As so often happens on Mad Men, last night was all about the ladies. Well, it was all about Don's relation to the ladies. And then there was that funky new narrative voice-over device.

After weeks of breakdowns, blackouts, and bad behavior, Don Draper seems to be on the mend. Still recovering from his divorce and the death of his close friend Anna, Don was in an exceptionally vulnerable place, and it seems like he has decided to heal himself rather than fall deeper into a pit made of booze, hookers, and working late nights. He's even taken to journaling, the great past time of psychiatric patients and Oprah addicts. This of course gives us a whole new framework for the episode, where we get to see the inner workings of Don's mind not through his actions, but through the words in his journal.

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Of course Don wants to climb Kilimanjaro. We bet Don Draper is a huge fan of Earnest Hemingway with his silent, macho protagonists and "grace under pressure." Actually, this whole episode reminded me a bit of a Hemingway novel, or at least a John Cheever short story. Maybe one of John Updike's Rabbit books? With the voice-over it was all very suburban male angst literature, but not necessarily in a bad way.

From what we see here, Don has taken up swimming at the New York Athletic Club and is trying to improve himself both emotionally and physically. His struggle in the pool is like his journey through the episode, he starts off having a hell of a time, coughing after just one lap, and having to take a long breather in the locker room. But he slowly gets better as he applies his discipline to the regime, and at the end, he's racing a younger man down the lane.

The most interesting thing about his new regime is his relationship to alcohol. He starts off the episode admitting that he has a problem and that he has to cut back, and throughout the episode we see him have a hard time with booze. First he sends Mrs. Blankenship—who can finally see clearly (much like her boss) after her cataract surgery—back to the closet with all his bottles of liquor, then he blanches at even a sip of wine at dinner with Dr. Faye.

Most telling though is when Ken Cosgrove hands him a glass during a group meeting. He doesn't want to accept it, but he does, and as he takes a sip, he enters a sort of mental fugue where everyone seems to quiet and draw away from him. This was exactly the sensation he craved for the first half of the season: isolation, silencing his demons, putting the world at a distance. He can't do that anymore and now he wants to engage not only with his coworkers, but with his family. Still, he can't give up drinking entirely, because to do so would be a sign of outward weakness and would set him apart from his peers in a conspicuous way.

After a tense encounter with Betty and her new husband at a restaurant, Don continues his date with Bethenny, who confesses that she really likes Don and wishes he could make more of a commitment. As we saw last week, Don has two types of women in his life, the silly blondes who he sleeps with and has a disastrous relationship with, and the more intelligent nurturing women who he is friends with. Bethenny is definitely of the former type and. After being coy on their first date, she is now offering him head in the back of a cab. That's our kind of girl!

But Don doesn't want that anymore (though he doesn't exactly zip his fly). After he gets a phone call from Betty's new husband Henry (more on him and the missus shortly), he goes to his house to pick up the boxes that he's left in the garage. As he drives up to the house and sees Henry mowing the lawn and his possessions stacked at the curb, he says in his voice over, "We're flawed because we want so much more. We're ruined because we get the these things and wish for what we had." With this, Don decides that he's not looking backward anymore. He takes his boxes and throws them in the nearest Dumpster. He makes a clean break with the past, no longer longing to be back with Betty and the kids, but setting out to make something new.

One day in the lobby he sees Dr. Faye breaking up with her boyfriend on the phone—and rather loudly. You know her screams gave Don a little bit of a boner. The only thing he likes more than blondes are feisty blondes. Also, he now knows that Dr. Faye, who poses as married, is very much single. He takes the opportunity to ask her out to dinner on a work-related matter. She quickly puts him in his place and says that if it's worth going out, it's worth doing it at a later date when work isn't involved. We've seen many women, including Dr. Faye, shoot Don down over the course of the season, but it's been a long time since we've encountered one smart and strong enough to actually put him in his place.

