As I began typing this review, it hit me suddenly that we are now about two-thirds of the way through the season. Can you believe that? I don’t know how I feel about these short-season series. They come and go like traveling salesmen in the night, tempting you with their exotic wares, only to abandon you before you’ve even turned the clocks back to standard time. I’m nursing a cold, so you’ll have to forgive me — that’s the most evocative simile I could conjure in my Mucinex-induced state.

This episode’s title, “Souvenir”, is evocative in its own right, even if it’s sort of stale. Upon seeing it in print, I immediately thought, Uh, oh. Someone is going to be bringing something unfortunate back with them from somewhere. It turned out to be not quite so simple.

There are essentially three stories at play in this episode. In the main plot, Betty and her colleagues with the Junior League of Tarrytown earn a reservoir victory with the city council, thanks to some bureaucratic intervention from Henry Francis. Henry makes it clear in the parking lot, however, that he’s done this feat in order to win favor with Betty. They share a kiss, and she leaves. That night, she asks Don — who has been working long days in various cities for Hilton — to take her with him to Rome. Although they’re only there for a few days and Don has to work much of the time, Betty takes every advantage of the time they do have together. It’s like a mini-second honeymoon. The couple especially enjoy showing off for a pair of sleazy Italian men who deride Don as old and ugly. The rest of us don’t stand a chance.

Once they return home, Carla confronts Betty with the second plot of the episode: Sally beat up Bobby after he made fun of her for kissing Ernie. To be fair, if you kiss someone named Ernie — fully clothed in a bathtub, no less — you probably deserve to be made fun of. But that’s beside the point. Sally gives Bobby a few cudgels, though it’s not nearly as out of control as Carla makes it out to be later. Sally’s game of make believe bathtub-driving with Ernie appears to have been a deliberate imitation of Betty and Don. Sally had earlier carefully observed Betty preening in the mirror. And when Betty tells Sally that she needs to learn to control her temper, you can almost hear Betty on the verge of losing her own.

So the romantic trip to Rome ends abruptly with the return of parental responsibilities. And it’s been even harder than usual lately, with Don having to work extra long hours. Betty tells Don she wants to go away, but she doesn’t mean another vacation. She wants to leave their life, and that no doubt includes her thankless, disobedient children. For an immature brat like Betty, they are the most unpleasant of souvenirs. She’d much rather life the life of a socialite. It’s not a fantasy for Betty; it’s a genuine desire.

There was a point in this series when it was easy to feel sorry for Betty. In fact, crazy as it was, she stuck up for Sally and the family dog by shooting the neighbor’s beloved homing pigeons out of the sky. And she had to endure the quackery of a psychiatrist who treated her like a child. In retrospect, he turns out to have been more or less correct. It’s unbelievable.

Pete, on the other hand, spends the week at home. Trudy is away for the week, and Pete is left to his own devices. He spends the first day watching children’s TV shows and passing out on the sofa. As he returns to his apartment that night after a trip to the store, he discovers a young woman trying to stuff a party dress down the incinerator chute. She introduces herself as Gudrun after Pete recognizes her as the au pair working for his neighbors, the Lawrences. She explains that she has accidentally spilled wine on the dress and is trying to dispose of the evidence. Pete, gentleman that he is, tells the German immigrant that this foolish plan will just lead to the Lawrences assuming she stole the dress, and offers to rectify the problem himself.

Pete takes the dress back to the store, dresses down a store associate who doesn’t share his optimism about the dress, and ends up talking to … Joan! Is she managing the dress department? The entire store? It’s not clear. But she does agree, despite Pete’s offer to pay for a new dress, to exchange it at no cost. A little quid pro quo, perhaps: I won’t tell Trudy that you’re swapping a dress that isn’t her size, and you won’t tell anyone I’m working at this store instead of sitting at home eating bon bons while my rich surgeon hubby pays the bills. Greg is apparently thinking of pursuing a specialty in psychiatry. Good luck with that.

