SEASON 7, EPISODE 3.

(Mild spoilers.) Roger's significance is outsize here. The woman who interrupts Don's meeting with Dave Wooster to give him her hotel room location only exists, I'm sure, as a narrative red herring, to set up the shock cut when the hotel room door opens and Roger's on the other side. One moment Don's about to move on -- just as Lane told his father he'd done a few seasons back -- and then boom, he's bursting in on his surrogate father and telling him, "I would never do that to you."

Some people have asked, in titles even, "Why did Don agree to return to SC&P?" One thing: Don has never worked anywhere else. Earlier this season they rubbed that in our faces: when Don said he'd almost worked at Y&R twice, Wooster pointed out that, nonetheless, he'd never actually done it. But Roger is also part of the reason. That Roger showed up late for their big meeting at the agency, apparently unclear on what he and Don had agreed on the night before, flashed me straight back to how a similar Roger brown-to-blackout first got Don in the door at the agency years earlier. Through Don's whole career Roger has been his guru as well as his partner in crime, and from the way Roger's been acting lately I'm sure he's sincere when he says he misses Don. But as I realized a year or so back when Roger was weeping over that shoe shine kit -- the sort of scene that's Screenwriting 101 for a reason -- Roger isn't even a surrogate father to Don; he's more of an aging Skimpole, and I fear Don hasn't figured that out yet.

So: Why did Don agree to return to SC&P? At the moment, it looks like he didn't have the guts to leave. ("Guts" in the broadest sense: Clearly it'll take effort and pain to make anything out of the shit-moat the partners have put him behind, but a trapped man will put up with a lot to make his prison glorious. Don tells Megan he's going to "make it right" by going back, and clearly saving their relationship isn't what he means by that.)

I wish I had a gif of Peggy and Don in this episode: "I can't say that we missed you." "Thank you, Peggy." Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm ate the worm. Take a good hard look at how far we've come from The Suitcase. Let alone from "It will shock you how much it never happened." The road to this scene is a series all by itself.

Why is Betty on Bobby's field trip the parallel stream? Because Don was an abused child and Betty is showing us how that's done in the generation that followed, among people who no longer live in whorehouses. At least that's what I got from January Jones' monolithic-minimalistic performance. Jones' vanishing voice and sour-apple-on-stupid-vanilla expressions are so epic, I'm beginning to suspect she's a drag queen.

Dawn and Shirley are turning into Solange and Claire.

UPDATE. In comments, JennOfArk says the Betty-Bobby plot

seems to build on a theme that started way back in the beginning, Betty-as-child. Remember the neighbor kid with the crush? Betty has been portrayed all along as this cossetted creature whose growth has been stunted by a life that expects nothing from her except that she look pretty.

That would explain her specific abuse, which is to treat her child as if he has adult responsibilities to her that trump her parental responsibilities to him.

I must also mention: Don going to the movies reminds me that though we see him sometimes relaxing with movies and even literature (including, preposterously, Dante), and reacting to art he doesn't like (The Beatles, Jean-Claude van Itallie), these experiences never seem to reach him or inform anything he does. His advertising copy is just good advertising copy, and that includes his open letter. What we've heard of his journal entries is pap. It's interesting that the great "creative" mind of the Mad Men universe is a perfect philistine.