Harry Crane belongs at McCann Erickson in every possible way.

You make an interesting point. I think Don's struggle probably reflects Weiner's struggle to sum up this whole damn thing.

Yeah, I suppose. But this doesn't feel like a slow reveal so much as a plot hole that they have to fill in. There's a difference between creating a mystery around a character's motives and throwing out too few details to fully make sense. But that may just be a poor choice on the writers' part.

OK, so you seem to be following all this.

The Waldo Moment was my favorite.

My favorite is another episode that fits this description: Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency. Completely self-contained, it starts by introducing the entire agency and setting the stage for the drama that would unfold, play out, and be resolved by an unexpected development by the time it was over. A genius episode.

I'm so old I remember when I came to avclub as a haven from that kind of pretense! Of course there's "the other site" but they don't do TV reviews.

Don didn't shut the Beatles off because it made him angry. He shut if off because it was noise that bored him. He didn't get it, and if there's anything worse for an ad man than falling behind the times, it's being blind to the fact, and I think that's going to play out in this painfully-drawn-out final half-season.

I continue to wonder when I'll see a Zack Handlen review that doesn't sound like a Gauloise-smoking hipster in the corner going "… it was OK I guess."

It's so funny, the first bars of The Chain kicked in and I thought to myself that I never appreciated how great a song it is the first ten thousand times I heard it. Funny how that happens sometimes when it's been a really long time and you hear something with fresh ears.

I'm old enough to remember pre-Thriller Michael Jackson. I dont think things got glossed over before Thriller, it's that he was a KID. Think of all those episodes of Intervention where the addict survives years of abuse as a child but doesn't become a train wreck until later, sometimes well into adulthood. So back…

"linguistic repetition and an obsession with idiosyncratic expressions is a long-running Stephen King tic"…

That's how I was introduced to the song, and it's an unforgettable association.

I always saw it like this: Whether it lasts another five seconds or forty years, this is what the rest of his life looks like. How long it lasts is almost irrelevant: it's this hell of anxiety every time somebody vaguely menacing walks by.

I don't see anywhere that I suggested that murdering one's wife was "normal"? Only that it didn't take two pages of contorted analysis to determine the motive for the crime.

I'd vote for Miller's Crossing for the next one. The movie is so densely packed in terms of plot, it could use the gradual pacing of ten episodes.

I'm a bit shocked that you saw Arya's act as compassion. I saw it as tremendously cruel. The Hound knows he's done and just wants to die. She takes the silver he stole from the family that HE basically left to die (that'll teach him!), and leaves him broken on the rocks to die slowly in pain himself. Is there some…

I think the contrast in his monologue versus his subsequent actions was meant to show how men can be capable of fully articulated feminist perspectives while still being blind to how terrifying their own actions can be.

I have to disagree with one point of this review. One of the things that made Mad Men work WAS the chosen industry for the setting. They so perfectly capture the "every man for himself" attitude along with the sense that fortunes and accounts can turn on a headline, or on one key person's particularly bad day. It's…

What, no 'Shine'?