that’s what matters.

* I did permit myself a bit of googling after the episode was over, and a quick search for “Roger Sterling blackface” revealed some pretty shallow and facile thinking about Mad Men‘s approach to race prior to the episode. I’m both amazed and not at all surprised that people who get paid to write about these things mistook the way the show reduced African Americans to speak-only-when-spoken-to servants, or to saintly nannies turned to in times of crisis, or to evidence of one’s beatnik bonafides, as evidence of the show’s racism rather than as an indictment of the characters’. Apparently episodes in which the characters gathered ’round the TV and talked about Birmingham would have been “better” than showing how they’d created a world for themselves where black people were permitted to exist at the margins but no further. I dunno, man. If that’s not an intentional absence, I don’t know what is. And watching it slowly leak into their lives as a presence — Betty’s drug-induced vision of the sad, slain Medgar Evars; Pete Campbell’s incredulity that anything as irrational as not wanting to be seen as the Negro TV company could ever trump the making of money; Paul’s failure to maintain a romantic relationship that needs must exist as more than symbolism and platitudes — has been bracing.

* Elisabeth Moss is a terrific actress because the role she’s playing is so challenging for a person of this day and age to play. She has to play Peggy as a strange and alien creature called a “woman,” learning and fighting to become a “human,” a transformation basically without social precedent.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sexism lately — I’m watching Mad Men, reading about superhero comics, and raising a baby daughter, so how could I not? And I’ve realized that I believe women are different from me as a man in three very specific ways and those three very specific ways only:

1) They have slightly different biology.
2) They identify as “women.”
3) I find some of them sexually attractive.

As best I can tell, that’s it. Aside from those three things I’ve never encountered a difference between myself and a woman that couldn’t be explained as a facet of that particular woman as an individual person rather than as a facet of her woman-ness. I remember discovering my senior year in college that one of my roommates had deliberately never taken a course taught by a woman professor unless required to, and this totally blew my mind — it quite literally never occurred to me that women as a class would be less good than men as a class at anything other than, like, bench pressing. I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back because I in now way feel like I deserve any “credit” for this viewpoint, any more than I deserve credit for having blue eyes. I did no work to get here. It’s just the way I see things, even if I’m only now articulating it in precisely this way, and mentally I never had the option of seeing it some other way, I don’t think.

The point is that problems arise when men think of women as a separate species. When Peggy looks at Don and sees who she wants to be, not who she wants to be with, for most men in the office that’s akin to a chimpanzee putting on pants.

* One variable I’d forgotten when trying to pinpoint the origin of Pete and Trudy Campbell’s newfound team spirit was Pete’s discovery that he’d fathered a child with Peggy. I’ve done a shit job of keeping track of Pete and Peggy’s relationship in light of this revelation this season — I barely recall if they’ve been palling around like the rest of the officemates or just cordial or barely speaking to one another — but all the evidence you need for the Campbells’ current relationship can be found in their hotstepping at Roger’s party. It made me happy for both of them to see them be stars together, however briefly.

* The bit at Roger’s party where that dude asks to put his hand on Betty’s stomach? Yeesh, this really is a sexy show. The performance of desire and arousal, and the invitation to intimacy. That’s where it’s at.

* I think my idiosyncratic Mad Men crush is on Sal’s poor wife Kitty. Meow!

* On a more serious note, what do you think she knows? Even though Sal would set off a five-alarm gaydar alert for most of us today, his coworkers seem completely oblivious, so it’s reasonable to assume Kitty is or was, too. I mean, she married the guy, and apparently after nurturing a boy-next-door crush on him for years beforehand. But she obviously senses that something is off. She feels left out when Ken comes for dinner, and she tells Sal he’s been distracted or distant for months. I really find myself puzzling out her teary eyes when Sal performs the Ann-Margaret routine he’s directing in the diet soda commercial for her. At first it seems she’s emotional because he’s letting her into his world. Then it seems like she’s upset because he seems so much more passionate about this Patio ad than he is about her. Then perhaps she’s jealous of the attention this presumably young and beautiful actress is receiving from him. But…is there also a sense that in this flirty, theatrical playacting, he’s somehow more himself than he’s ever been?

