America shaken and even Don stirred Don and Bobby go to the movies. The heavens are telling us to change. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner does not like to confront the crushing events of the 1960s head on. They form the backdrop to the characters' lives, and can readily bring their dilemmas into focus, but the public never pre-empts the personal. The Flood, the fifth episode of the current season, used the assassination of inspirational civil rights leader Martin Luther King jnr on April 4, 1968, to interrupt and magnify intentions or unspoken truths, but selfishness and guilt played more of a part than civic nobility. Don and Megan. When John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, the season three episode The Grown-Ups alluded to the news breaking, with Don Draper walking through the office as unanswered telephones rang, and here the first confused reports reached an awards dinner that had Peggy and Don's wife, Megan, both former employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, nominated for work previously done at the agency. A voice blurted out a barely audible comment during a supposed speech by Paul Newman (seen as a silhouette, heard with terribly misguided voice casting) and despair and panic filled the room. Race relations have rarely been a focus on Mad Men, befitting an era when segregation was barely cracked, and this episode emphasises that distance. Dawn and Phyllis, the two recurring black characters on the show and secretary to Don and Peggy respectively, both try to go to work the next day, hoping for a measure of normalcy as grief and rioting broke out across black neighbourhoods in America's cities. They receive misguided support and clumsy sympathy, with both Peggy and Joan providing hugs so awkward they were barely comforting. Mad Men The focus instead was on family and how one generation struggles to prepare the next. Peggy was getting ready to buy an apartment on the Upper East Side, and once the agent realised that her freelance journalist boyfriend, Abe, was not making a decision of any kind, advocated using King's death to suggest a lowball offer because the location was only 10 blocks away from possible rioting. It didn't work, but the pay-off was Abe's admission that he didn't like the area because he wanted their children to grow up somewhere more diverse. The wonder, glee and then fastidious follow-up that Elizabeth Moss gave Peggy in just a few seconds was remarkable as she took in his matter-of-fact belief that they would start a family together. Pete Campbell saw the upset and spectre of lawlessness as an opportunity to return to his suburban family home from the morose Manhattan apartment to which his wife, Trudy, has banished him. His outrage and upset grew in leaps and bounds, and he furiously castigated Harry Crane, who was dealing with costly changes in the regular television schedule, for placing commerce over simple decency, before calling Trudy and trying to invoke his paternal place in the household. He thought King's murder was his marital get out of jail free card, but Trudy, despite a momentary weakening of her resolve, didn't relent. SCDP's Michael Ginsberg was blundering his way through a surprise blind date organised by his father with a friend's school teacher daughter. There were traces of Woody Allen in his jittery monologue - he managed to mention still being a virgin within minutes - and one of the things that elevated this episode to rank as the best of the year to date was the welcome mixture of biting humour and genuine emotional recrimination. Betty, whose current husband, Henry, was walking through Harlem with then New York mayor John Lindsay (before deciding it was time to run for office himself, requiring Betty to have a public profile), nailed former husband Don when he forgot to pick up their three children for a scheduled visit. "You'd go to Canada on your knees to get your girlfriend," sniped Betty, not only refusing to acknowledge his marriage to Megan, but also unknowingly spotlighting Don's actual worry over his mistress, Sylvia Rosen, who was in Washington - where rioting was severe - with her husband at a medical conference. Don was definitely prepared to go to Washington on his knees. This was primed for a deepening of the relationship between Don and his oldest child, teenager Sally, who has pursued him previously as so many of the women in his life do, so naturally the focus was middle child Bobby (Mason Vale Cotton - the fourth actor to play the role, the first to have something to do). A cipher until now, the boy revealed Don-like traits, beginning with a curiosity about the wallpaper in his room and progressing to deceiving Betty (a former specialty of his father's). When Megan, correctly assuming Don's insular lack of interest, took Sally and now toddler Gene to a vigil, father and son upheld Betty's ban on Bobby watching television by going to the movies, one of Don's favourite escapes. They saw Planet of the Apes twice, a science-fiction metaphor for racial division, and Bobby's appreciation of it tweaked something in Don. It wasn't overplayed, but there was a powerfully troubled look on the father's face when the son, aged 10 or 11, told a black usher that people weren't going to the movies to have fun, but because it helped them with their sadness. It was a subtly effective message, something else Don traffics in, and when Megan, who had already hung up on her own father, a French-Canadian Marxist, confronted Don about his refusal to share his emotions - "You don't have Marx," she snapped, comparing key male figures in her life, "You have a bottle" - a shaken Don didn't so much reply to her as let Megan hear a monologue he had to deliver to himself. He talked about how from the moment they were born he'd pretended to be excited and proud of his children, but that it was an act. "You don't feel anything, especially if you've had a difficult childhood," he noted, before talking about the moments in which a child judges the parent the same way the parent once did when themselves young. But his few hours with Bobby has changed Don's belief, and genuine love for your child, "feels like your heart is going to explode." Megan was once again reduced to tears by her husband, but for once it was because of what he had revealed instead of lashing out to remain comfortably numb. After four episodes in which Don Draper's intransigence in refusing to acknowledge his own problems, let alone deal with them, had been used as a battering ram on the audience, The Flood let up just as Mad Men fans were starting to wonder how much more they could endure. The biblical flood, invoked by Ginsberg's father, washes everything away and those who remain start again, and perhaps that was the case with this deceptively powerful episode. But it ended with a subsequent exchange between the new amigos that was both telling and drily funny. When Don tucked Bobby in, the child admitted he was scared of the ructions reaching into every corner of American life. "What if somebody shoots Henry?" he said, making clear who he saw as his father figure. "Henry's not that important," Don instantly replied, finding himself loving a child he had let drift far away. Don Draper sounded like someone who knew at least one thing that he actually wanted. Roger's Business Acumen: When Roger Sterling actually tries to contribute to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's growth, it's generally disastrous. His LSD buddy, Randall Walsh, an interplanetary insurance business executive played by William Mapother (aka creepy Ethan from Lost), took a meeting with Don and the creative team and basically freaked them out to varying degrees with his Molotov cocktail-dominated pitch - except Stan, who knows his drug casualties - before Roger casually ushered him out. Merger Possibilities: At the awards night both SCDP and Peggy's firm, Cutler, Gleason and Chaough, were again bemoaning the reality of life as mid-level advertising agencies, literally seated at the back of the room. Is a merger on the cards? Jim Cutler, played by no less than a greying Harry Hamlin, was introduced, with Peggy telling Megan, "He's like Roger with bad breath." Upgrading: Ted Chaough, by the way, is quite the smitten kitten when it comes to Peggy. At the awards he tried to claim Abe's seat next to her, and basically told his wife to be quiet while Peggy spoke. Peggy wanted to get a fancy new apartment, but will she do the same with the man in her life? Anyone who had an ongoing affair with "Duck" Phillips has to have a question mark to their name.