Pete brings the new dress to Gudrun, who receives it with bafflement, but spurns Pete’s offer to “celebrate”. So Pete goes back to his apartment, gets good and hammered, then returns to the Lawrences’ place to he can have his way with Gudrun. She doesn’t resist him this time, but she has so much to lose: for one thing, Pete could tell Mrs. Lawrence about the dress. Even worse, he could inform immigration — one gets the impression Gudrun may not have all her papers in order. She she lets Pete kiss her, and presumably more.

One of the recurring themes of the series is power, and Henry Francis states a political truism early in the episode: “When you don’t have the power, delay.” Don tried his best to do this last week, but finally ran out of time when Cooper forced him to sign the contract. Pete, on the other hand, has a keen sense of when he has power, but terrible instincts about when to use it. His abuse of the nanny was repugnant, bordering on rape. But strictly from a self-interest standpoint, it was stupid. The following day, Mr. Lawrence comes by to put up a roadblock between Pete and Gudrun. We can only guess what she actually revealed, but it must have included his name. What kind of moron has his way with a girl who lives a few doors down from the apartment he shares with his wife?

So Pete has an unpleasant souvenir from Trudy’s trip away: a constant reminder of his inability to control himself, in the form of a neighbor’s au pair. So when he’s at work he can see Peggy — the mother of his child — and when he’s at home, walking through the hallway or riding the elevator, he can see Gudrun. How about that?

Before dinner, he begs Trudy never to leave town without him again.

But at the end of the episode, has anything changed? The city council has held a secret meeting, and is apparently going ahead with the development anyway. Mr. Lawrence has assured Pete that he’s not going to rat him out. Betty is back to being frosty with Don. Would Pete and Trudy have had a romantic time together if he’d gone with her? Who knows? But now, like Betty, he has something to get away from.

I’m not sure why Hilton called the Drapers’ room, seemed surprised to hear a woman’s voice, then never asked to speak to Don. But I’d like to see more scenes with Hilton. Chelcie Ross brings such an interesting energy to the show. And I’ll have to give a little shout-out to Mark Metcalf, who played the Master on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was the mayor in this episode.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Cooper’s in Montana. I won’t repeat where Sterling is.

Rarely has there been a more offensive image on television than that of Roger Sterling, black shoe polish smeared across his face, singing to his barely legal bride about how difficult it is to be a slave on a Kentucky plantation. He is, at best, painfully out of touch with the times he is living in, rapidly disintegrating into a fossil before our very eyes. When Don walks away from Roger’s performance in disgust, it’s unclear whether he is offended by the overt racism or the lack of dignity, but it hardly matters. If Roger and the attendees of the Sterlings’ soiree think this kind of thing is entertaining in 1963, how can Sterling-Cooper compete as an advertising firm?

This third episode of the season is very much about home, or the pale imitations of it that we content ourselves with. And the Sterlings try to find their home at a country club, surrounded by friends. Or, barring that, coworkers and their spouses. But the only people who actually seem at home among the party guests are Pete and Trudy, who break out an intricately choreographed Charleston routine. It is the most genuinely happy Pete Campbell has ever looked in his life. Everyone else mills about uncomfortably and with nothing to talk about other than work. Jane gets plastered and grabs Don by the belt, but not before opening old wounds by saying how happy she is that Don and Betty have reconciled. And poor Roger laments that his big mistake must have been letting everyone see him happy. “No one thinks you’re happy,” says Don. “They think you’re foolish.”

Don, for his part, finds the country club bar where he meets an older gentleman named Connie (the ever-present Chelcie Ross) who is at the club for a wedding, and the two talk about not belonging. Connie, from New Mexico before it was a state, explains that even though he’s just as wealthy and Republican as everyone else in the country club, he still feels like he has the head of a jackass. “It’s different on the inside,” he says while Don fixes their cocktails.