* I love moments when Matthew Weiner’s Sopranos starts showing. Previously the standout was the bit with the neighbor’s pigeons, the Drapers’ dog, and Betty’s gun — the lyrical way in which that stuff was shot, the use of animals, the weird outburst of violence. This season I think there’s been more than usual. We’ve had the episode that focused on a character who was about to die as he made some portentous final memories with another character (Gene and Sally). Betty had her dream sequence during childbirth. The agency preying on the dipshit jai-alai trust-fund kid was the Scautino bustout all over again.

* And, of course, the lawnmower. That was a majestic moment, man. Hilarious and awful and unforgettable, like any number of great Sopranos moments. I know without looking that there are a million animated gifs out there of that, aren’t there? Since violence on the show is so rare, a flash of grand guignol like that probably had a similar effect on large segments of the audience to the one it had on the people there in the office. (Wait, there was a Peggy/Pete moment I remember — he caught her when she fell. Dun dun dunnnnn!) It also gave rise to some of the show’s funniest and most mordant black humor: The “He might lose the foot.” “Just when he’d gotten it in the door!” exchange was topped only by St.-John-whatsisnames grave pronouncement that “The doctors say he’ll never golf again.”

* What’s more, it gave us sympathy for Lane, for perhaps the first time. He’s seemed like a decent guy rather than a tyrant throughout, but it wasn’t until he was rewarded for his achievements at Sterling Cooper by being packed off to Bombay effective immediately, a fate he resigned himself to in the space of about 90 awkward seconds, that we realized how much his stiff upper lip, company-man persona could cost him. The owners can rely on him and thus abuse him, and making himself amenable to the abuse is the only way he can make himself indispensable. When he tells Don that he feels like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral and didn’t like the eulogy, I really felt how awful that must be: to be great at your job and respected less because of it, not more. He’s the anti-Don.

* Writing that very last sentence made me realize that I’m barely talking about Don himself! He’s receded a bit this season — perhaps because he’s not sleeping around and thus there’s less relationship drama for him to star in, while at home he takes a back seat to Betty and the baby, plus after he threw his weight around in the final confrontation with Duck over the sale, we know he’s probably got more job security than anyone else at the company?

* Still, I think we got a “shape of things to come” moment when he talks to Sally’s hot, slightly drunk teacher over the phone as she divulges her personal history, then still thinks to tell Betty that it was “no one” even as they leave for the hospital for her to give birth to their baby. The ease with which he lies is alarming.

* But so too can be the ease with which he tells the truth. I have two married siblings, as does my wife, so I’ve seen just about every possible relationship between a person and their parents-in-law, from “great” to “my God make it stop.” Even so, I was still stunned when Don told Betty “He hated me and I hated him — that’s the memory.” To put it so bluntly, to remove any wiggle room for politeness and decorum…even after Gene’s death, that’s still a huge shock to the system. Good for Sally for coming in at just the right moment and defusing the situation by apologizing for bothering the baby.

* And man, Sally’s an MVP, isn’t she? That kid’s a terrific actor, and the show really uses her without overusing her. (Lately I’ve thought about the problems faced by Game of Thrones in having so much of the story driven by children acting basically on their own. The show had to age all of its characters up for a variety of both content-based and logistical reasons, but one of them was that if they’d kept (say) Arya and Bran at their ages in the book, you’d basically be relying on children the age of Sally and Bobby Draper circa Mad Men Season Two to anchor a quarter of the show.)

* Back to the lawnmower incident: Here we had another tour de force writing performance. An entire episode is spent setting up the possibility of a new status quo, ramming it into place, and forcing both us and the characters to contemplate it…then completely undoing it with one drunken mishap. I love not being able to expect where things are going even when the show comes out and says “This is where things are going.”