The date goes swimmingly. Don takes her out to a nice restaurant and Dr. Faye compares Don to her father, a "handsome, two-bit gangster." That is perhaps one of the most succinct descriptions of Mr. Draper that we've ever heard. Then she tells him a parable about the wind and the sun. Both are trying to get a traveler to take his coat off. The wind blows and blows but the traveler just resists. The sun just gets warmer and warmer until the traveler eventually gives in and takes the coat off thinking he did it of his own volition.

This is Don's new strategy when it comes to Dr. Faye.

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When we've seen him in the past just shove a woman against a wall and shove his hand up her skirt. Now he's putting his coat around her in the restaurant and actually turning down her sexual advances so that he can get to know her better. While there is something genuinely sexy about a man who will throw you down and take control like Don has in the past, that's not really the man who you want to dedicate your life to. However, this new Don is equally as sexy, with his sideways glances and easy smiles, but he'll keep you happy long past retirement.

It turns out that I misclassified Dr. Faye last week when I said she was just another of Don's floozies. She actually seems like the first person to bridge both of Don's types of women since Rachel Menken in season one. He obviously desires her sexually and she has the drive and intelligence to keep up with Don in other areas. The only thing that worries me about Faye is that she lies about her life as well. Is the fact that she's a little bit gangster just like Don going to pull them together or drive them apart?

Speaking of driving, Betty Draper sure had one hell of a car ride home after running into Don and his date at a restaurant in the city. Henry was there to talk politics, (was it just me, or did anyone pay any attention to what the hell those two were talking about? Were we supposed to tune it out?) and Betty was there to look the part of the pretty wife. After her freak out, and several cocktails, she wasn't that much of a pretty wife. Just seeing Don got her so riled up she had to retreat to the ladies' room for a shaky cigarette and to get the sweat out of her pits. Then she had to answer for her actions.

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Don says in one of his voiceovers, "People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be." Nothing more true was ever said about Henry or Betty or their relationship.

Betty's line about Henry living in his mansion with his servants is so telling. That may not be where she lived, but it's where she imagined he lived. She actually has no clue, but she made up her truth about him and constructed an ornate mythology that he was this wealthy, dashing man who would come in and save her from the evil dragon Don Draper. She didn't pay attention to the man who was actually in front of her. The same thing happened to Henry, who bought her story of a wronged housewife who was being held back and emotionally abused by her husband. Now that they've been together for some period of time, the truth is seeping out and they don't like it.

The reason Betty gets so angry at seeing Don is obviously because she's not over him. Even Henry can see that. Like Don said, she wanted one thing and got it, and now she will be ruined for wanting what she had in the first place. When Don eventually invites himself to his son's birthday party, she looks at him lifting the baby in the air longingly. She tells Henry they have everything (a sentiment that she stole from her friend Francine when they chatted in the kitchen) but she doesn't believe it. Betty is one of those people who is chronically unhappy. She is a child who doesn't even know what she really wants or needs and instead just likes to stew in her own ornate juices of misery. Her glare at Don has changed into a glower, and you can see, three episodes away, her arriving on his doorstep to try to get him back.

As for Henry, he clearly hates Don and hates that Betty is still fixated on him. Strangely enough, it's turning him into Don. Not only is he trying to control Betty and using her as the Suburban Splendor Barbie adornment for his business occasions, but he's even acting like him. Didn't he look just like Don when he was mowing the lawn. And then when he stalked in the house, ripped off his shirt (hot daddy alert!), and stomped across the kitchen, he was giving total Don Draper realness. Maybe it's because, like Don, he feels like he has a very tenuous grasp on his life. Don was always afraid his real identity would be revealed and he would lose everything and Henry is worried that Betty will go back to Don and he'll be left alone again.

Don's greatest fear came true and Betty left him, and he's learned from that and is finally rebuilding. But not Henry, who is holding on tighter than ever. Don is the sunshine, showing up at Gene's birthday party and trying to make peace with the family. Henry is the wind blowing hard against Don. We know who wins in this equation. Henry and Betty are going to repeat their past mistakes all over again. Remember, Betty, as Oprah taught us, if he cheated with you, he'll cheat on you.

