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Spoiler alert: This blog is for those who are watching season seven of Mad Men. Don't read on if you haven't seen episode four.

Catch-up with Zoe Williams' episode three blog

I wish you would stop introducing me that way. Why? It's good for business.

Pete is still with his beautiful girlfriend, and still introducing her as his real estate agent, and still doesn't have the first ounce of wisdom, so that every drop of human news bites him on the arse like a beaver in an arcade game. His father-in-law has had a heart attack. The fact that he finds that out from a regular Joe in a restaurant gives us some clue as to the status of his estranged marriage. Trudi might have joined some totally other show by now. She'll probably turn up on Orange is the New Black.

I know. I know it will happen. It is one of the verities of drama, as women fall, as Icaruses (Icarusi?) burn, people like Pete get their comeuppance. People who seem careless don't really not care; they're just … I don't know … disassociating …. They've shoved their sorries in a sack. I know he will come undone, but when?

How the hell do you think that's going to happen when you're at the bottom of a bottle?

Before all that, though. Peggy is Don's Boss. It all happened so fast: one minute they're giving him these unacceptable terms and he's accepting them; the next he's on his knees outside the castle, and his fool has been put in the stocks and all his knights have been fired. Yes, I'm mixing it up with King Lear because so have they.

It seemed to me to be a bit by-numbers: Lou deliberately puts Don under Peggy to make him flip his lid; he duly flips his lid; Peggy duly realises that was the purpose. It looks like a game of chess, played on Twitter. Bold moves with obvious ends, impressionistically described, which only makes you realise how little description you really need in life.

It was a little neat for my liking, distilled in the moment where, in his office, Don drops the thing under the cupboard and reaches under it, to find Lane's beloved Mets flag. Number one, it annoys me when they succumb to a screen-trope, because they're better than that. A cough always means cancer, a long look always means suicide and whenever you reach your hand under an item of furniture, you find something like a memento or a skull. In real life, you find a ball of dust and a fork. Part of being arthouse is at least keeping this in mind. Number two, what does the memory of Lane actually raise in him? A sense of mortality, a carpe diem style thing? A crushing feeling of being dragged beneath the wheels of commerce? Or does he just remember that he quite likes the Mets?

I don't know why I'm complaining. One minute I hate ambiguity, the next minute it's all I want. Don has, yet again, got under my skin. I'm trying to match him, fuddled inconsistency by fuddled inconsistency. I have to say, he gives the lie to the line that it's impossible to act drunk. Jon Hamm's drunk act is absolutely peerless, that mix of confusion, brio and weird smiling.

Broadly, Don's hurtling to rock bottom; I do see that when that happens, it's with a gravitational urgency. They can't afford to dick around with subtle slights and ambiguity. It has to move fast.

Hey Genius… Brooks is in jail in Kingston

Mona has suddenly got an arch personality that she must have bought at a Manhattan charity auction. Her delivery is brusque and hilarious as she rages about her daughter in the commune and her son-in-law in … well, in jail, for whatever that was, in Kingston, wherever that is.

As enjoyable as she is, with her one-liners ( "I'd say she'd been brainwashed, but there's nothing to wash"; "These people are lost, and on drugs, and they have venereal diseases"), the power of this section can be chalked up to Roger, the pisshead wrapped in the riddle, wrapped in the enigma, drenched in more booze.

Something about him makes you want to believe him when you can see he's lying; something about him makes you want to forgive him before he's even done anything. Roger reminds me a bit of that story by Herman Hesse where a woman wishes that the world would love her son and it destroys him. There's something about pre-forgiving someone that is the same as willing them to fail, and fail he does, almost as a gift.

The insight, via his spoilt daughter, that women's lib (or rather, maternal liberation) is just more hedonistic pap from narcissists resenting the narcissists who raised them – immovable object meets another immovable object – I thought could use some work. But that's just me.

Oh right … the future's still coming …

Big mother of all computers! Forgot about that, even though it was most of the episode.

The way people flirt with Don has become slightly vaudeville – halfway between real flirting and the thing people do to men in old people's homes to cheer them up.

Did anyone else think the lighting was so bad in the commune scene that they had to watch it three times just to check Roger hadn't shagged his own daughter? No? Just me, then.

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