* Name nerdery: One of my favorite little comics factoids involves the naming conventions at the two big superhero publishers. DC characters tend to have a first name for their last name: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, Guy Gardner, Tim Drake, Jason Todd, Ronnie Raymond, Barry Allen. Marvel characters have alliterative names: Peter Parker, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Stephen Strange, Matt Murdock, Bruce Banner, Scott Summers, Warren Worthington, Victor Von Doom. (Also fun: finding the exceptions. Marvel’s got Donald Blake, Bobby Drake, and Clint Barton; DC has Wally West, Guy Gardner (again) and Superman’s entire supporting cast.) I’ve noticed something similar about Mad Men. The male characters’ names are nearly always a one-syllable first name and a two-syllable surname with the emphasis on the first syllable, i.e. “First LASTname” — Don Draper, Dick Whitman, Pete Campbell, Ken Cosgrove, Bert Cooper, Paul Kinsey, Duck Phillips, Gene Hofstadt, Bill Hofstadt, The female characters’ names are nearly always a two-syllable first name and a two-syllable surname, with secondary emphasis on the first syllable of the first name and primary emphasis on the first syllable of the surname, i.e. “Firstname LASTname” — Betty Draper, Peggy Olsen, Trudy Campbell, Rachel Mencken, Mona Sterling, Sally Draper, Bobbi Barrett, Judy Hofstadt. As the alpha male and female, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway/Harris are the exceptions that prove the rule.

I believe I am two episodes into Season Three. SPOILER WARNING.

* The key to Don Draper is war. I’ve thought this ever since the pilot episode, before I knew…anything about him, really. There’s a moment in that first hour where he takes a nap in his office, and slowly the sounds of explosions begin echoing in his head. I believe at some point before that we caught a glimpse of his Purple Heart, but that sound cue (effectively cribbed a few years later by Game of Thrones) was the moment when I realized that something happened to him out there, wherever there was. Everything we’ve seen since lends further credence to this notion. Dick Whitman became Don Draper in an explosion in Korea. The prospect of “total annihilation” sends him running from an aerospace conference directly into a lost fortnight of the soul. And I think it’s his candor about the Cuban Missile Crisis making him “sick” in his letter of apology to Betty that precipitates their subsequent reunion as much as anything else. I don’t think I’ve wrestled with this enough to boil down what Don’s experiences in Korea did to him and mean to him to a single sentence, but I promise you it’s not for lack of trying. But I do believe that the hole in Don, the part of Don that’s so hard to define — that hole was created by being blown open.

* My recent experiences with miscarriages, pregnancy complications, premature childbirth, and fatherhood have humbled me by showing me just how beholden to biography criticism really is. Man oh man, am I ever a mark for neglected-baby shit now. Every glass of booze or Lucky Strike that goes into the mouth of one of the pregnant characters is like nails on my mental chalkboard, and when Peggy rejected her baby that first night, or when Betty left the gynecologist’s office without a checkup and then proceeded to do various things he’d instructed her not to do anymore, I had a tough time getting around that with them. The funny thing is that, like my wife, I’m more pro-choice after our ordeal than I ever was before it. I think it’s the noncommittal quality of Peggy and Betty’s ways of dealing with their unwanted pregnancies that bothered me. If Betty had gone to that “doctor in Albany” that Francine told her about rather than simply going horseback riding again like it ain’t no thing, I’d have been much more okay with it and with her. Make a decision, is what I’m saying. I dunno, this shit’s complicated.

* Duck Phillips’s self-immolation was the show at its meanest. The guy’s only crime, it seems, was just not quite playing the game right. Everybody else gets to be a drunk — he has to be an alcoholic. Everyone else cheats — he gets a divorce, and doesn’t even have a 20-year-old secretary to show for it. Everyone else thinks big and takes risks — his big thoughts and risks never seem to pan out. When he finally shoots for the moon, he’s not Neil Armstrong, he’s Gordo the ill-fated space monkey. Sure, I was rooting for Don, and was invested enough in Duck’s defeat to literally shout “He doesn’t have a contract, you dope!” at my laptop screen out loud on the train, alarming the woman in the seat next to me. But even so, watching his seemingly successful office coup and business masterstroke end with his former boss dismissing him by saying “He could never hold his liquor” was a gutpunch. And like that, poof, he’s gone.

