Mad Men: I don't want to be a Dick

Spoilers for episode five of "Mad Men" coming up just as soon as I hit the newsstand...

"Who is Donald Draper?"

That is indeed the question, young Adam Whitman, and will no doubt continue to be the central narrative pillar of "Mad Men." The show's not much on plot, but the mystery of Don's true identity -- not just his birth name, which we now know, but how and why he is who he is -- is a lot more interesting than any procedural cop story I watched in all the fall pilots.

In an episode where Jon Hamm has a lot of great moments, I think my favorite may be right at the end. Don's returned from paying off his brother to go away forever and is completely out of sorts. Betty tells him, "I want to talk to you about something, and I don't want you to get upset," and the look on his face is priceless, because there's such a long list of potential secrets Betty could have uncovered: the Dick Whitman thing, Midge, Rachel Menken, etc. No wonder Don's big brainstorm for their banking client was the secretive "Executive Account" -- if ever a man needed such a thing, it's Don, who has so much going on behind the scenes that his secretary assumes she's covering for one scandal (Midge) when it's something else entirely (Adam).

Though we now know for sure that the Dick Whitman incident on the train in episode three wasn't a case of mistaken identity, there's still a lot here that remains unclear. Did Dick/Don fake his death, or did Adam and the family just assume he was dead when he didn't come home after Korea? Is there identity theft going on, or just Don escaping the shame of his family, whatever that is? How long ago did he leave? Adam makes reference to seeing Dick/Don in his uniform, after his "death," when Adam was only 8. We know Don's service was in Korea (I have that straight from the creator's mouth, and there's a more explicit reference to it in an upcoming episode), which would put it less than a decade in the past, but Adam's clearly not a teenager. So either I misheard, the line was a continuity error, the producers mistakenly believed Jay Paulson could pass for 18, or something more complicated is going on.

Regardless, Adam is quite a bit younger than Don. He almost certainly can't have been involved in whatever horrible thing "mom" and "Uncle Mac" did to Don, is in fact so young that he doesn't seem to comprehend that something awful happened. So unless Don is keeping his old identity a secret for reasons beyond shame, his unsolicited payoff seems especially cruel. Maybe necessary, but cruel.

Meanwhile, I was inordinately delighted by the subplot about Kenny (who?) (exactly!) getting a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly, which promptly causes all the other young guys in the office to react like the high school prom queen realizing on her first in college that she's no longer the hottest girl around. Pete -- who just last week felt emasculated by the wealth and influence that comes with his family -- mocks Kenny as a nobody with a salesman for a father. Paul, pretentious, Orson Welles-impersonating Paul, can't believe an account rep (not a man from "creative") could accomplish such a thing, is taken aback that the premises for Kenny's two novels don't sound awful, then goes on a rant about all the brilliant ideas he has locked away in his oversized melon, like the one about "this crazy night I ended up in Jersey City with all these negroes and we all got along. Can you imagine how good that story is?" (Based on that logline, Paul? Probably not. Could be the premise for a Chris Tucker movie, for all I know.)

After going to great lengths last week to make Pete a sympathetic figure (as I said, to explain, if not apologize for him), the writers are back to using him as the selfish, tunnel-visioned little rat he was early on. Sending your wife back to see the ex-fiance who still holds a torch for her -- and guilting her into it by claiming it would "help make up for" her losing her virginity to that guy instead of Pete -- all to keep up with the Kennys of the world? Wow.

Last week, commenter Anthony Foglia asserted that the episode was the best so far: "One major benefit was that, unlike all the other episodes, it wasn't a particularly dated story. The time merely enhanced the drama, as opposed to being the root cause of it." That description applies to this subplot, and to much of the episode. The petty professional jealousy story translates easily to today -- though the achievement in question no doubt would have involved getting a short film into Sundance, or getting a million hits on the YouTubes or something you young people do. (Get off my lawn! Rarrr!) I can't speak to the Don stuff too much, simply because we don't know all the details of how and why he stopped being Dick Whitman, but there wasn't a lot of Frankeinstein-esque "Sixties baaaad!!!! Bread gooooood!!!" going on.

What did everybody else think?