Week after week, this season, I’ve been marveling at Don Draper’s moral stature: he seems to be the only character in the show who knows right from wrong. True, his morality is pragmatic. But it is very firmly rooted in a desire to avoid causing unnecessary pain to other people, and I don’t ask much more of a moral system than that.

This week brought me back to earth. Don certainly does know right from wrong. But he still has a lot of junk in his head, a lot of adolescent sap to metabolize. Else why would he have picked up a pair of strange teenagers on a dark and, okay, not stormy night and taken them to a motel for a party? The episode’s writers set it up so that we knew ahead of time where this frolic was going to lead (a beaten-up, drug-rattled Don, lying face-down on a strange carpet), so it was a relief to find out that our hero wasn’t in much worse trouble. The true folly, however, was Don’s refusal to sign a contract with Sterling & Cooper. This had become, inadvisedly, a point of pride with Don. Free to leave (and to work anywhere else) at will, Don came to see his unbound status as the biggest trophy in his case.

The advent of Conrad Hilton’s account, however, has given his firm (both Roger and Bert at the near end and Lane as the British rep) a perfect occasion to demand businesslike commitment from Don, in the form of a three-year employment contract with the usual non-compete clauses. From the very moment the topic is broached, it is tremendously clear that Don is not going to be able to sidestep this hurdle to his pride; if he leaves Sterling Cooper in a snit, he’s going to have to sign a contract wherever he goes. He knows this and they know this and everybody knows it, so well that Roger Sterling very foolishly decides to push matters along by enlisting Betty’s home-front support. Betty doesn’t know what Roger is talking about, but, smart girl that she is, she doesn’t let on, and hangs up on Roger’s impertinence. But of course she’s furious with Don for thinking that he’s a special act of creation, and it’s when she calls him on this that he turns on his heels and drives off into the night, with a highball in his right hand. Because I can, you can almost hear him insist. He picks up the hitch-hikders because I can. He pops the proffered “reds” because I can. He gets a bit of the shit kicked out of him because he can.

And then he signs the contract — helped along by Bert Cooper’s superior understanding of affairs — because he can’t not.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Mad Men. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.