"Mad Men": Episode 12, "The Mountain King"

Joan Holloway: Her heart was smashed to bits on the floor of Draper's office by the man she thought she loved when her doctor-fiance Greg forces himself on her out of a mix of jealousy of Joan's past with other man and pure sadism. He must be a crummy doctor.

It was heartbreaking to watch (though tastefully played so as to not veer into cringe territory), especially after we'd seen Joan stopped at the first hint of discomfort on Greg's part in an earlier scene in the episode. It was almost as hard to see her still trying to keep up appearances about her Christmas wedding plans a day later as Peggy is moving in to the office next door to Don's. Such a role reversal for those two (Peggy and Joan) over the course of the past two seasons.

Joan's relationship is obviously a lost cause, but Roger didn't do Joan any favors by going out of his way to indicate to Greg that he knew Joan pretty well (well enough to know that she doesn't much like French food) when she introduces them at Sterling Cooper.

Betty Draper: She's still on an emotional roller coaster, careening from behavior that is, in fits and starts, completely juvenile and the right thing to do for a woman in her predicament, i.e. leveling with daughter Sally at long last about the state of mommy and daddy's relationship. But poking at the wound of her ostensible friend Sarah Beth for having an affair with creepy stable-boy Arthur -- especially after Betty went out of her way to throw them together at a lunch date a few episodes back -- is nonsensical.

Sarah Beth calls her on it -- "My god, you are an awful woman, you know that?" -- and it's that slap in the face that seems to push Betty to finally be somewhat straight with Sally. It recalled the literal slap in the face scene with divorcee Helen Bishop toward the end of last season when Helen realizes that Betty isn't exactly discouraging her son Glen's fixation on the woman he thinks of as a "princess."

Pete Campbell: What's he got against chicken? I think it was a roasted chicken on the plate that he sends hurtling on to the sidewalk below their high-rise apartment. Pete hasn't gotten over his adoption-phobia, and it's putting incredible strain on his marriage to Trudy. I have suspected that Trudy was too smart, and too coddled by her mommy and daddy, to take much grief from Pete for long. Wonder if the end is near for those two?

Interestingly, as it relates to his work and his interaction with Peggy -- Pete actually seems to be growing up, a lot. He has dirt on Draper for his disappearance during the L.A. trip but hasn't blabbed it immediately to the Sterling Cooper multitudes. (Biding his time, no doubt.) He's hunkering down on the assignment he was handed by Don before he went AWOL, namely to figure out a way to push aerospace/defense projects in such a way that members of Congress politically can't afford to vote against them. As I've been saying for a while, I get the sense that the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis is going to help that cause before the season is out -- after all we are in early October 1962.

And in his dealings with Peggy, Pete of all people is starting to actually treat her like an almost-equal. When he comes into Peggy's new office and finds her sipping scotch from Freddy Rumsen's old bar, he sounds 100% sincere when he tells her "congratulations" on her new digs. Wasn't he the one who suggested to her that she might command Freddy's office, when he was trying to calm her down after he set Freddy's dismissal in motion? The mean-spirited, bitter reaction to Peggy's move by Paul Kinsey (who tries to portray himself as Mr. Progressive but in fact he's come back from Mississippi dumped by his Freedom Rider gal pal) and Harry Crane (he's such a doofus -- he's gonna vote for Nixon in '68 for sure) only reinforces how different Pete's response is.

And the quip that Peggy gives Pete about how she's sleeping with Don -- "It's really working out" -- is such a sign of how far Peggy has come. First season Peggy would never have been able to think, let alone deliver, such a line. And that Pete doesn't blink but takes it immediately as a joke is telling too.

Bert Cooper: I've suspected that a lot of his ditzy-ness was an act, and now I'm sure of it. He has huge reservations about the merger with Brit agency Putnam, Powell and Lowe, which Duck Phillips set in motion in the last seg. Cooper voted to accept the Putnam offer but that last lingering shot of him thinking hard at his desk makes you think he's got another move up his sleeve, fer sure. "You can't trust the Brits," he opines.

Roger Sterling: Roger is getting a huge blast of what his post-divorce life is going to be like with Jane. Snickers and snide comments at every turn. Bert Cooper delivers a zinger in chiding Roger for putting him "in a position of having to sell off my life's work because you have an increase in overhead," re: paying off Mona and taking care of his youthful intended, Jane.

But the most cutting remark comes from Bert Cooper's younger sister, and Sterling Cooper full partner, Alice Cooper. (Look, you can't blame them for writing in this joke; if I had a character named Cooper in my show I'd do the same. Heck, I'd probably have had her humming "Under My Wheels" just to drive home the point.) When she notes that the sale proceeds could really help Roger take care of his "children," Roger corrects her by noting that he only has one daughter. "Really?" Alice replies, with a knowing look. It takes Roger a second, but he gets it. Boy does he get it.