Paul, Smitty, and Peggy don’t get to attend the party because they have to spend their Saturday in the office trying to come up with scenarios for drinking Bacardi rum. Peggy has a new, middle-aged secretary named Olive who also comes in on Saturday, since Peggy has to be there. Paul calls on Jeffrey, an old college choir buddy, to set them up with some inspirational marijuana, and Peggy, over Olive’s objections, joins them. The four of them smoke up in Paul’s office while Olive sits at her desk all day and frets. It turns out stoned copywriters aren’t really all that creative after all, and they mostly just lay around the office until Jeffrey and Paul start insulting each other, with Jeffrey landing a devastating blow impugning Paul’s singing voice. Peggy eventually comes up with an idea and tells the guys to go home.

But of course, they kind of already are home. No one expected to get anything done (except for Peggy, although she spent the morning napping on her desk). There’s no logical reason for them to stay — especially Olive. And by filling the office with their reefer smoke, they essentially turn the room into their home. But the payoff for this whole scene comes once Peggy takes her inspiration and leaves. When she returns to her office, Olive scolds her. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing in there?” she says. “You’re not thinking about your future.” And Peggy responds with a little speech that packs a whallop even if it is a bit on the nose:

The thing is, I have a job. I have my own office with my name on the door. And I have a secretary. That’s you. And I am not scared of any of this. But you’re scared. Oh my God, you’re scared. Don’t worry about me. I am going to get to do everything you want for me. I’m going to be fine, Olive. I really am.

In those few sentences, Peggy not only responds to the over-dedicated fans of the show who might be concerned that Peggy is “going down a bad path”, but also to the women of her mother’s generation — those who are afraid of what will happen if women like Peggy fail and are afraid of what will happen if women like Peggy succeed.

In fact, Olive could easily be a figment of Peggy’s imagination, couldn’t she? Where did she even come from? Did anyone else talk to her or acknowledge her presence?

The third home of the episode belongs to Joan and her rapist/surgeon husband Greg. They are hosting a dinner party for Ronald Ettinger, Greg’s boss, as well as a coworker and their wives. They almost fall into a fight over seating assignments before the guests arrive, but Joan defuses the situation by suggesting a buffet. Still, Joan wants Greg to sit at the head of the table in his own home. Throughout the course of the party, it becomes slowly clear that Greg isn’t really destined for the head of anybody’s table. “The fact that Greg can get a woman like you,” says Ronald’s wife, “makes me feel good about his future no matter what happens.” Never mind that the only reason Greg has a woman like Joan in the first place is because he’s a doctor and she’s afraid of being an old maid. It comes out in conversation that Greg lost a patient on the operating table. It sounds like he won’t be advancing very quickly. Greg changes the subject by convincing Joan to play her accordian(!), which she does while singing in French. And in fact, she might as well be in France. She suddenly seems very far away.

The final home belongs to the Drapers, where Roger’s inept racism comes full circle in the person of Gene, who assumes Carla knows his old housekeeper because both are black. Gene is outraged that someone has swiped five dollars from his money clip, and immediately suspects Carla. But the culprit is little Sally Draper, Mad Men’s most tragic character, who eventually returns the money to her grandpa by tossing it onto the kitchen floor (and then “finding” it). Gene may not have all his wits about him, but he seems to know children, and later calls Sally into his bedroom. Rather than punish her (or even accuse her), he insists that she continue reading aloud from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Sally’s theft of the money seems almost pointless. Where is she going to spend it? But by not lashing out at her or giving her a lecture, Gene may have made an ally in the Draper household. That’s bound to pay off in some way later. As for Sally, which will win out in the end: her rebellious spirit or her guilty conscience?

I’ve stumbled across a few headlines in the past couple of days suggesting this was one of the all-time great Mad Men episodes. Maybe I’m just dense, but I’m not sure I see why it’s worth that kind of hype. It was, however, a solid entry and planted more interesting seeds for the remaining season. There’s probably more that could be said about it — particularly all the themes I’ve overlooked and the scene where Betty lets a stranger touch her belly — but I’ll leave it at that.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Governor Rockefeller just married a recently divorced woman. Looks like Goldwater has the nomination sewn up.