I’m starting to wonder.

By episode four, season one, all the basic plot points that would provide the season’s arc — Rachel Menken, Pete vs. Don, Betty’s shaky hands, Peggy’s misadventures with the pill — had been set in motion. After episode four of season two, another dark and meandering affair like the episode preceding it, we are not quite there yet. Episode four gives us Don’s views on household management and corporal punishment, Peggy’s crush on a man of the cloth, Roger coming out of the old adulterer’s home to sleep with an expensive escort, more of Bobbie’s Lucretia Borgia-meets-Marlene Deitrich routine and a crushing moral lesson for Stirling-Cooper over the American Airlines account.

Of all of these, only the American Airlines plot seems to have any real juice. If you’ll remember back to episode two, Don (Jon Hamm) was vehemently opposed to SC dropping their existing client, Mohawk Airlines, to clear the decks for a pitch to AA. Don smelled the AA pitch for what it was — a long shot, undertaken in desperation by Duck (Mark Moses). Well, the chickens come home to roost in episode four — SC is thrown into overdrive to complete their pitch for the airline’s business on time.

The morning of the presentation, they find that Duck’s buddy at AA who promised them the account has been fired. Demoralization all around. Don goes home, smashes a plastic robot, gets a shove from Betty (January Jones), shoves back and reminisces about his long-dead, dirt farmin’, ass-whoopin’ dad. (Or rather, Dick Whitman’s dad. If you’re reading this and haven’t seen season one yet, it is going to take more than an internet episode recap to make this all make sense for you.)

Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) spends much of this week’s episode back in Brooklyn, avoiding her illegitimate kid and flirting with a visiting priest (Colin Hanks). This does not sit well with her older sister (Audrey Wasilewski), who alerts the Father to the existence of Peggy’s child through a crafty confession. More great pre-Vatican II moments in this episode, from the punishment doled out to adolescents who act up during mass, to the Palm Sunday household decorations.

Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is all but MIA again this week. Although he does show up for an impromptu Sunday afternoon work meeting dressed in a tennis outfit I am not even going to try to describe.

Bobbie’s (Melinda McGraw) back. She has a really bad/good idea for a TV show for her insult comic husband Jimmie (Patrick Fischler) and needs Don to help her get some changes made to his Utz contract. She helps Don, right there in his office, with Joan (Christina Hendricks, temporarily Draper’s secretary), on the other side of the door but well within earshot. I think this is going to be an ongoing thing — blackmail?

Again, the aborted American Airlines pitch seems to be setting us up for some sort of multi-episode conflict. So far it was the season’s only big, complex morality play, with Don clearly coming out on top. Next episode: Don goes duck hunting?

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For Christina Hendricks, playing Joan Holloway on “Mad Men” has been an eye-opening experience.

Not only is Joan one of the most intriguing and contradictory people on the drama, but Hendricks has had to deal with a variety of feedback about her character, who is the office manager at the show’s fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency.

Even Hendricks herself had surprising reactions to Joan during the show’s acclaimed first season.

“I remember when I first got the script where (Joan’s) roommate came to the office and she’s just been fired. And Joan says, ‘Sit down, tell me everything that happened,’” Hendricks said in a recent phone interview. “And I remember going, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t know how to play this scene — Joan is being really nice.’”

Joan certainly can be brusque with junior secretaries. But last season, she was tender and sweet with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), her married lover. And although she doesn’t understand the creative goals of Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), a secretary who has been promoted to copywriter, Joan also is an ambitious professional.

“I don’t think a woman (at that time) would be office manager and running the whole place … if she wasn’t driven,” Hendricks said. “And Joan could go out and find a husband quite easily. She’s an attractive, smart, successful woman, but she’s not pursuing that. She’s doing things that are safe to a certain degree, because she can’t marry a man who’s already married.”

What’s most satisfying is “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner never has made her seem like a TV stereotype.

She’s not a predictable man-eater, a one-note scold or a character who is prone to soapy promiscuity. Joan is a complicated, guarded survivor in an era that wasn’t kind to women with professional ambitions.

At a recent panel discussion of the show, Hendricks recalled one woman in the audience talking about the show’s early ’60s accuracy.

“As she talked about it, you could tell that the memories were coming up in her and that her body was tensing up,” Hendricks said. “You could tell that watching the show, for her, was certainly bringing up a lot.”

“I never hear anyone say, this is so farfetched. I hear the women say, ‘This is how it was,’ ” she adds.

Fans often ask what it’s like to work on a show in which the male characters can be so sexist: Hendricks says she tells them that her first read-through of the show’s scripts sometimes make her “catch (her) breath.”

“It’s the initial reading that really takes you by surprise, then you just settle in” and play the part, she says.

Although Joan’s behavior sometimes shocks the woman who’s playing her, Hendricks says she also gets a lot of positive feedback.