And finally, Don Draper: Wow. We peel back at least one layer of the Dick Whitman/Don Draper mystery, complete with flashbacks to big-hair, 1950s Don, but it only leaves us out of breath and begging for more. Here's what I pieced together from the explicit and non-explicit info provided (and would most appreciate reader insights).

The woman who confronted Don in the flashback to his car salesman days was indeed the real Don Draper's wife, Anna, who appears to have had polio or some illness that left her with a limp (I'm thinking she's wearing leg braces from childhood polio).

It appears that Dick Whitman summoned all his charm, and he and Anna came to an agreement to continue the charade of him being Don Draper and theirs being a marriage of convenience where no romantic relationship was expected. Anna drops hints that her marriage to the real Don Draper was no picnic; he wanted to marry her sister, "who looks just like me with two good legs," Anna confesses to Dick. (All in all a fab perf from Melinda Page Hamilton as Anna. She eases right into the role as if she's been in "Mad Men" ensemble from the get-go.)

It appears that Don and Anna lived for a time in the San Pedro area of L.A. (Minutemen fans are going to be so excited; they love the town that the locals call "Pee-dro") But I do not think they are in Los Angeles the first time we see Anna confront Dick, in the car dealership flashback earlier this season. I'm thinking they run away to the far edge of the U.S. after they form their weird alliance. Were they just two lonely people who needed each other at that moment?

We know that Don/Dick has helped support Anna all these years, and that they've stayed in touch here and there. She references that he's paid for the house, etc. She knows that Don has two kids and a wife, and that he's in advertising. And hallelujah -- the mystery from the closing scene of the season two is solved. Anna is the one that Don sent the book of poetry "Meditations in an Emergency" to.

There's still something that Anna did for him in his transition from Dick to Don that hasn't been spelled out. It doesn't seem like she came from money, so it must be some other twist. Perhaps it's just that she didn't bust him to the world as an imposter when she could have.

"What am I going to do with you?" Anna muses out loud in the flashback scene in Dick Whitman's apartment, as he's lamely trying to convince her she's wrong. Later, in the present-day, Anna tells Dick/Don: "I've always felt we met so that both of our lives could be better."

And to my mind, we finally got a confession out of Don. When he's talking to Anna about his predicament at home, he says flatly "I ruined everything: my family, my wife, my kids." He also makes it clear that his brother's suicide is still weighing on his conscience. In one of the Don-Anna flashbacks, Anna tells him "you're in the lavender haze" as he's describing how he feels about his new girlfriend Betty.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the revelation of Anna's existence is that here is the one person in the world that Don is comfortable with, because he's not really Don to her, he's Dick. Remarkable also that Don could have this kind of relationship with a woman, given his history. But again, he didn't choose this particular relationship. He had to adjust to it. "What are you going to do to me," he asks Anna nervously in the flashback.

It's telling that when Don confesses to having screwed up on the home front, Anna tells him flatly that "you love her" and he doesn't correct her. Seems like he would have in the moment if he had gone totally cold to Betty. His boozy discussion with Roger a few episodes back about how he was "relieved" at the separation from Betty was just that -- a macho response that may have been true at the time, but by now a few more weeks have gone by and the ache has set in.

Not even the promise of wanton carnal adventures with the "Jet Set" could combat how bad Don feels about screwing up the life he worked so hard, in such a twisted way, to achieve. The dialogue in this scene is so natural and well delivered by Jon Hamm. A guy in this head space would not be speaking in perfectly formed sentences.

"I've been watching my life. It's right there. I keep scratching at it trying to get into it. I can't," he tells Anna.

There's not a lot of Betty in this episode, but what is shown seems to be further evidence of her having to grow up in a hurry, under duress. She's become good at forging Don's signature for checks. Maybe that's a sign that she's on her way to taking charge of her home and filling some of Don's void. She's taken a baby step with Sally but the one you really gotta feel sorry for is Bobby.

The Tarot card reading scene between Don and Anna was fabulous (Weiner's "Weiner Bros." vanity card is fashioned as a Tarot card, of course) but more revealing than Anna's reading was the shot of Don looking out the window and noting how nice it is to "smell the ocean." Bobbie Barrett, anyone? Remember how hesitant Don was when Bobbie asked him if he liked the ocean. And when Don and Bobbie were on their ill-fated trek to her beach house and had the smash-up in his car? It's almost as if Don didn't want to make it to Bobbie's, so as not to sully his memory of the sea on the other side of the country. And maybe the prospect of visiting Anna was the real reason he butted his way into the L.A. trip with Pete in the first place. (And the shots in the Tarot scene of Don fixing Anna's wobbly chair, of course, recalled the chair that he didn't fix at his own home, to Betty's destructive dismay.)