* That whole storyline was another terrific case of misdirection by the writers, of course. The entire time Don was wandering around California incommunicado, I anticipated a total meltdown or freakout when he returned to find Sterling Cooper sold out from under him and Duck Phillips calling the shots. Instead he collected his half million dollars, blithely offered to quit, and destroyed Duck’s career with seven syllables: “I don’t have a contract.” It was like one of his “magic pitches” (I wish I remember who introduced that phrase to me), where he has just the right idea at just the right time. He didn’t even break a sweat. He’s a miracle man.

* Betty’s post-adultery rapprochement with Don was one of the show’s few too-predictable moments. They’d been building up to it for so long that I had no doubt Betty would cheat one time only, “getting it out of her system,” in order to welcome Don back to the family. In general I find the supposed epiphanic value of sex to unhappy suburban women overvalued in fiction, as if there’s a whole nation of Joan Allen in Pleasantville out there just one bathtub frig away from Freedom. Still, it could be worse: They could have made like the odious American Beauty and made the housewife’s sexual satisfaction an object of ridicule and contempt. Personally, if you’re gonna go the whole When Hausfraus Fuck route, I prefer the Hellraiser option.

* Less predictable, and much more troubling for that, was the fallout for Joan’s rape by her fiancé. Specifically, there wasn’t any. I expected the Holloway facade to finally crack, but this was no life-altering trauma for her, because this is par for the course. If marital rape (I know they weren’t married yet, but I don’t know an adjectival form for fiancé) still occasionally has a hard time mustering outrage today, imagine what it would have been like then. Like smoking while pregnant or after a pair of heart attacks, perhaps for some people it’s something you don’t even know is bad. It was the show’s most depressing depiction of the era’s misogyny this side of all those avuncular or leering male doctors dispensing unsolicited life advice with each exam. Their lives are not their own.

* People told me Alison Brie’s Trudy Campbell would improve, and lo and behold. She and Pete are so different together, so much more understanding of and genuinely interested in one another’s feelings and opinions, in that first episode of Season Three that it almost feels like a continuity error. But I guess that if you peg it to Pete’s falling out with Trudy’s father and his own mother, you’ve got the precipitating incidents you need.

* Speaking of potentially jarring character transitions, I was a bit surprised to see Don back up to his old poon-hound tricks again with that stewardess in Baltimore before the Season Three premiere was even over. I figured we’d at least see him make an effort to stay faithful to Betty before failing. And yet this felt much less like plothammering to me than…well, I can’t say, but another acclaimed drama of recent years featured a womanizing, hard-drinking leading man who briefly reformed only to lapse back into bastardry when the demands of the writers required it. There — perhaps because the original development felt so well-earned — the reversal felt cheap and trollish. Here it’s another clue in the mystery of Don Draper.

* What makes it all the more puzzling is that both Don’s apology and his subsequent lapse were juxtaposed against two of the clearest indicators that he could well pass the Good Guy test. Don came home to Betty after we learn that he’s friends, close friends, platonic friends, with the woman whose dead husband’s identity he stole. For that kind of genuine, easy affection to develop under that kind of hideous circumstance, Dick Whitman must be some hell of a guy, right? And after he cheats, he discovers that Sal is gay, but subtly makes it clear to him that he has no intention of either outing nor ostracizing him for it. It’s not just that Don’s displaying admirable tolerance for a man of his era, although that’s awesome. It’s that he’s not a hypocrite. He knows how important keeping a secret and playing a part can be, so he doesn’t hold it against Sal. That’s admirable, in its way. (He’s been hard on Betty for being too sexy for others’ enjoyment from time to time — flirting with Roger at dinner, wearing a bikini to the pool — but while I can’t imagine him reacting well to her actual cheating, I feel like these bother him as breaches of decorum rather than as acts of mote/beam optometry.)

* Don to Peggy: “You’re not an artist, you solve problems.” Copywriters, this is our gift. This is our curse.

