Mad Men/Headscratchers

• Betty Draper's sniping of the pigeons at the end of "Shoot". Crowning Moment of Awesome to some, a touch of Disproportionate Retribution to me. The Draper's neighbor is raising the birds, and their dog Polly grabs one in her mouth, injuring but not killing it. The neighbor snaps at Sally that if the dog comes into his yard, he'll shoot it. Now granted, he that's a pretty dickish thing to say, particularly to a kid, and Betty mentions that she'll talk to him to see what happened (she never does). Cut to the end of the episode where, after being dumped from the modeling shoot, she grabs an air rifle and starts taking potshots at the birds as they fly by. Look, the guy was a jerk to your daughter, but I'd be annoyed too if a dog had randomly grabbed one of my trained birds. He didn't threaten Sally herself, and you have no way of knowing if he even meant what he said. So without checking in to get this guy's side of the story and without any other provocation, Betty decides to do what the neighbor had previously only threatened. Bad form.
  • Betty is well-established to have mental issues.
  • Or you could look at it from a completely different standpoint. Much of the episode drew significant parallels between Betty and those pigeons - pretty little housepets, beloved but trapped in their gilded cages (there's a good reason why Don's nickname for her was Birdy). It's very plausible that she didn't intend to kill the pigeons with that gun, but to scare them away, in hopes that they might fly away and live the life of freedom that she herself couldn't obtain. You'll note that she didn't seem to actually hit any of them. Maybe Betty's just a poor shot (which several of her family members should probably be grateful for), but I'd imagine it was intentional. Of course, as season 3 developments would indicate, she probably didn't know that domestic animals tend not to do so well in the wild...
    • That's brilliant!
• Joan keeping Roger's baby. It just drives me up a wall because it's the soap-opera way out, considering they pulled a bait-and-switch. And we all know it's going to end SO BADLY.
  • Consider the following: It is implied that Joan has already had several abortions before. She isn't getting any younger, and her biological clock is probably ticking very loud. Abortions do, as far as i know, not exactly increase the chance of conception. She is insanely scared that she'll end up as a lonely, childless spinster, because she wasted her biological prime having an affair with a dirty old man which was going nowhere. This fear is why she married that jerkass, rapist, failure of a doctor in the first place. Besides that, she seems to really love Roger. There are quite a few reasons for her not to have the abortion, which aren't all shallow Soap Opera ones.
  • Abortions have no effect on your chances of conception unless something goes wrong. Given that all the "procedures" shown are apparently performed by doctors (Joan's first one was performed by a midwife -- "midwife" is a protected term now, although I don't know if that concept existed then -- rather than a doctor, but she would have known if something went really wrong), I think we can safely assume her previous abortions are not a factor in her fertility. Whether Joan knows this for sure/believes it may be a different matter.
  • Abortions may not affect your fertility, but they do affect your chances of carrying a baby to term.
    • Having a safe abortion has no effect on a woman's future pregnancies. It's possible that the first procedure Joan had may have left her with permanent complications, but modern surgical abortions do not.
  • Okay, let's assume Joan has had safe abortions and hypothetically would have no difficulty conceiving a baby or carrying it to term. But, does she know that? The further we go back into history, the less and less information women are allowed to know about the reproductive facts we take today as a given. And maybe she's worried the next abortion would go wrong, and she wouldn't be able to have the kid after this.
• Joan's husband deciding to give his wife stitches at the dinner table for a deep incision in the hand with a kitchen knife instead of taking her to the hospital. I get he's qualified and, has the proper tools but damn it take her to the hospital!
  • Well, that was the point. He insisted over her objections.
    • Yeah, but it still just bugs me.
      • so you're saying the scene had its desired effect then
        • Greg's always been shown as insecure and needing to assert his power over Joan--hence his infamous rape of her before they married. Insisting on taking care of her injury himself is the flip side of this same coin. We know he's not that good a doctor, so he needs to prove to her he has what it takes to stitch her cut.
• No one ever seems to have looked for the Real Don Draper besides Anna. Was he an orphan with no siblings or friends? It's possible that whoever was looking went to Anna and was told they'd been divorced and she didn't know where he was. But it's still odd that this man who supposedly returned alive from Korea just vanished.
  • Real Don seemed like something of a jerk. He didn't really care about Anna, only marrying her as a consolation prize because her sister wasn't available. She didn't appear to be all that upset when she found out he died. Maybe no one liked him enough to care that he was missing.
  • Perhaps it just wasn't out of character for him to come back to the states, abandon his wife, and start selling cars in Jersey.
  • The 60s were a lot different than today. How exactly would someone (presumably in the Western US based on Anna living in California) look for him? First of all after the Korean war would you really think twice if an acquaintance or friend failed to return home? It would take an extremely dedicated friend to go beyond asking his wife about it...They didn't have Facebook or the internet to look names up, where would they even start? The one person who realistically would look for him, his wife, did so. Who else would even know he didn't die, and would go cross country to track down someone who most likely never came back from the battlefield? It would be jarring and completely unbelievable for someone other than his wife to guess he might be alive at all, let alone somehow track him down.

• Lane Pryce is panicking in "Christmas Waltz" because he owes the British government a lot of money in back taxes. He is apparently being double taxed in the US and UK since there are no tax treaties in effect yet. However, he lives and works in the US at this point so why is he so desperate? He could have his lawyer try stalling for a few months until he can raise the money and avoid going back to Britain for a while.
  • He would almost certainly lose his visa and be extradited for trial.