EJ – Well, Season Three bursts out of the gate with the Secret Origin of Dick Whitman. Now, we know that Dick/Don’s real mother was a prostitute who died in childbirth, but this sequence raises some questions. First, is his father really his father? It seems like there’d be a lot of candidates for that position, with no real way to verify. So Don Draper’s real life many not actually be his real life. Second, how does Don know any of this? The staging makes it clear that this is Don’s vision. That means Don knows his backstory. He knows about the miscarriages and everything. (We find out later in the episode that today is Dick Whitman’s birthday – I like that Don and Dick have different birthdays.)
Back in a Season One flashback, young Dick acknowledged to the hobo that he was “a whore’s son”, so this was not any kind of secret in the Whitman household. So, who gave the kid all the gory details? Mr. Whitman was a mean SOB, but I don’t know that he’d keep bringing up his own misdeeds just to traumatize a kid. I wonder if, once Mrs. Whitman actually had a child of her own later on, she was a lot less excited about Dick. Was she a good mother, happy to finally have a child, only to turn on him when she finally gave birth to a healthy baby of her own? And if that’s the case, look at Don’s interactions with his adult brother during the first season with that as the subtext. As much progress as we’ve made, we’re still a long way from answering the question that began the series – “Who is Don Draper?” By the way, after much speculation about the timeframe, this season picks up shortly after the end of last season. I believe the jump between Seasons One and Two was 14 months, and this jump appears to be only a month or two. Could this season be built around a pregnancy, as Season One was? If so, that would bring the finale just shy of the date of the Kennedy Assassination. And, if you’re obsessed with comparing Mad Men to The Sopranos, as I am, it could be Mad Men’s equivalent of 9/11 – a major historical event that happens offscreen and changes the tone of the series from then out. (Of course, this event is planned in the case of Mad Men, and not a case of something happening in the real world while David Chase was taking his own sweet time putting together some episodes.)