* Peggy Olson’s A Series of Unfortunate Hairstyles

* No, semi-seriously: Elisabeth Moss is an attractive lady, but in Peggy it’s tough to see. I had a real holy-shit moment recently when I realized that the girl in that uncomfortably intimate Excedrin Migraine commercial that had driven my wife and I crazy for years during Judge Judy was none other than Sterling Cooper’s newest copywriter because the voice and the eyes were virtually the only thing recognizable about her. That commercial is predicated, more or less, on the appeal of being close enough to this dewy-eyed, breathy-voiced young lady to make out with her, whereas Peggy, to me, has been defined by the awkward middle part of her bangs. Even her makeover at the hands of Bob Dylan enthusiast and noted pervert Curt Smith didn’t fix it. Only when she took a swing at reenacting Ann-Margaret’s Bye Bye Birdie performance in the mirror at home was I reminded that hey, my goodness.

* Sterling silver-tongued.

* Another gasp-out-loud-on-the-train moment: The save-the-date for Roger’s daughter’s wedding. The missile crisis material was so effective — it was the first time the show really affected my personality throughout the day, making me nervous and paranoid — that I was looking forward to seeing how they’d deal with Kennedy’s assassination despite its potentially hackneyed nature. Turns out they’re gonna run right into it full speed. This should be interesting.

* Don got to where he is — at the top of his profession, basically untouchable even by the new owners — because everyone respects his creative talent. Creative talent could make you in that world. I don’t give a fuck about fedoras and suits, but that’s something worth getting nostalgic over.

* Is it time to start shipping Don and Peggy? Deggy?

IT OCCURS TO ME I SHOULD BE SPOILER TAGGING THESE

* I just finished the Matthew Weiner-scripted episode toward the back end of Season Two in which Don Draper has his Los Angeles idyl with the idle rich Eurotrash and their aptly/portentously/heavyhandedly-named scion Joy. While Don’s out there fiddling and relearning not to say no to things he wants (Joy, you are setting a bad example), Rome’s burning in the form of Duck Phillips’s attempt to cement his position, and take over Creative, by having his old British company buy out Sterling Cooper. What I love about this development is probably just long-form fiction writing 101, but here it is:

At the end of Season One, Don was faced with a choice. He could hire an outside applicant to take over his old position as he moved up to partner, with Duck the leading candidate, or he could promote Pete Campbell. Neither Don nor we in the audience wanted him to do the latter, for a number of reasons: 1) Pete was too big for his britches and didn’t seem to deserve the promotion on a professional level; 2) Pete was generally an obnoxious creep even by Sterling Coo standards and rewarding that behavior would have been unpleasant to watch; 3) Most directly, Pete attempted to secure the position through blackmail, and both on a “Crime Does Not Pay” level and in the sense that Don is a more likeable character than Pete, we wanted to see that fail. So Don hires Duck, then ends Pete’s game of chicken by deliberately crashing into him, and finally emerges victorious and more secure than ever. Hooray! In the moment, it looked like he made the right move.

And in the moment, he probably did make the right move! Promoting Pete under those circumstances would have been disastrous for Don, and probably not so hot for the company either. (Or for Pete, I suspect.) But this outcome — which Don selected and fought for, taking a risk and reaping the reward — had the unintended consequence of completely undermining his own happiness and power at the job. (At least I think it will — I haven’t seen how the deal with the Brits turns out yet, as I’m no further than the episode where it was first brought up.) What a great technique for the writers to use: They gave their character what he wanted, but instead of either a happy ending or a pat “be careful what you wish for” as a result, they use it as the seed from which something he absolutely doesn’t want will eventually grow. The Don vs. Duck line emerges not as a direct continuation of the Don vs. Pete line, but off on a tangent we couldn’t have predicted, and one we couldn’t have followed if Don and Pete hadn’t been made to collide in the first place. It’s Curt Purcell’s idea of narrative shrapnel (warning: A Song of Ice and Fire spoilers at the link) writ large. And it’s a great way for writers of serialized fiction to keep their stories going when seeming endpoints are reached.

