"This is all there is..."
This is yet another multi-layered and multi-faceted episde of a drama with a lot going on, ending with Don facing a bit of a low-key existential crisis after Roger's heart attack. But essentially it's aboiut how society, certainly in 1960 but very much also today, expects women to be pleasing to men as men use them.
We see this first with Betty's widowed father and his new girlfriend who, to Betty's disgust, "lives to serve". It's revealing that Don says casually that it'll be "good to have another woman around the house, give Betty a break." But we also see this with Roger (and, passively, Don) abusing his power to hire some pretty young twins half his age, invite them to drinks, and then humiliate and sexualy use them while they fulfil theor roles of being pleasing. It's creepy to watch. We also see a kind of parallel as Joan and Carol (of whom more later) pick up two men; Joan snags the good one while Carol, stuck with the dud, just sighs and tells him to do "whatever you want".
And Don, distraught, instinctly goes to Rachel- a woman he respects, and who is not afraid to be firm with him- for succour. She doesn't yield meekly... but she yields. Althoigh not after getting some of Don's life story out of him. He's the son of a prostitute, raised by his dad, a client, and after his dad's death by his dad's wife and her new man. Bloody hell.
Even the exceptions are interesting. When Carol finally, drunkenly, confesses to Joan that she loves her ("Just think of me as a boy"), Joan pauses and pretends it never happens- and Carol goes along with it. Same sex attraction simply can't be mentioned.
And then there's Peggy, callimg out Pete on his entitled dickishness. She's going places.
This is simply an extraordinary bit of telly.
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