As for men behaving badly, Peggy's little art buddy Joey was definitely being a jerk to Joan for the second episode in a row. After challenging her authority in the office, she pulled him into her office for a little Joan-style chewing out.

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Clearly Joey is working out his mother issues in the office. He admits that his mother was "a Joan," a woman in the office who thinks she's powerful and tries to tell everyone what to do. That doesn't mean he has to go and make that crack about her getting raped, especially because we know that Joan actually was raped at work. The second he said that, I said out loud, "Oh, hell no!" No one talks to Joanie like that, and from that instant, you know that Mrs. Harris was going to find a way to get Joey out of that office.

Naturally the struggle at the office had everything to do with Joan's problems at home. After the fight with Joey, she goes home to Doctor Rapist who is packing to be shipped off for basic training. (Against our better judgment, he is still one of the absolute hottest guys on the show. We all love the ones that treat us like crap, don't we?) Joan is worried that he's going to be killed and that she's going to be left all alone. How sad that our Joanie put all the eggs of her future in her husband's basket (and what a basket it is!) and without him she has nothing to fall back on. He tells her that she will have her friends at work and she bursts into tears. This is the first time I realized that Joan really has no friends at work. She has the men who she slept with and the women who she lords over and that's it. Joan doesn't see anyone as her equal and that's why she doesn't have any companions. Maybe that's the direction her relationship with Lane is going in now that they come from a place of mutual respect?

Well, Joey thinks there is much more to their relationship and draws a dirty picture of Joan blowing Mr. Pryce. Then he has the audacity to hang it up in her window. Joan is rightfully outraged when she finds it, as is Peggy. From a modern perspective, it's so sad these men can't just get along with the women they work with. As someone who has had female bosses and coworkers for my entire adult life, it's just baffling to me the way these men treat the women. They either see the women in the workforce as their slaves (all the secretaries), humorless scolds (Joan), or just one of the boys (Peggy).

When Peggy takes her problem to Don, he handles it perfectly. He tells Peggy that if she wants the boys to respect her, that she'll go earn some respect. This way Peggy does his dirty work and he gets to stay in good with the boys. Peggy goes in and talks to Joey, and it seems like she would have been satisfied if he went and apologized to Joan. When he refuses, Peggy sees that it was because he thought Joan was something less than he was. By corollary, Peggy now feels like she's less than Joey too. She proved differently by lashing out against him and showing him how powerful she is—she fired him. Like Joan said, Peggy really fired him for herself, not to avenge Joan.

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Oh, what a complicated relationship these two have. Joan used to try to help Peggy and make her life better. Now that Peggy has potentially surpassed her, Joan is jealous. Peggy, for her part, still looks up to Joan and tries to please her. She doesn't seen Joan as an adversary, but as an ally—one of the few other powerful women in the workplace.

What is really going on here is more wind versus sun. Joan exercises her will through diplomacy, as she points out here. As soon as Joey offended her, she went around telling people there had been "complaints" about him and trying to plant the seed to get someone else to show him the door. She doesn't want power, she wants the classic female role of influence. She knows how to get the men around her to do the thing that she wants. Few of them resent her, because this is a role that they're used to, one that their mothers and wives have also used on them. Also, she persuades them into thinking it was their idea in the first place.

Peggy, on the other hand, wants power. She has struggled to get to where she is so that she can hold the fate of men in her own hands, and when her power feels threatened or she feels wronged, she doesn't mind using it. Of course, people don't like this, not only because she fires them, but because they aren't used to women in power. When Peggy tells people what to do, she's emasculating them, which has more to do with their perceptions than Peggy's execution.

When Dr. Faye poses the duality of the sun and the wind, they are mutually exclusive, but it seems that for the "power of poontang" (as that fat jerk art director whose name I can't remember right now calls it) to enter the work place, it's going to take a little bit of both. We need the Joans to massage and cajole the men into doing the right thing, and it's going to take the Peggys to exercise their might when the men are still too stubborn to behave appropriately. Yes, Joan may seem weak next to Peggy, but she's just as valuable. Now if we could only get them to work together, they'd be twice as powerful.

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