'Mad Men' recap: Affairs of the Heart

What comes around goes around. In seasons 1 and 2, how I loved watching Don take the head of the room and pitch his clients. It was like all the longing and ache he walked around with in his everyday life somehow came together in a brilliant bit of storytelling. But when pitching Hilton to Hilton Don seemed kind stiff and bloated. ''We're not chauvinists,'' he says of Americans. ''We just have expectations.'' Oh for the love of…. Well Connie, who is really turning out to be a bit of a cuckoo clock, sits there for a second after Don gives his final ta-dah. ''What about the moon?'' he asks gruffly. Don looks confused, saying he didn't know Connie was being serious about Space Hilton. ''Well isn't this something?'' says Connie, his salty voice suddenly a little terrifying, before asking to speak with Don in private. Peggy, of course, shoots Don a last lingering glance before shutting the door, as if she knew Pop was going to give her big brudder a spanking and she felt powerless to help. Connie's speech of disapproval is not unlike Don's verbal smackdown of Peggy. ''You want me to just say yes to everything you do,'' snaps Connie. ''What do you want from me, love?'' Yes, actually. And the old badger is mean to toss it out so easily in the Waldorf suite only to yank it back when Don doesn't lasso him the moon.

So Don, who believes himself to be essentially unloved and unlovable, rebounds from Connie's slap into the arms of Miss Farrell. It was a mortifying progression, from Don on the bed pretending that Hilton has summoned him once more to the city to him showing up at the door of a garage apartment with his hat cocked to his pleading declaration of intent. ''I wanted to talk,'' he says. ''Right,'' Miss Farrell hands him back dryly, ''says the man unbuckling his pants.'' It started to get a little creepy when Don impatiently insists that she's been flirting with him and how can she deny their attraction. ''I want you,'' he says, echoing Betty's earlier analysis. ''I don't care. Doesn't that mean anything to someone like you?'' Turns out no brunette alive can resist Don's forceful charm. They end up in bed together, Don finally asleep for the first time all episode. Damn it. And damn it that Sal, broken and betrayed, is driven to find a little cold comfort cruising a friendly stretch of the park. But when he calls Kitty and tells her he loves her, at least he means it.

Maybe I have the emotional constitution of a Wet Nap, but this hour of TV has left me terribly blue. I'm exhausted by these people. You know who else is? Carla. In the Draper kitchen, she listens to the funeral service of the four girls murdered in a Birmingham fire. ''You can leave it on your station, I don't mind,'' says Betty, who was more trying to appeal to Carla's sense of loyalty than share a human moment of grief and outrage. ''I hate to say this,'' she goes on primly, ''but this has really made me wonder about civil rights. Maybe it's not supposed to happen right now.'' Sorry, Birdie, if this all makes you uncomfortable. But the outside world is pounding at Mad Men's borders. We got yet another ominous mention of Dallas. Vietnam, and the steps our government took to maroon us there, looms. A housewife thinks she'll vote for JFK again. Martin Luther King Jr.s' voice hovers ghost-like over the whole proceedings. We are in over our heads.

Best line of the evening: Roger, of course. ''That's what you want this place to be known for? That and some guy losing his foot in the lawnmower.''

What did you all think? Is Connie a nut? Is this really the last of Sal? Can you forgive Don? Are you more and more realizing that we might be faced with Don's suicide in the end?

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