Ouch. Everybody is uptight and angsty beyond belief in the second episode of “Mad Men‘s” third season. The title is “Love Among the Ruins,” but it might’ve been called “Where Did Our Love Go?”
Perhaps the most shocking turn the seg is that Don Draper actually does something selfless in order to make Betty happy by taking in her dementia-troubled father, Gene. He pulls it off in pure Don Draper sotto vocedramatic fashion, pulling Betty’s brother into the study of the Draper manse in Ossining and telling him how it’s going to go down.
After Betty forces Don to accept the invasion of her brother, his wife, their children and her ailing father for the week of spring break, he gradually realizes that Betty’s finely honed sense of guilt about caring for her father will eat away at her if she doesn’t take care of him — or worse, if her brother’s wife winds up playing nursemaid. Goodness knows she’s already enough of a b-i-t-c-h. Could she be any colder to her kids?
Don would have to be blind not to notice Betty’s pain (though that’s never stopped him before). Betty declares herself to be in a “foul mood” while worrying about her father, and she later declares herself “the world’s worsta horrible daughter” just before Don takes matters into his own hands with Betty’s waffly brother.
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Having rendered himself rootless with no family, Don also instinctively understands that Betty can’t bear to sell the family home in order to put the father in an old folks home, as Betty’s brother suggests. (The brother Don referenced last week as being someone who’s always borrowing things and putting his name on them, and whose name, WilliamHofstadt, Don assumed for his near one-night-stand in Baltimore.)
There was a heck of a lot going on in this episode — written by Caryn Humphris and Matt Weiner and helmed by Lesli Linka Glatter — but to me the stuff with Betty’s father was the most weirdly intriguing.
After last week’s season opener, I was hoping for an episode with more Betty and more Peggy, and darn if Weiner and Co. didn’t deliver on both counts.
