“You don’t have Marx, you’ve got a bottle. Is this what you really want to be to them when they need you??”
What up! Hello, hello, we are back in the room. Let’s get down to it, shall we?
image courtesy of Tumblr
Don has no shortage of epiphanies, but has yet to actually commit to change in any concrete way. Like how his first concern is his mistress when the news hits of MLK’s assassination.. woof, bad look. Maybe the fact that Bobby sees Henry as more of a father figure will be a kick in the pants? Who the hell knows. All he knows of the world is what you show him, Don.
On one end of the spectrum, you have the Horror Movie America that is 1968, with that gargantuan cultural shift over the back half of the decade– as seen with the styles/hair, Peggy’s profesh rise, Dawn being hired, et cetera. And then there’s the people stuck in the same old holding pattern; or in Don’s case, falling back on that familiar pattern of banging around after a prolonged attempt to snap the hell out of it.
So it turns out Peggy and Abe are really wrong for each other, holy shit. She doesn’t get the UES apartment she really wants, while Abe sees the bright side; he imagines raising their hypothetical kids in a more ~diverse place~. K. Peggy is taken aback a bit and happy on the surface since he just revealed way more than he thought he did re:the longview, but also feeling backed into a corner. The age old She Should Be Happy about something like this even if it’s not necessarily what she actually wants. Societal expectations sure are a bitch, especially in 1968; ultimately, they have very different goals.
Ay yi yi, Pete Campbell. MLK is assassinated, and natch he rings up Trudy. Let’s be real, the guy just wants to go home. It’s that splash of self-motivated Pete Campbell Shit masquerading as magnanimous, tale as old as time. When he tells Trudy, “I don’t want you to be alone” he’s really saying he doesn’t want to be alone. Thankfully, Trudy stands her ground; Pete’s made his bed, vainly attempting to forge a connection with his Chinese food delivery guy.
SEETHING || image courtesy of 4plebs
And honestly, this is not to say he isn’t mostly correct in his yelling match with Harry.. but he ratchets it all to the next level because he’s ready to pop the fuck off as it is. Like the dearly departed Dr. King, an exceptional and gifted man, Pete feels as if he has been suddenly ripped from his family. But it’s only sudden to him– we could all see it coming from the fucking International Space Station. Don’t shit where you eat, Pete.
Man, Planet of the Apes is iconic; 1968 is a great year for movies. Don takes Bobby to see it to get out of the house, a tried and true method of dealing with tragic events. Between showings, Bobby chats with the usher about how people like going to the movies when they’re sad; they share a human moment, and Don sees his son in a different light, Bobby’s becoming a more fully formed individual. He’s picked out something Don himself does, inferred it, and Don is taken aback.
image courtesy of AMC
“I don’t think I ever wanted to be the man who loves children.. but from the moment they’re born, that baby comes out and you act proud and excited and hand out cigars but you don’t feel anything. Especially if you had a difficult childhood. You want to love them, but you don’t. And the fact that you’re faking that feeling makes you wonder if your own father had the same problem.
Then one day they get older, and you see them do something, and you feel that feeling that you were pretending to have.. and it feels like your heart is going to explode.”
His monologue about his kids is Don at his best and his most honest, a very rare combination– and to me, the most lovable and relatable. In spite of him and Betty arguing over Adult Shit like logistics, Don shows how much he loves his kids and understands them in his own way, bit by bit. And the feelings he describes about the emptiness and lack of engagement upon their birth and how a sudden blaze of terrifying love can kick in later and punch him square in the solar plexus make sense. Evolving as a man in the 60s; heaps of societal expectations there too. It’s a lot to take in, and Megan is quiet while she processes this information dump.
Brass tacks, I think it’s obvious that Don does love his kids a great deal– he’s not a fuckin sociopath, after all. He is, however, completely terrible at sustaining nearly any kind of healthy relationship for a long period of time. And Don being Don, he’s both emotionally perceptive enough to catch when he becomes alienated from his children, and sensitive enough to feel badly about it.. and hopeless enough to do not much of anything about it.
And even though Roger’s friend Randall is a goddamned lunatic, he has a great bit of burnout wisdom.
“This is an opportunity. The heavens are telling us to change.”
the MARS DEN 