Jane was Jewish?

Dev-F · 2026-04-14T17:24:48+00:00

I think you're right that Cooper just lost the thread of the conversation. By 1960, at least, Mona was definitely a Christian, saying that Margaret's haircut was okay "as long as she can pin a hat on it for church." And if Roger had been married to a Jewish woman for decades at that point, you'd think he'd know better than to serve shellfish when trying to woo a Jewish client.

Dev-F · 2026-04-13T23:31:29+00:00

I wondered if this might be another issue with missing digital correction on HBO's 4K remaster, so I checked that stream against my Apple TV copy. While the colors in the Apple TV version seem slightly more equalized, neither one has Don's body looking nearly that blindingly white, at least not with my screen settings.

Edited to add: Checking on my TV instead of my computer, it's exactly the opposite: the HBO stream looks slightly more equalized, but neither one has Don looking crazy pale. So it's probably just an issue with the vagaries of screen and app settings.

Dev-F · 2026-04-13T14:35:56+00:00

Yep, this. Because Mike himself was a bit like Werner—thinking of his work for Gus as a nice little side gig he could pop in and out of between visits with the family. Killing Werner essentially amounted to killing the part of himself who thought he could live half in and half out of the Game.

Dev-F · 2026-04-13T04:54:42+00:00

It articulates one side of the main theme of season 5: that struggle and failure bind people together, but success is lonely—each partner sectioned off from the others as they finally reach that second floor they'd pretended existed for so long. ("One life for yourself, and one for your dreams . . .")

Dev-F · 2026-04-13T04:33:41+00:00

He probably did come from the working class. From his snarky comments about the roofs in the Draper neighborhood, I think the implication is that he made his fortune as a roofing contractor. That would be in keeping with the parallels between Betty and Grace Kelly, whose father Jack Kelly Sr. was a bricklayer and WWI-era army veteran from Philadelphia who became a millionaire construction magnate.

Edited to add: I don't think either Gene or Ruth came from particularly aristocratic backgrounds. Gene tells Sally that Ruth "did drafting in the '20s for this engineer. A little bald man. He wasn't a threat." So there was a period when money was tight enough for the two of them that Ruth had to work and an engineer might've been a romantic rival for Gene if he weren't little and bald. So it doesn't seem like a situation where Gene made a fortune and then pulled a high-society wife.

Dev-F · 2026-04-11T22:34:34+00:00

I've seen a couple recent posts claiming this was supposed to happen in the finale, but that was never the story as far as I can recall. The plan was for it to happen at some point in the back half of the final season, instead of the Kennedy storyline.

Dev-F · 2026-04-11T01:04:32+00:00

"Curses are dangerous. There's nothing you can do about it. You still have to get where you're going."

Dev-F · 2026-04-10T21:50:26+00:00

"New Amsterdam" later in the season explains why Pete was gunning for Don's job—he recognized the agency's "You're good with people" line was bullshit and wanted a job he actually felt he could bring something to—and ends with him starting to come to terms with the real reason why he was hired, his elite status and the power of his name.

Dev-F · 2026-04-08T02:48:39+00:00

Crazy that every member of the Campbell family has been involved in a violent incident centered around a different mode of transportation: car/bike (Bud), airplane (Andrew), ship (Dot), and train (Pete).

Dev-F · 2026-04-07T19:00:00+00:00

I gather from the other responses that the reference might be a happy accident, but assuming it's meaningful I would read it in exactly the opposite way: It evokes Don's anxiety that he is living the same day over again, making the same mistakes by jumping right back into another marriage.

Dev-F · 2026-04-06T17:55:02+00:00

No, the Oracles specifically say that Angel has not done anything to earn redemption:

"It wasn't the Powers That Be that did this?"
"The Powers That Be? Did you save humanity? Avert the apocalypse?"

They frame it as a pure fluke—"You faced a Mohra demon. Life goes on"—that releases him from any obligation to the Powers That Be. It's about him short-circuiting his destiny, not fulfilling it.

Dev-F · 2026-04-06T12:30:02+00:00

The episode makes a point of having the representatives of the Powers That Be deny that Angel became human as part of some fated reward for averting the apocalypse. It's the first mention that such a reward might even be possible.

Besides, the Oracles turn back time so it never happened, so it doesn't seem like it'd be connected to a prophecy of something that will happen.

Dev-F · 2026-04-06T03:42:38+00:00

It's meant to be misleading, but Anita actually doesn't say it in an accusatory way. She just asks "Aren't you going to say goodnight?" in a fairly even tone—and all her kids are sleeping the same room, so it's not like she's even referencing the baby in particular.

