Out of curiosity, did they even try to explain why a movie that mentions karate in its title would feature a Hong Kong film legend who has demonstrated his considerable kung-fu for three decades or more?  Or did they just make Jackie Chan Okinawan in the movie?

Faye was blonde and smart, it's true.  I never found her as interesting as other viewers did, but that probably has more to do with my growing boredom with Don's personal life than it had to do with her.  At any rate, Don chose the brunette Megan over blonde Faye.  Haven't all of his mistresses been brunette?  Maybe…

Well.  That's ominous.

"Smalls. Leonard Smalls. My friends call me Lenny. But I got no friends."

My point was that you, too, could probably come up with all kinds of symbolism in episodes of Mad Men if you felt your paycheck depended on it.  Todd certainly does.  I'm not sure all the symbols are really there, much less glaringly obvious.  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  But, sometimes a knife at the end of a…

Lots of us don't pick up on the symbols.  Remember, it's Todd's job to watch these episodes more closely than the average viewer, so that he'll have something to write about them beyond, "Wow, I liked that one, especially the part where ______," which is about all I can muster.  Also keep in mind that it's Todd's job…

@avclub-dd5321bef3221ce6653c54293a545c71:disqus  D'oh!

Did you intend your first paragraph to read: "The average income of any given [real-world] family didn't [increase], just the average income of TV families"?

Yeah, that made me think about an SNL skit back in the 1980s where a flying saucer lands, the aliens come out and command the earthlings to submit to them, but they're only carrying muskets.  They are easily captured and studied by the military.  It comes out that they come from a planet with little to no advanced…

Fuckin' Canada, always trying to foist its ways on the rest of the world, like they've got it all figured out.

@avclub-22eda830d1051274a2581d6466c06e6c:disqus I can't help but hear "jajaja" in a mellifluous baritone over-dub.

Get the butter…

Not just nice to her, but was savvy enough to get her out of the office without exposing her vulnerability or weakness.  Joan is like Ron Swanson in that scene where he sat in his office all weekend, rather than ask for help getting to the hospital because of his hernia.

The early seasons probably support the claim that Betty isn't too bright better than the current one or last season.  Looking back, though, I think what I took as Betty's emptiness was really just her childishness, which the show demonstrated many times.  She really was stunted by her life with Don, and the pressure…

If she was talking about black people or other minorities only in terms of their skin color, culture, or whatever else makes them minorities, then no, I wouldn't be okay with it.

Gotta toughen that little bugger up.  When I was his age, I was already working in the coal mine and killing my own lunch every day.

Ask Don Draper — or whatever he calls himself — whether a man with no balls can be a ruthless gangster.

Update from the lands without basic cable, where people buy the show from Amazon: Not only have they finally started putting subtitles on the show, but "fuck" is audible in all its glory.  In this episode, Abe said something like, "living in a fucking police state."  Interestingly, in the subtitles, it was given as…

It's what the closed-captions said, too.

"If we weren't so alike
I'd like you a whole lot more…"