'Mad Men:' The doorway, Don Draper, Dante, Zippos

"Man Men" returns and with it, questions, thoughts, observations, and a few hundred blog posts attempting to define The Meaning of It All.  And with your forbearance, here's mine. Let's start at the very beginning of Sunday's "The Doorway" because -- in a series where nothing is ever wasted -- that is where you were meant to begin.

And in the meantime, this quick note -- I'll spend most of this post talking about Don, and not that Peggy, Betty or Roger didn't have equally important moments but -- to be blunt -- I gotta get some other stuff done.

He's back from Vietnam, and offers Don this singularly great line, "they offered me R and R in Honolulu. Did anyone notice this is the same place?" (Naturally, conflated Vietnam -- hell - with Hawaii -- paradise.) Then, he goes on to convince Don: "I believe in what goes around comes around. One day I'll be the veteran [Don] in paradise. I'll be the man who talks to strangers."

I could go on and on about the meaning of this remarkable scene, but we haven't got all day, have we? Instead, I'll make this brief: The drunken serviceman is Don, an earlier version of Don, on an earlier stage of his life when he was in fact Dick Whitman -- long before he co-opted the identity of Don Draper. The full force of this realization doesn't strike Don until midway though the episode when he discovers the Zippo lighter he has is actually Dinkins.

For Don, the idea of a switched Zippo is only a short step away from switched dog tags. He is not Don Draper, but Dick Whitman -- who is "dead," but then so is Draper. With that cold realization, Don finds himself very much alone on this life's journey. He is in the dark wood, a place as forlorn and remote as hell itself .?.?. For him, and really, for the rest of this series, the question becomes for Don, as it was for Pfc. Dinkins: How to get to "paradise?"

Obviously, Hawaii was also the "jumping off point" for GI's headed to Saigon, and this ad is presented to the Royal Hawaiian exactly at the outset of the worst year of the war, and one of the worst years in American history, something neither they or Don could yet know.

Because "Mad Men" is always so rich with parallels -- all the better to infuse depth and meaning -- parallel this ad with Peggy's, at her new agency. As you recall, she quickly has to change the ad because the client makes the wild leap that consumers will somehow associate it with the grisly practice of GI's cutting off the ears of dead VCs (yes, this did happen in some instances). The tagline, "lend me your ears" has to go.

In this sense, both Peggy and Don are confronting Vietnam, because the war is being refracted through their work.

Roger, like Jonesy, has gone through the door of death, too -- died and returned. He is seeking meaning to the journey and so far finds none though in contrast to Don, is at least seeking. Of course, the complexity of the quest for Don was made clear earlier in this episode -- how can you find the meaning of your life if you are not who you say you are, and who you are already died years earlier?