“I have women coming up to me and saying, ‘I love your character! She’s so empowered. She takes control; she gets what she wants,’” the actress notes. “That’s another side of her. And I respect that in Joan. She says and does things that I would never allow myself to do. Sometimes I think they’re nuts, and sometimes I admire (the actions she takes).”

One of Hendricks’ favorite scenes takes place early in Season 1.

The women on the staff of Sterling Cooper are assembled in a conference room to test lipstick shades for a client. Through a one-way mirror, a group of ad executives watch the women, making sexist comments all the while. At one point, Joan joins the women in the conference room and makes a point of bending over and showing off her alluring figure to the men.

“She was playing. She knew what they were doing on the other side of that mirror,” Hendricks said. “She was taking the control back, instead of being the victim. … She wasn’t being slutty, she was being confident and sexual. That was one of my favorite scenes. It was one of the best, revealing moments for Joan, and I also just love the dynamic of men and women on either side of that glass (that) I think it sums up a lot about ‘Mad Men’ — in particular, (what goes on) in the office.”

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(S02E02) “Supermarket checkout girl? The conversation must be stimulating.” - Joan, to Paul, about his new girlfriend

It must be hard to deal with the death of an actor on a current show. Not just the death itself, of course, but how to deal with the fact that the actor won’t be playing the character anymore. On some shows, one of the leads dies, and you’re left with either replacing the character with another actor, ending the show completely, or having the character die on the show too. I didn’t think Mad Men would even deal with the character of Pete’s dad (played by Christopher Allport, who died in January), since he was only in one episode of the first season. They could have easily referred to him, sight unseen. But they’ve chosen to have him die in the American Airlines plane crash in Jamaica Bay, and this could actually prove to be an interesting catalyst for future Pete stories.

As for the rest of the episode, I’m rather astonished. I would have bet money that we would have to wait weeks to see what happened to Peggy’s baby, but we see in this episode that she’s being raised by her religious mom? That’s actually a surprise. A rather welcome one. (Also: superb acting by the kid, crying when he is handed to Peggy.)

I also like the dynamic between Don and Pete in this episode. It’s played perfectly, Don’s mixture of “I hate this guy” and “I honestly feel sorry for what happened” and Pete’s looking for advice from Don in a big brother sort of way and utter confusion as to what to do and if he should even grieve for a guy he thought was a jerk. Well done. But then when Pete wants to talk to Don again, thinking they shared something special and Don rejects him - again - you can practically see Pete’s heart crumbling like a dried cookie. But it’s interesting how Duck has confidence in Pete. He thinks Pete has some progressive ideas (and let’s face it, he seems to be the only one besides Duck to see the world is changing).

I also like seeing “non-work Paul,” with the casual clothes and partying and the Charles Nelson Reilly scarf around his neck. OK, so I’m not wild about that last thing, but besides that scene in the beatnik coffee house in season one, this is the only time we’ve seen the alternative side of the 60s, the marijuana smoking, the rock music, the partying. And a black girlfriend (not too thrilled with Joan’s reaction, though I think it’s more jealousy than anything). I like how Peggy blew off the guy after making out with him a bit. It’s such a great contrast, 1960 Peggy and 1962 Peggy. And Elisabeth Moss is playing her with a real special kind of confidence.

I know I keep on going on and on each week about how great this show is and how each episode just works so well. But honestly, I’m having a really hard time trying to find fault with this show. With most shows you can spot a bad episode pretty quickly. A plot doesn’t make sense, the writing is bad, it has a conclusion that is predictable, etc. But Mad Men hits everything just so so right that it’s impossible to see what they could have done differently. I’m really digging Matt Weiner’s vision for this show. I trust him and the writers and the actors completely. He’s like a novelist that you just trust with the story, and you read the entire novel as a whole. I can’t wait to see where the stories of these characters are going.

A big marketing push, a bucketful of Emmy nominations and an ocean of critical praise helped drive “Mad Men“ to its biggest audience ever.

The second-season premiere of the much-lauded show drew 1.9 million viewers to AMC Sunday (July 27). While that’s likely to pale in comparison to fellow Sunday-night cable series like “In Plain Sight” and “Army Wives,” it’s also the best showing ever for “Mad Men.”

Last year’s premiere drew 1.6 million viewers, but the show lost audience as the season wore on. It averaged 915,000 viewers per week for the season (not counting mulitple same-week repeats). What’s more, about half of Sunday’s audience fell in the adults 18-49 demographic, way above its first-season average.

AMC mounted a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign for the second season, and the show has gotten some free publicity as well by virtue of its 16 Emmy nominations — including ones for best drama series and lead actor Jon Hamm — and near-universal critical acclaim. The show also won three awards, including program of the year, from the Television Critics Association this month.

Numbers for USA’s “In Plain Sight” and Lifetime’s “Army Wives” weren’t available as of Tuesday morning. They’ve been averaging about 4.7 million and 3.7 million viewers, respectively, over the past month.