'Have a Nice Holiday': Mad Men Recapped

Or maybe "dewy" is overstating things. Certainly nothing good will come of any of this at home, where Don has been sleeping in the baby's room for weeks and Betty has resolved to follow through with a divorce. It's all dizzyingly certain: She will consult an attorney (with Henry Francis's aid, natch) and suggests Don do the same. Betty is actually doing this. Old Don rears his head: "You should see a doctor -- a good one this time." She replies with withering clarity, "You think I'd need to be sick to want out of this?"

It's the last civilized conversation the two of them will have for a while, fueling the slightly too-convenient showdown to come. After all, she and Henry plan to hit Reno, establish residency and be divorced in six weeks flat. Meanwhile, Don tilts and reels in confusion as Roger raises the Henry Francis matter over reconciliatory cocktails, as if his old friend could have known his wife was imagining a new life with a guy Don's never heard of. Suddenly the viewer is Peggy Olson to Matthew Weiner's Don Draper, sat down in the 11th hour and told to believe, "This is how it's gonna go." It all taints Don and Betty's late-night bedroom confrontation to some degree, which isn't necessarily any less riveting for the sheer clifhanger-y implications of it all: "You're good, and everyone else is baaaad," Don sneers, clutching her close by her nightgown like a sailor in the drunken prelude to a bar brawl. "You're a whore." He'll fight her, take the kids, keep every nickel. She'll go to Reno, she replies, and Don will consent.

And you know what? He will. He'll even call later to reverse himself: "I'm not going to fight you. [...] I hope you get what you always wanted." It's all a part of settling his karmic bill -- the expensive lying, identity theft, infidelity... all that oppressive presumption that seeped through his pores like some hot, toxic vapor. But as Connie alludes early on, don't pity Don. Rather, pity the little ones: Sally and Bobby for starters, who don't know whom to trust in their parents' bust-up. Their helplessness is crushing, as is that of the children of the Sterling Cooper divorce. Take Paul Kinsey, visibly haunted (in a single shot) by the family that left him behind. Or Ken Cosgrove, who thrived in an appartus of comfort, stability and opportunity. It's gone now, usurped by a patriarchy that's fled home and left its young ones for dead. And those who survive will never trust their families again -- at least not until their own Connie Hiltons come calling, jolting them out of the embittered complacency of their own middle age.

For now, though, it's all about adjusting to new life, for better and for worse. Particularly for worse, in the long, cold shadow of the season finale. But 1964 will be here before we know it; Pete has probably landed the first Beatles ad account already. Onward ho.

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