Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B+ | 1465 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT Half the Battle
By Couch Baron | Season 4 | Episode 8 | Aired on 2010.09.12
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.On the heels of Don opening up to Peggy last week, it makes sense that this week he follows by voicing over a bunch of his innermost thoughts to the audience. First, though, Joey pisses off Joan yet again, and when she calls him into her office to chew him out, he sends it ten horribly disrespectful and inappropriate levels up, which is terrible timing since she's super upset that her husband is really REALLY about to leave for basic training. The result is that Joan seems to want to get rid of him even though Creative needs him to retool a Mountain Dew campaign, and when he leaves a pornographic drawing of her in plain sight, she essentially tells all the boys that she can't wait for them to die in Vietnam, causing Peggy to take the drawing in to Don and demand justice. He tells her just to fire Joey, which she does, and as much as I'll miss Matt Long it was well enough justified. Joan, however, doesn't appreciate Peggy stepping in to handle something she was already all over, and with her typically acerbic economy of words lets her know how much she thinks Peggy screwed both of them. Sisters aren't yet quite doing it for themselves, apparently.
Don has finally admitted to himself that he has a drinking problem, which we learn about via a journal he's keeping, and said revelation also causes him to see his and everyone else's alcohol consumption in a new light. He's also taking some exercise at a local pool, which lets him know he has a smoking problem as well, but he's only interested in working on one issue at a time. He takes Bethany out for dinner, and after she tells him she needs a bit more from him as far as their relationship goes, as luck would have it, Betty and Henry happen upon them while out for some dinner about Henry being involved in an upcoming John Lindsay political campaign, and Bethany seems secretly heartened by the fact that she and Betty are rather similar in physical type. She hasn't laid eyes on Faye yet, though. Betty, for her part, is rather upset at seeing Don out, which causes a nasty enough fight between her and Henry on the way home while Bethany is blowing Don in the back of a cab. The next day, Betty apologizes, but Henry's not satisfied, and calls Don for a little dick-measuring contest regarding space in the garage, and no, I'm not making that up, because boys are stupid. Sometime after, Francine (WOO!) shows up, and Betty tells her what happened, prompting Francine to advise her to tread lightly where Don is concerned.
The next day, Don observes Faye yelling at, presumably, her boyfriend on the office pay phone, and later, after they go over some work, he invites her out to dinner, and she accedes to a Saturday date. In the cab afterwards, they make out heavily, but when she suggests she come back to his place, he does the right thing for the first time all season and tells her he's only going to take her home. He follows this coup up by semi-crashing Baby Gene's party, and even though Henry is displeased, Betty has made peace with Don being involved with the kids, and a small part of her might even long for the time when the two of them were together. Honey, all I can say is they didn't get Francine out of mothballs for nothing, you know?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We start with a long shot of Don diving into a laned pool as he voices over that it's said that as soon as you have to cut down on your drinking, you have a drinking problem, and I'm glad that he's finally becoming aware of his alcohol abuse, even if it sounds like the "they" in this case is Bazooka Joe. Cut to Don writing these DVOs down in a journal as he goes on that his mind is a jumble and he can't organize his thoughts, "and typing feels like work." And I'm guessing with Miss Blankenship as his secretary, he's having to do a lot more of it to cut down on random spelling errors and his correspondence ending up in Timbuktu. By the way, even though Don is home and this is apparently a day off work, he's dressed and groomed and not entertaining women whose names he forgot/never knew/is not interested in because they're prostitutes, so between this and the journal, it seems like last week's interaction with Peggy plus the closure of Anna's death may have inspired him at least to try to pull himself out of his downward spiral. Also, while we're here, it's definitely a departure for this show to employ voice-over so heavily when (a) I don't remember it ever having used it and (b) it by definition somewhat sacrifices the subtext and ambiguity that the show revels in. However, I think it makes sense for this episode given that, thanks to both the increasing prevalence of people talking about their feelings this season and him being at a real crossroads, he's engaging in self-examination for the first time in his life; we really do need to know what he's thinking in order to advance the story they're trying to tell here.
Anyway, Don sips some coffee as he confesses he's never written more than two hundred and fifty words at a time, not even in high school, and if he actually existed I'd love to show him a recap so he could blanch at the length and then laugh at me. He pronounces his old self lazy and then expresses his regret that he never graduated, as "everything could have been different." If he's saying that he then could have gone on to college, I hate to disappoint him, but he wouldn't even have made it past the application process writing only two hundred and fifty words. Either that, or I did it waaaaaaay wrong.
Cut back to the pool, where Don finishes up a lap and then coughs in such a smokerly way that the lifeguard asks him if he's okay, and Don waves him away all "Just let me hack some yellow stuff up into your pool and then I'll do another couple laps." Not that he's the only one, I'm sure.