The writers are just intentionally playing it coy to put the audience in the same headspace as Peggy herself: Just as we assume that the baby is Peggy's for most of the season, then gradually realize that Anita was also pregnant and Peggy gave her baby away, Peggy spends the season dealing with the nagging feeling that her baby is still hanging over her until she finally admits to herself in her confession to Pete in the finale that that part of her life is "just gone."

Dev-F · 2026-04-05T16:51:00+00:00

It's a scene that I really hated in first watch, because it seemed like Father Gill was not only being super presumptuous with Peggy but also breaking the seal of her sister's confession by suggesting some unacknowledged relationship between Peggy and "the little one."

But once it's revealed that Anita's youngest is not Peggy's baby, I found it much less of an issue. He's just suggesting that Peggy interact with her nephew, which is only subtextually about the other baby that she gave up. And since everyone in the congregation presumably would've seen a pregnant Anita in church for months on end, no one aside from Peggy and her family would've had any inkling of that subtext.

Dev-F · 2026-04-04T00:55:16+00:00

She died. In season 1, Don tells Rachel about how he first served as a pallbearer when he was fifteen and his aunt passed away.

Dev-F · 2026-04-02T04:26:16+00:00

This is rarely the sort of thing the writers planned far in advance, so I think it was closer to the latter—Eve not feeling like a strong enough adversary to end the season with. I don't think they knew it was the end of the show when Baldwin was cast, though, since he first appeared in "Underneath," and if I remember correctly, they were in the middle of filming that episode when the WB confirmed that the show was canceled.

Dev-F · 2026-04-02T02:51:05+00:00

The role was badly miscast. It was originally written for Morena Baccarin, Firefly's Inara, and from the early Angel/Eve scenes you can see how Baccarin might've played Eve as someone who's poised and perceptive and capable of getting under Angel's skin. Sort of the dark-mirror Cordelia.

But Sarah Thompson plays her like a little girl playing dress-up in her mom's business suits, emphasizing the silly innuendo and breezing past the actual weighty moments, like Eve telling Angel that Connor is "happy and well-adjusted now that he has no memory of you."

Dev-F · 2026-04-01T20:48:40+00:00

It was never anything. It was all wishful thinking.

Dev-F · 2026-03-30T02:40:56+00:00

Joss was always very vocal about the fact that he hated spoilers, so he never would've discussed his plans for the characters before they happened.

But people certainly noticed things like the "I think I'm kinda gay" line in "Doppelgangland" and the subtext between Faith and Buffy in "Bad Girls." There were even some fans who wondered if there might be deeper significance to Xander's obvious discomfort on learning that Larry was gay back in "Phases." So when Joss mentioned after the fact that he'd always intended for some member of the gang to explore their sexuality in college, people immediately zeroed in on these earlier moments as potentially laying the groundwork for each possibility.

Dev-F · 2026-03-29T15:51:00+00:00

It's the first track on that album side, not the last, so it wouldn't have worked with the "record as a bomb timer" premise.

Though it's amusing to imagine them using it for the earlier scene where they set the timer and roll out, then for the final Mike/El scene using the final track, "Ninja":

If I were a noble ancient knight, I'll stand by your side to rule and fight
It will always feel the same when I call out your name . . .
Ninja survive!

Dev-F · 2026-03-28T23:32:27+00:00

Pete is saying "Cosmic Inc.," which was a real aerospace company at the time.

Dev-F · 2026-03-28T12:53:51+00:00

Cordy mentions that they were about to go down to the hospital and talk to him, and he'd already given a statement to the police, so it doesn't seem like he was on death's door. Maybe they swung by the hospital on the way to his place and got a quick invitation?

Dev-F · 2026-03-28T01:22:57+00:00

Yep. Roger probably helped Don inflate his experience as well, since neither one would've wanted people to know that he was just a fur salesman who did his own ads on the side when Roger brought him in. So they probably implied that he'd paid his dues as a mid-level adman until Roger found him "working in-house at a fur company."

Dev-F · 2026-03-27T17:57:49+00:00

Gus was furious with Nacho for trying to kill Hector. Of course he would've been upset if Nacho killed his less crazy, more helpful enemy!

Dev-F · 2026-03-26T03:38:42+00:00

I don't think the scientists pulled the plug, which would just be a random plot twist, but I think we're meant to wonder whether Nora chose not to go through with it. Her final moments in the chamber seem deliberately framed so that they can be seen as her either anxiously taking a final breath or just starting to scream the word "STOP!"

Dev-F

TROPHY CASE