Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A- | 1420 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT All the Real Girls
By Couch Baron | Season 4 | Episode 9 | Aired on 2010.09.19
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Early in the episode, Roger tries to hit on Joan, but after she leaves his office in an even less amused mood than normal, Caroline tells him that Greg is going straight to Vietnam from basic training. To make his ill-timed insensitivity up to her, Roger sends her two women to give her a massage and manicure, which makes me wish he were around to hurt my feelings sometime. The next day, Miss Blankenship dies in the office in an extremely unceremonious way even for someone who wasn't the Queen of Perversions, and even though the whole thing kind of turns into Weekend At Miss Blankenship's, which I assume is evocative enough to obviate any further explanation, Roger takes the whole thing very hard, and before you know it he and Joan are going out for dinner, after which the two of them get mugged for everything they have, including Joan's wedding ring, and the raw emotion of the incident prompts them to have sex right then and there. The next day, Joan tells Roger she has no regrets, but that doesn't change the fact that they're married to other people. Roger, however, informs her that he's interested in seeing where this goes, and I said at the end of last season that I thought the two of them might be headed back into each other's arms, but now that Greg really is gone and we haven't seen Jane in ages, the possibility seems a lot more tangible.
Joyce and Peggy go out for a drink, and soon, Abe, that cute guy that ended up in the closet with Peggy during the police raid, turns up, and Joyce does a girl a solid and leaves the two of them alone. In talking business, Abe drops the bomb that SCDP client Fillmore Auto Parts won't hire African-Americans, but when Peggy compares that discrimination to the kind she endures as a woman, Abe takes issue with it, which leads to a quick end to their impromptu date. The next day, with Fillmore execs in attendance for a pitch meeting, Abe shows up to see Peggy with a piece he wrote entitled "Nuremberg On Madison Avenue," which Peggy begs him not to publish as she thinks it could get her fired. However, when she pitches Harry Belafonte as a potential spokes-singer for Fillmore and gets shot down in a "They're racists, honey" way, it leaves her something to think about. Like, in a "Is this the career path I want?" way.
Last week's discretion has been abandoned with extreme prejudice as Don and Faye are enjoying some rather energetic nooners, but the fun ends when Sally turns up at SCDP in the hands of a stranger who found her on the train into the city with no money, and when Don calls Betty to chew her out, Betty tells him he can see what it's like to deal with her for a change. Don asks Faye to take Sally to his apartment while he deals with the Miss Blankenship fiasco, and when he gets home, Sally has cottoned on to the fact that there's something between Don and Faye, and Don later seems happy that Sally has a reasonably decent opinion of her. Also, Sally, who even with the jaunt into the city seems to be a lot more together thanks to the psychiatry, tells Don she wants to live with him full-time, and although he tells her that can't happen I wonder if his mind is really completely closed to the idea, especially not after he wakes up to find that Sally has made him French toast for breakfast. In return, he takes her to the zoo before going to work, but when it comes time for her to leave, she flips out and causes a scene, and even though Don tries to get Faye to help, only Megan, who's temporarily taken over for Miss Blankenship, is able to calm Sally down so she can be delivered into Betty's arms. After she's gone, Faye freaks out on Don for putting her in such a difficult position with his kid, and he apologizes, but after she leaves, he takes a sip of the drink she made for herself. Well, AA might frown on it, but I'm inclined to let it go.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We open on Don forcefully telling someone on the other end of the phone that no, they are getting together today, and he's going to clear lunch plus one hour so they can discuss things face to face. However, when we cut to his living room and hear some rhythmic pounding and loud female grunting, you realize that the first bit was all about scheduling a nooner, and since the woman being pleasured is Faye, it seems it didn't take that long for Don to be ready for the full trip around the bases. After cutting to his bedroom, we see that he knocked over a lamp in his ardor, and when Faye amusedly asks if it's broken, Don asks, "The lamp?" Don, you may think it's funny, but can you imagine how different this show would be if Don Draper's dick didn't function? He should take out an insurance policy on that thing.
After a bit of pillow talk, Faye wonders which of them is going to look at the clock first, and Don admits that he caught a view of it when he was picking the lamp up, and he's already late for a Secor meeting. Faye tells him she has a four o'clock at "Erwin Wasey," but declines to share the specifics, and when Don tries to get her to spill what she's working on over there, she asks him if he knows what a Chinese wall is. Well, if he doesn't, I have a feeling he will soon. But I'm guessing he does, as he gives up asking, instead saying he should go, and when Faye asks if she can get in the bathroom first, he encourages her to take her time, and it's clear from the way he gets dressed that he's leaving immediately. Reading people as well as she does, she probably is too savvy to be surprised that he's returning to the office with the smell of sex all over him, but she does raise an eyebrow at the fact that he's willing to leave her alone in his place. He playfully replies that he's taking all the interesting stuff with him, and the fact that he's still got no shirt on kind of emphasizes the truth of that statement. Faye giggles, and Don heads out...
...while at SCDP, Roger is on the phone heatedly asking if whoever it is really doesn't think his book is better than Ogilvy's. "Mine's got a story!" That's hilarious, considering a large bit of what we heard had to do with his thoughts on comedy duos and the ice cream he was allowed to eat as a child. Roger adds that his book has actual examples of how to sell things, which makes me wonder if this is a book about him or Don, and then when the buzzer rings, he puts whoever it is on hold. Caroline informs him that Jane is on the phone and she's leaving for the weekend, and Roger barks that it's only Wednesday and they have phones in Southampton besides. When he tries to go back to the phone conversation, however, the person is gone, either because Roger disconnected him or, far more likely, the person was like, "Wait, I'm HOLDING to hear more of this bullshit why, exactly?" and hung up.