Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A- | 415 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT There's That Past, Informing the Present Again
By Couch Baron | Season 4 | Episode 5 | Aired on 2010.08.22
...before marching into Sally's room, and kind of heartbreakingly, Sally's sitting on her bed not even having taken her coat off, like, I don't think Betty's going to turn you out on the street quite yet, kid. Well, at least not as long as Henry's around. Betty grabs Sally by the chin and tells her she doesn't do such things, especially not in public, and when Sally denies any wrongdoing Betty threatens to cut her fingers off. Trying to one-up your mother, eh Bets? Betty tells Sally to go to bed...
...and then heads there herself, lighting a cigarette and saying how mortified she is before telling Henry what happened. She throws up her hands and asks what's wrong with the kid, and Henry pushes the idea of therapy for Sally, apparently not for the first time. What is new, however, is that Betty tells him about her stint seeing a psychiatrist, adding that she doesn't think it helps anything. Well, no, not when the shrink is reporting to your husband on the sly and then you find out about it. That truly does not help anything. Henry, however, says his daughter benefitted tremendously from seeing a child psychiatrist he found through her school, and he's not even so convinced that anything's so wrong with Sally, but it's obvious that her recent behavior has been hard on both her and Betty. When he tries to probe a little more about Betty's experience, she shuts that line of questioning down, but she does seem to have heard him about the Sally idea. I should also note that whatever demands are being placed on Henry's time these days, he apparently still works out, because for someone who looks and acts (and we've been there before, but ew) old enough to be Betty's dad, dude is in shape.
In a development that I can't imagine signals any good news, Don asks Miss Blankenship if she's had any luck with a call to California, and Miss Blankenship tells him there was no answer. She then announces "Misters Peters and Pryce" to see him, which means Pete and Pryce, of course, in case you lost your Blankenship-to-English dictionary. Pete's not sure what's going on -- he got a call from his contact Masao saying the meeting was a disaster, but then the guy turned around and called Pryce and set a time for their presentation. However, Bertram and Roger then enter, and Roger, apparently having had a talking-to from the only person he regards as senior to him, apologizes for his behavior and says he realizes he shouldn't limit their potential business in any way. The bad news, however, as Bertram sees it, is that they should have gotten a gift back from the Honda people, and the absence of one suggests they only fixed the meeting with the expectation that SCDP would use it to resign from the competition.