I HEARD YOU LET THAT LITTLE FRIEND OF MINE TAKE OFF YOUR PARTY DRESS: For thoughtful, cogent analysis of last night's Mad Men, go see Sepinwall. For thoughtless, rambling reactions to it, wait 18 or so hours and check here.
What I thought was most interesting about this episode, aside from the fact that Zoe Bartlet is now old enough to seem too old for this particular gentleman caller, was how Don's spiral manifests itself in so many ways. It's not just the liquor, the clumsy pawing, the lack of suavity with all three of his romantic targets this episode. It's the carelessness with the boundaries that he so meticulously maintained before.
The episode opens with a pretty impressive string of things that would never have happened to the old, more cautious Don. In Season 2, when Jane bought him a shirt for his drawer after noticing that he wasn't living at home, he just about stared a laser through her forehead for acknowledging the existence of a private life. In Season 1, Peggy took hostile fire when she made a foray into the same forbidden zone just to get Don to pay her back for the bail money. And I don't recall a secretary other than Joan sitting down in Don's office except when necessary to make notes or take dictation. But this episode opens with Allison sitting comfortably (who, including Joan, has ever felt comfortable in that seat?), not only referring to Don's private life but being asked to read a private letter. Even when Don is making a show of frustrating strangers' intrusions on his privacy, he's being more careless with it than we've ever seen.
And, of course, it gets worse. In an early (maybe the first) episode of the show, Peggy comes on to Don, believing, from what she's seen, that it's part of her job. Don angrily rebukes her, telling her that she's his secretary, not his girlfriend. Allison is a much better secretary than Peggy ever was, but drunk, incautious, adrift Don, still wearing for Allison the swagger that isn't there for Market Researcher and Nurse Ratched, stumbles right through the modest resistance that Allison's professionalism puts up.
So here's my question: is it that Don has a genuine affection for Allison that he didn't for Peggy and Lois (and that either he doesn't have in the same way for Joan, or that he did have but couldn't act on because of the Joan-Roger relationship), meaning that he'll try to make it up to Allison and Market Researcher's prediction about how he'll be married again in a year may not be that far off the mark? Or is he just so far gone that, in violation of rules that he has always observed, he's newly indifferent to the consequences of his behavior in the workplace?