* As if a film studies major couldn’t have enough fun making hay out of the name “Don Draper,” they went and made his real name “Dick Whitman.” Drop a “D” from the former and add an “e” to the latter and you’ve got an A in the class.

* I’m currently seven episodes into Season Two, I believe.

* Sex: Has there ever been a show this effectively and uniformly sexy in its sex scenes? I am no more the kind of person who says “The sexiest thing is what you don’t see” than I am the kind of person who says “The scariest thing is what you don’t see” when discussing horror movies. I mean, grow up. But nearly every sex scene on this show compares so favorably to the pneumatic breast-bearing cheek-clenching sweat-drenched thrustfests on comparable pay-cable programs that I’m starting to wonder if I should reconsider that position. Look, I like seeing attractive naked people, especially attractive naked women, I’m certainly not going to lie about that. And if we lived in an alternate universe where HBO had picked the show up after all, I’d reblog an animated gif of a nude scene involving virtually any of Mad Men‘s female cast members and cameo players so fast your head would spin, I don’t care how confused the readers of Superheroes Lose would get. But it seems as though the show’s necessitated focus on buildup and afterglow, anticipation and satisfaction, forced them to become peerless portrayers of desire and arousal. These, of course, are the hottest things about sex. You can see naked people in all sorts of contexts, but you can really only see truly turned-on people tear into one another in just the one. It’s in that glimpse of the performance of desire, and the subsequent glimpse of its fulfillment, that the erotic really lives. Bobbi Barrett isn’t even my type, but the scene in which she’s lying in bed face-down with Don face-down in turn on top of her, both of them panting and sweating after a job well done, as she talks about the air-conditioned sensation of being both hot and cold and then asks Don, basically, not to take his dick out of her yet…shit, man, that’s one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on TV.

* Violence: Would you believe that for the longest time, as I promised myself I’d watch this show but never got around to it, I worried that I’d somehow find it less compelling because the main characters are advertising executives rather than mafiosi, medieval knights, cops and drug dealers, cowboys, outer-space soldiers and killer robots, gun-toting crazy people stranded on an island someplace, and thus the chances that someone might get killed during any given episode were much, much slimmer? To be clear here, what worried me was what that would say about me, not about the show. I am so used to drama in which the ability of characters to kill other characters provides an instant high-stakes atmosphere, an array of dramatic story possibilities and emotional consequences, that I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle one in which the worst that could happen was, I dunno, someone gets fired or his wife leaves him or whatever. Now, if you look at my comics-reading habits, I have no preference for violent fiction; if anything it’s the contrary, as the sort of reading habits that privilege action-based genre work of whatever sort to the sneering exclusion of so-called New Yorker navel-gazers are perhaps my biggest pundit pet peeve. My prose reading list works in much the same way, though I do less prose reading and thus it can get a bit more lopsided toward violent genre work depending on what I made a point of plowing through recently. But for some reason, I’d be hard pressed to tell you the last movie I saw in a theater or on DVD in which someone wasn’t violently assaulted or killed. With TV it’s an even stronger bias, because one of my favorite aspects of all my favorite millennial shows is my uncertainty that any given character will live to see the end of any given episode. With Mad Men, by contrast, I’m reasonably sure no one will shoot Joan Holloway in the head at any point. Of course, it turns out that that certainty doesn’t hurt my enjoyment of the show in the slightest, and I’m just as capable of loving the narrative and execution here as I am in a Chris Ware comic. And the absence of violence as an ingredient in the everyday lives of these characters as opposed to the characters on Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, or even Twin Peaks means that when the threat of physical harm does arise, be it intentional (the possibility that Don might kill his half-brother to shut him up, Don’s brief shoving match with Betty during their disagreement over corporal punishment, Don’s really unpleasant quasi-sexual-assault on Bobbi when he threatens to ruin Jimmy if he doesn’t apologize to the Utz owners for insulting them) or accidental (Don and Bobbi’s car crash, Bobby Draper burning his face on the stove), the bottom of my stomach really drops out.

* Just noticed this as I wrote that last sentence: Bobbi and Bobby.

