"Who is Don Draper?" This is the question asked in the opening scene of the fourth season of AMC's Mad Men, and has been the perennial question that Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, has been asking us since the show first premiered. We come into the new season with much of the show's dynamics drastically changed. Sterling Cooper as we've known it has ceased to exist, having been swallowed by a large advertising firm Y&R. The agency is now Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and has in its employ Joan Holloway, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell and Harry Crane, leaving the rest of the firm behind to Y&R. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is a small operation with a confident face forward that is struggling behind the scenes to obtain and keep clients. On the home front Don and Betty are divorced. Betty is now married to Henry Francis living in Ossining with Sally and Bobby, while Don is now living in an apartment in Greenwich Village. We see Betty and Henry are adjusting to living in a house still owned by Don, and Thanksgiving with Henry's family, the building of new family dynamics.
The question, "Who is Don Draper", and the episode title, "Public Relations" are connected in both a literal and metaphorical sense in this episode. Literally because Don is the center of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Riding the success of a recent advertising gem, Don is interviewed by a reporter from an ad newspaper. At the interview Don fails to play himself up or the firm for that matter. His modesty is taken for arrogance or perhaps complacence. This causes the loss of an account and thereby forces Don to reconsider his role at the firm. His creative success is linked directly to the financial success to the firm, and now so is his face. There is no more hiding for Don Draper. Finding out don Draper's secrets has taken three seasons of bread-crumb-trail-following for the audience and even for the characters on the show. Don is a man who exists most comfortably in the shadows, in mystery. He is a cautious man who has had to protect his identity for a long time and has successfully built a wall around himself. It would appear now that we are starting to see the bricks crumble and not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Perhaps his path lies outside of his wall and that is path he is starting to walk. At the end of episode he throws out the Jantzen's people for being too safe, for being unwilling to take necessary risks. Maybe Don Draper is ready to take those risks as well. To shed his shell and step forward into the light and out of the shadows. To begin public relations. Perhaps this is a new man.
Just a word on Betty, this is a woman who has been slowly unraveling as the story progressed. Betty's position in the show is sympathetic. From the outset she is a bored and lonely (and rich) housewife. Her husband comes home late and leaves early, married more to his job and his mistresses than to his wife. Essentially she is alone, and we know she feels it when we see her reaching out to Glenn, the neighbor's prepubescent son. As her marriage fell apart and she became increasingly alone she regressed into more and more of a child. This is most evident in the presence of her father, and she shifts back to daddy's princess almost immediately. As Henry's mother put it, "She is a silly woman."
