Allow me to wager something at halftime here: When this series ends, the tragedy will be Joan, the triumph Peggy, and the rest a “Good Soldier“-like traipse through the depths of human interaction, led by Don Draper, the dark side of American ingenuity and reinvention (“This is your little brother. He’s only a baby. We don’t know who he is yet, nor who he’s going to be. And that is a wonderful thing.”).

Joan really is the tragedy at hand, though. Married to Dr. Rape, who cannot even cough up some mitigating social status, the prospects seem dim, particularly since this will involve some kind of professional degradation elsewhere as Moneypenny fails at Sterling Cooper. Joan Holloway SAVES LIVES, y’all, and she’s married to awful Dr. Harris who kills people. And so she sits in a bloodstained dress (…a nod to the eminent assassination?), silently drinking Dr. Pepper with a bag of groceries between her and Don Draper, and there’s a symmetry there, lacking elsewhere. Joan and Don best created their superficial identities, better than anyone, but they understand how little that can comfort you. Sepinwall put it thusly:

Hendricks kills it throughout the episode, but it was stunning to see the exhaustion on her whole body as she stood there in a blood-soaked dress, and to hear what I have to assume is her real speaking voice, without a trace of the breathy sexpot tone we know so well. Joan isn’t just a character Christina Hendricks plays; she’s a character Joan plays. And when we see her at the end of this very long, bad day…we see what an effort it is for her to make everything look so easy. And we see Don, at the end of his own long, strange day…appreciating this woman who, if circumstances were different, and if he wasn’t so pathological about keeping his life compartmentalized, might have been his perfect match…[As] far as Joan knows in this episode, this is the end of her story at Sterling Cooper, so she can drop her guard a little – call Mr. Draper “Don,” give him a friendly kiss on the cheek, etc. — before she heads home to pick up the mess she made of her life by choosing to be with, and stay with, Dr. Greg.

We get other small glimpses that will likely set the tone for the rest of the season — like Lane Pryce fumbling with his glasses and acting all cheerful (considering the Tom Sawyer comment, things gonna change at Sterling Cooper); the oddly comfortable late night dinner session of jaunty flirting about London; Roger staring into the black void of irrelevance — but Joan staring at Don, working over what she’ll say, saying goodbye to her life before, that’s it. Joan Holloway was like my mother and I talking about how she likes Part I of Gone With the Wind better than Part II — people are happy and you just know they won’t ever be again.

Alright, shifting to other things: God forbid any of us question Matthew Weiner in these parts, but I’ll lay it out there: Betty concerns me. She currently risks becoming one-note, which could be tolerable, if we could be granted some slightly less shrill perspective (part of this is, admittedly, that I find the little girl who plays Sally extremely grating, and miscast as the child of Jon Hamm and January Jones). “The Fog” offered those super queer dream sequences for Betty, including the flat out awesome Medgar Evers blood bath, which allowed January Jones to remind us that she can act, but also illustrated just how isolated Betty’s narrative has been this year.

Matthew Weiner told Alan Sepinwall last spring, that “the story of the marriage was, Betty was a child last year, and this year she was an adolescent, and I wanted to show her growing.” Well, she’s regressed, but without reason. Season one depicted her as a capable mother, with serious mental problems. Two, an immature, but scorned woman navigating some pragmatic decisions about her marriage. Three…a woman who is childishly reacting to her father’s death? At this rate, I do not anticipate scenes as effective or clearly drawn as the epic final psychiatrist’s visit in season one, or the what the hell fried chicken gnawing in the refrigerator light after sleeping with Captain Awesome. Unless Don and the Who Wouldn’t Call Don Draper Holding a Scotch Late at Night school teacher play some October baseball (…which, you could see her bra, so this is likely) in some excellent way that feels not like a repitition, I guess.

The central flaw in this, I suspect, is that Grandpa Gene did not linger with the Drapers long enough for his death to impact the viewer. “Mad Men” skims the surface of the superficial character, traces the rim of the glass, back and forth, back and forth, then wades a bit, then plunges and dwells there for a little while before coming back up for air — the supreme layering of character drives this show.

Not to get all Henry James “if only plot could be a melody” on y’all, but that’s why “My Kentucky Home” dominated: all the character and minutiae of life shifted into focus. Grandpa Gene needed the slow burn, and about three more episodes, to etch out some of the missing complexities in his relationship with his daughter, and the impact that would have on Sally. Where I suspect this ends, actually, is that the timeline gap between season three and four will be more like three years, and we’ll land in 1967 with a 12 year-old Sally who’s prepping for self-destruction.

Post-game notes:

• Barbie had the Crazy Eyes. She looked like she just got off a three day coke binge in the Valley.
• Two episodes in a row with blood being mopped off things! A fine sign of the times.
• Whenever Peggy and Joan talk, one always ends up staggering away in the throes of crippling depression and unintentionally low self-worth. How charming that they removed that by running over somebody’s foot with a John Deere.
• Pete caught Peggy, Joan saved a British guy’s life. It was like a surrealist version of a Merchant Ivory WWII play.

Top five funny ha ha lines:

• “Who the hell do you people think you are?” “That was a joke.” [I hate that beard, too, though].
• “Well, we could hire some prostitutes.”
• “That is a very handsome man.”
• “Baby Gene can’t write.”
• And the far and away winner: “Sit down, Sissy Mary.”

I will be telling people “Sit down, Sissy Mary” for the rest of my life. As always, thanks John Slattery!