Mad Men: How do you talk to Achilles?

Geez Louise.

Poor, poor Betty. I mean, I know a lot of people aren’t the character’s biggest fans, but after this week, I dare you to find me someone who wasn’t clutching their chest in sympathy for poor, lost-in-the-dark Betty Draper.

Here’s what happened this week:

Sterling Cooper is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and it’s up for sale, although so far only Pryce and his homesick wife know it (the latter is thrilled, but probably because Pryce never got around to telling her about the Bombay thing). My, what Duck’s ego and Roger’s lust have wrought. Paul and Peggy are competing for Don’s love via writing competing ads for Aqua Net and Western Union; Peggy, naturally, wins both times. Don is spending every single night with an increasingly stalker-ish Suzanne Farrell, and winds up running into her epileptic kid brother. He then helps him skip town to atone for Don’s own kid brother’s suicide, even though Lil’ Farrell seems a much less worthy candidate for Don’s assistance than did Lil’ Whitman. And Betty finds Don’s secret box where he stores the photos, dog tags, and divorce certificates of his past. She has a meltdown comparable to last season, when she first found out about Don and Bobbie, then tries to confront Don, only to have him not even come home that night. Like I said, with the chest-clutching.

I don’t like Suzanne Farrell. I keep waiting for her to do something that makes me see her as a complex character, but so far I’m just getting full-of-herself small-town wannabe-intellectual – basically, a cardboard cutout version of myself in high school, but smarter and with much better clothes. And even the three-dimensional version of myself in high school didn’t make for the caliber of character I expect to see on this show. “Nobody feels as good about what they do as you do,” Don tells Suzanne Farrell. “You’re sweet,” she replies, although I don’t think he meant it to be sweet. What does Don see in her, anyway? Is it just that she’s more mysterious, less complicated, less dependent, than Betty? One of the biggest mysteries of this show, ever since the pilot, has of course always been why any man would cheat on January Jones. The answer has always been that Don will never be happy or feel like his life is full enough, so he has to keep reaching for more more more. But why Suzanne Farrell, why now? Because she’s new and different, or because she’s more of the same? I have faith that the show will make this work, because it’s never created an uninteresting character before now, but we’ve seen an awful lot of Suzanne Farrell this season and I still don’t care about her, and I’m starting to get just a tad nervous.

Anyway, let’s go back to the Peggy/Paul drama, which this week serves mainly as comic relief and as even more evidence of Peggy’s awesomeness. Peggy has long shown a great ability to improvise – someone shoots down an idea and she springs another one on the spot – and Paul is finally ready to admit that it’s getting to him. He calls her on it, and she retorts, “No one’s keeping score,” which is the funniest line she’s had in a while. They both stay up all night to work on their Western Union campaigns, and neither comes up with anything – Peggy because she’s genuinely at a loss, Paul because he’s so drunk he forgets to write down his own supposedly brilliant concept. Peggy then improvs in Don’s office, an idea inspired by Paul’s failure and knowledge of Chinese trivia (gleaned, no doubt, during that otherwise useless Princeton education), and Paul stares at her in sheer awe. It’s a cool moment, and if that didn’t convince Don that yes, Peggy deserves a raise, then Peggy had better damn resign in the season finale.

Paul, Paul, Paul. What can I say about Paul? How can you analyze a character who’s an open book? Everything about him, from his politics to his writing style to his pot-smoking, is designed to make him appear a certain variety of cool that isn’t particularly respected by anyone he associates with, now that Sheila dumped him (unless you count Smitty – and if Smitty is Paul’s closest pseudo-beatnik friend, then now I’m even sadder for Paul than I was before). Paul’s a wannabe-novelist, a mid-level copywriter well on his way to turning into Freddy Rumsen, a serial monogamist who I can’t fathom any woman would ever want to settle down with, who spends his nights in his office listening to jazz and drinking and doing, uh, other things, and for what? Is this really how he envisioned that Ivy League scholarship paying off? I would like, in some future season, to see Paul redeem himself. Maybe, if Paul grows up a little, and Joan gets far far away from Greg before it’s too late, the two of them could get back together and make it work. I can see them appreciating each other’s respective talents, if Paul can just learn to keep his mouth shut and Joan can learn that her priorities at 36 really should be different than what she aspired to when she was 19.

Also this week: Sally thinks it’s hilarious that her parents’ chauffeur is Chinese. We meet Roger’s mother, who mistakes Jane for Margaret, which is awesome. No one’s ever asked Pryce where he went to school since he came to New York, which leads me to believe he didn’t go anywhere good. (Mrs. Pryce, by the way, who looked incredibly familiar when we first saw her, is the awesome Embeth Davidtz, who among other things starred in Junebug, which believe it or not had a lot of cool things about it in addition to Amy Adams.) Alison Brie’s name is in the opening credits, which was distressing because when I see her name I get all excited and assume I’ll get some quality Trudy time, and then when Trudy doesn’t even have a line but we spend twenty minutes with Suzanne Farrell and now, of all people, her kid brother (who looks really familiar too), well, I get sad. Lois is back, and none the worse for having chopped off a guy’s foot, which is too bad; I was looking forward to some character development on that front, since Lois is the closest thing we have on this show to a cartoon. Sal, apparently, really has left SC, as we don’t see him at all (boo!). Also absent is Joan, still (double boo), and we only get a split second of a silent Pete, which I don’t think has ever happened before; maybe Vincent Kartheiser got a movie role?

Some unanswered questions for the season:

• Did that chick from Undeclared ever move in with Peggy?
• Why is Don keeping so much cash in that drawer?
• Are we going to get closure on the Peggy/Duck/Pete/Gray thing?
• Is Sally still beating up overweight girls?
• Is Don going to find out about Henry Francis?
• When are Sal and Joan coming back to SC???

I’m sure there are more than that, but I’m still processing the sight of Betty putting Don’s keys back in his pocket. So I’ll just leave you with my favorite line of the week:

“My goodness Sally Draper, try not to take everything so personally.”

Season 3, Episode 10: The Color Blue (originally aired October 18, 2009)

For more on Mad Men, click here.

Sundays at 10PM/9C, AMC

Photographs courtesy of AMC and Carin Baer