* Speaking of Bobby: God, the Draper kids are just crushingly cute, somehow without being cutesy. Another absurd casting coup. When Bobby said to Don “We’ve got to get you a new Daddy”? Oh man, I’m getting choked up just writing it out.

* And speaking of that line: It’s possible I just wasn’t paying the proper amount of attention, but it seems to me like Season Two emphasizes the killer quotables more than Season One. I’m thinking of “We’ve got to get you a new Daddy”; “You’re garbage. And you know it” ; Don encouraging Peggy to power through her psych hospitalization by saying “It didn’t happen. It will shock you how much it didn’t happen”; Trudy asking Pete that if they don’t have a baby, “What’s all this for?”, and Pete replying “I don’t know.” I certainly don’t mind.

* And speaking of Trudy: I hate to say it, but Alison Brie is maybe…miscast? I love her on Community, and obviously she’s one of the prettiest people on television, but her broad brittleness works for comedy — particularly for a caricature like Adderall Annie — in a way it just doesn’t for drama. Certainly not for maybe the broadest and brittlest role on the show to begin with. There might be a way to bring some extra shading to that status- and baby-obsessed nag (not that the two obsessions are at all separate, mind you!), but Brie has yet to find it at this stage.

* Close your eyes and Vincent Kartheiser sounds almost exactly like Steve Buscemi.

* Every once in a while — and I mean every once in a while, not all the time — I’m able to see past the suits and dresses and smart hairstyles like they’re some kind of Magic Eye poster and see the twentysomething kids underneath the Sterling-Coo staff and their significant others. I spent my twenties feeling like I was playacting being an adult, and I damn sure didn’t wear a suit unless someone was dead or getting married, so that’s the experience I’m bringing to the table when evaluating Pete’s ambition or Ken’s good-time sexism or even Betty’s Donna Reed routine. The contrast may not be quite as striking as it is with the medieval-realistic ages of the characters in A Game of Thrones (the book, not the show) but it’s still pretty damn striking. I’m glad I’ve never been didn’t forced to perform adulthood the way they needed to/wanted to.

* Like Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, and (er) Robert Blake before him, Patrick Fischler, aka the Winkie’s dream guy from Mulholland Drive, will forever emit a dark luminosity that is the price of proximity to something terrifying that David Lynch directed. Every time I see his crass and unfunny dinner-jacket insult comic character Jimmy Barrett, I half expect some horrible person from another place to emerge and drive everyone insane. The funny thing, though, is that I first started thinking of him in these terms before his sudden snap into the rawest fury we’ve ever seen from anyone on the show, when he confronts Don about having an affair with his wife. With the flip of a switch he goes from jocular overbearing ballbuster to a curdle-faced desire to utterly annihilate another human being with words: “You’re garbage. And you know it.” The furrow-browed incomprehension on Don’s face was astounding. This is a man far more accustomed to the fawning treatment he received earlier in the episode from the unctuous English Cadillac salesman than he is to somebody telling him “You know what? Your constant terrible behavior does in fact make you a terrible person!” That the messenger was as big a creep as Jimmy Barrett — that Don’s conduct is so loathsome that it has the power to genuinely hurt and disgust even a guy like that — only made it worse. It was a knockout moment.

* The big question for me right now is a related one: What turned Don into Don? I get why he ran away from his past, why he adopted his new identity, but why play it this way, with the heaping helping of amorality? Especially because he doesn’t seem like a bad guy inside? I mean, it’s not just that he obviously cares about his wife and kids — so did Tony Soprano — it’s that the knowledge that what he’s doing would hurt them if they knew about it seems to genuinely be weighing on him. He’s not just thinking of their feelings as pesky inconveniences. Even when he offers to run away with Rachel after Pete finds him out, it’s clear he’s motivated by terror so profound it’s overwhelming his feelings about his family, not that those feelings are ephemeral. (I think that in many ways he hates the life he’s formed with and around his family, but he doesn’t hate Betty, Sally, or Bobby.) So what gives? Is it really as simple as Bobbi’s claim that you find a job and then become the person that does the job, and the person who does Don’s job must needs be a dick?