There is a limit to the charm of Don Draper and he seems to be reaching it in the late spring of 1968.
There, soon after his bold merger with Ted Shaw’s firm, he immediately stops going to meetings and tries to get his new partner drunk. “Move on,” an irked Peggy tells him.
One guy calls him “a cold fish”; Shaw himself will only say he’s mysterious.
And then there’s that doctor’s wife with whom he’s been having an affair. With the episode beginning with a big fight and the doctor heading to the Mayo Clinic to do his heart transplant work, the wife calls Don and says she needs him.
He has her meet him at a hotel room and then he goes all 50 Shades of Grey Flannel on her, ordering her around to crawl on her hands and knees, ordering to stay in the room and wait for him, because she’s there only for his pleasure and even stealing her paperback of McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show” because he’s a jerk.
At first I thought it was another one of his well thought out Draper campaigns: Make her hate him for being such a jerk, and then walking away from the relationship with no strings.
Instead, after hanging out in that hotel for a couple of days, she’s the one who finally wises up and tells him it’s over. That doesn’t happen to old Don too often and he seems crushed.
But it’s not the worst thing that’s happening in the world that week, as Bobby Kennedy is shot in a Los Angeles hotel. Megan is all broken up about it, like any American, and Don is just brooding about his own life. He is a cold fish.