More old faces join the fray this week as Don heads on vacation for the new year. On his way to Acapulco, he stops in LA to visit Anna Draper. What I thought would be a good opportunity for more revelations about Don’s past takes a morose turn when we learn that Anna has terminal cancer. The rub being that she doesn’t know as she is being “protected” from the news by her sister Patty. After a heated argument between Don and Patty, Don realizes he shouldn’t intervene in the family’s matters, regardless of his feelings for Anna, and decides to go back to New York and forgo his trip to Mexico. In the scene where Don says goodbye to Anna for presumably the last time, Jon Hamm really shows off his acting chops in one of the more emotional scenes of the series so far.
When Don gets back to the office, he finds Lane buried in work as usual. After some of Lane’s top shelf liquor, they decide to go out to see a movie and then dinner, where Lane confides in Don that his marriage is also breaking up, as his family does not want to return to America. The night ends in Don’s apartment with a pair of prostitutes. This is new territory for Lane, but Don maintains his line of not giving advice to people in that situation, alluding to the shaky advice given to him by Roger Sterling. Regardless of whether advice was given or not, just the action of inviting Lane along on his romp definitely had a “misery loves company” feel to it. Seems as though there are more dark times ahead for Don, and perhaps Lane.
The only other story going on in this episode was that of Joan and her husband Greg, who, although trying to have a baby, still have a very tumultuous relationship. This fact is acknowledged by Greg as he is stitching Joan’s cut finger, when he says, “I can’t fix anything else, but I can fix this.”
It seems that this week we got a breather from the list of subplots that seem to be piling up week after week. With many series, it would be a concern that the writers would leave a dead-end plot line, but as we’ve seen time and again with this show, eventually everything always seems to get wrapped back in to the story.
