DUDE. "My Old Kentucky Home" was such a weird, funny, oddly musical, anxiety inducing episode. Gene Hofstadt is like putting a grenade on the kitchen table and then starting up a game of Jenga right next to it. He's going to explode, you know it -- "you just wait, all hell's going to break loose."

But hell is different than I thought it'd be. As soon as Carla came into frame seconds after the Case of the Missing Fiver started, we were like "NOOOOO, NOT CARLA, YOU BASTARDS" in the Hustler office because we thought that was where it was going.

Oh, but it was way worse. We got four music-centered sequences (Pete & Trudy dancing, the blackface horror, the Tiger Tones, and the Woeful Romantic Accordion) all pathetic in a kind of Dorothy Parker sort of way, set against a handful of very quiet, almost character-sketch moments (the evening reading sessions, the pregnancy adultery moment, the final kiss in the dark).

Now, the blackface song and dance routine, fading from vogue but still somewhat socially acceptable in 1963, is like textbook demise of Roger Sterlings in the post-1960s landscape. Of course, it just dragged on and on and on, and I had literally been relating the glacial pacing of Mad Men to an early 1960s movie (like, watch "From Russia With Love" and the actual espionage and sedate action scenes will stun you) -- things just lasted and lasted. Blackface was a defining feature of early 20th century vaudeville routinely until the 1930s, but when we see vaudeville in media today, it's more of a Baz Luhrman pop pop pop, Moulin Rouge! type thing, instead of this drawn out trek through gleefully atrocious racial implications. Roger Sterling is a man making a fool out of himself with a new money girl in tow.

The woman he could have left Mona for, the one whom Bart Cooper told she could do better than Roger Sterling, and the one who could certainly do better that Dr. Rape, Joan would never, never get drunk at her own dinner. Hell, she deferred to Emily Post on dinner seating. That accordion situation, playing "C'est Magnifique" (apparently it really was Christina Hendricks playing, too), it encapsulates Joan perfectly: Never, ever, ever could you convince me that anyone, even Joan, playing the accordion and singing in French would actually be awesome, and yet it was. A bombshell secretary of a wife is Dr. Rape's only political capital at a hospital he's failing at. Loved the half-halo Joan had in the kitchen with the doctors' wives -- it's beginning to look like she's, tragically, becoming the martyr for women somewhere between Betty Draper and Peggy Olson.

Lesser so, we have the dancing and the Tiger Tones rendition. The former, sad because Pete and Trudy are exactly the type of people who would spend all sorts of time learning dance routines to perfect their fake version of life, and sad in the latter because Drug Dealer Jeffrey and Paul practically come to blows over a stupid a capella group. One's a drug dealer, one's a faux-intellectual, both are getting beaten by a girl who just graduated two years ago from secretarial school.

Conversely, we got those very quiet moments. Though the episode ends with that very pastoral 1950s, early 1960s shot of Don approaching an isolated Betty standing in the dark and them kissing, it's really a companion piece to the melancholy but tension-laden encounter with the man outside the bathroom. That man, who wants her, and seems geniunely interested in her, is not what Don offers Betty. She also lacks the same intuitive cues Don has (she laughs at Roger's blackface routine; Don bolts for the bar) -- so neither's really getting what they ought to out of that marriage. Understatement of the decade, of course, but that final image of them silently united in the dark gives off dual images: standing alone against the dark, and some natural, instinctive belonging together that words complicate.

The words Sally reads to Grandpa Gene, though, that's the soundtrack to the remainder of 1963. In the same way the final, cool hued shot of Don and Betty has an ethereal romantic feel to it, the, like, idea of a little girl named Sally reading the fall of Rome to an old man who can't always remember what decade it is, is pretty much as foreboding and haunting as you can get in Mad Men. Just wait, all hell's going to break loose.

Top five quotes of the week go to Peggy Olson, drug queen:

• "What are you doing...I know what you're doing."
• "I'm Peggy Olson and I want to smoke some marijuana."
• "I am so high."
• "We could go to the roof--" "And do what?"
• "I'm in a very good place right now."

And finally: How much did Princetonian Drug Dealer Jeffrey look like Tom Cruise circa 1986? Like distractingly so. He even TALKED like young Tom Cruise.