Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A | 479 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT Bertram is Evil. Evil!
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 7 | Aired on 2009.09.27
Back at Eclipse Central, parents and children alike have cardboard boxes over their heads, which makes for a fairly amusing tableau, but Don is not participating, and the teacher comes over and asks if he doesn't want to watch it, adding that it only happens once every ten years. They make some small talk about how she'll be off in August, but when he, perhaps too pointedly, says he'll be around despite the fact that the place is a ghost town during that month, the teacher takes it as an overture: "You're all the same -- the drinking, the philandering." Hmm, this is interesting, because she obviously made advances to him that were at the very least overly familiar, and did so while drunk. Not only that, she's rewriting history on another front, because she told Don, both verbally and in ways unspoken, he was not like other dads at their last meeting. I think this exchange is very telling and thematic and ties in strongly to the eclipse -- I don't know if I can even articulate it particularly well, but I think the point is to remind us that, like looking at the sun, looking directly at people and seeing what's really there is a forbidden and potentially destructive thing in this era. Like most parallels, I don't know that it completely holds up in every aspect, but in this case, the teacher let Don view something about her other people perhaps haven't seen (and keep in mind that even if there was an attraction, it was motivated by her feelings about a young child's loss of a parent, so it was deeply personal), and because of that, he now holds the power in the relationship. And knowing this makes her angry and scared, which is why she's lashing out in this clumsy way and accusing Don of impropriety. But interestingly, he doesn't use that knowledge to dominate her, at least not here, nor has he done so with other people -- witness how he reacted after learning huge secrets about Sal and Peggy. He could easily bring up that phone call here, but he doesn't. Instead, he convinces her either that he's not being inappropriate or that he's too charming for her to care, maybe both, although she does suggest that people as rich as tend to live in their area get bored more easily than others. Don denies that he's bored, and they gaze into each other's eyes, but Sally interrupts and calls the teacher over to look at the eclipse with her. Don, for his part, finally puts his sunglasses on and stares up into the sky, and it's at this point that the sun is declared legally blind.