The closing shot of Don walking into the ocean with his pants on brought to mind James Mason suicide-by-sea in "A Star is Born." At first I wasn't sure how it was going to go, but then after he's washed over by the first wave his head bobs back up. To have that set to George Jones' plaintive wail on "A Cup of Loneliness" is fairly inspired. It reinforces Anna's earlier line about Don only telling himself that he's alone in the world. (A reader points out that it's a form of baptism, of being reborn and cleansing sin, etc. And Anna did talk up the resurrection card in her reading of Don.)

There were two moments that were intriguing but I couldn't readily plug into the puzzle. One was the exchange that Don/Dick has in flashback form with the hot rod enthusiasts. Is it one of them that draws him into advertising, perhaps? (There's some confusion about whether this scene is flashback or not. Smarter "Mad Men" observers than I say contempo so I'm going with the flow. If it is contempo, then I'm thinking that Don/Dick must be looking at the father and son and thinking about how it could be a weekend hobby for him and Bobby.)

The other was in the scene between Betty and Sally, where Betty gives her the riding gear and tries to enlighten her about mommy and daddy's "disagreement." When Sally reacts as Betty gets off the couch and says "Mommy, you're bleeding" -- I presume it means menstrual blood? (My Variety colleague Kathy Lyford points out that it could be a miscarriage -- after all Betty and Don did have sex recently -- or a harbinger of an illness that could bring Don back in the picture. Or maybe she's pregnant.)

Other thoughts:

**What a feint in the first scene with Anna and Don at her house with the pre-teen boy playing the piano. Our minds are left to race for a minute until it's made clear that, no, this is not a child Don bailed on but a piano student of "Mrs. Draper." The piece he was plunking out, "In the Hall of the Mountain King," gives the episode its title and hails from Edvard Grieg's music for Henrik Ibsen's "Peer Gynt," an epic poem that revolves around a self-centered, commitment-phobic, inveterate liar who embarks on a journey through the four corners of the earth. And he's the son of a peasant. (I didn't know any of this until looking it up, BTW.)

**Great moments with Salvatore Romano: In discussing the allure of Popsicles, he recalls how his mother would go out to the ice cream truck with young Salvatore and his siblings to buy Popsicles and "give it to us like Jesus at the Last Supper."

**Great moments with Peggy Olson: She pieces together the key selling point of the ritual of Popsicle distribution among families. "It's like communion," she says. "The Catholic Church knows how to sell things," she adds.

**We learn that Ken Cosgrove is from Vermont and had to make his own ice cream as a kid. I don't know if I trust a man who didn't eat Popsicles as a kid.

**Alice Cooper is looking out for Roger Sterling: "Let Roger Sterling have what he's always wanted: To die in the arms of a 20-year-old." Sis doesn't treat Bert much better. Countering her brother's obsessive-compulsiveness about keeping shoes from treading across his carpet, Alice explains: "My pantyhose cost more than your carpet." And yes, as many other "Mad Men" bloggers have pointed out, there was an unmistakable reference to Alice's femme companion Florence.

**Management 101 with Roger Sterling: He or she who asks for the empty office gets it. "You young women are very aggressive...It's cute," he tells Peggy when she stops him on his way out to talk about the office. "There's 30 men out there who didn't have the balls to ask me" for the office, he adds.

**What happened with Don's suitcase arriving back home from his L.A. jaunt the end of the previous seg? Surprised it wasn't addressed in any way, but maybe in the finale next week. Sally mentions it briefly in the opening scene when Betty's shoving her into the closet after catching her smoking in the bathroom. (Thanks, readers.) That's a pretty jarring image all on its own -- an 8-year-old wanting to be like the adults, I suppose. And once again, Betty's parenting instincts leave much to be desired. Hair-pulling and then shoving her in a closet? Weird.

**Quotation below is from from "Peer Gynt." It's the lead character's mother berating her son for telling her a whopper about how he killed an animal in the forest.

Yes, a lie, turned topsy-turvy,

can be prinked and tinselled out,

decked in plumage new and fine,

till none knows its lean old carcass.

That is just what you've been doing,

vamping up things, wild and grand,

garnishing with eagles' backs

and with all the other horrors,

lying right and lying left,

filling me with speechless dread,

till at last I recognised not

what of old I'd heard and known!