Although I usually shy away from the graphic, I thought this episode was all about, literally, life and death. The last episode ended with Gene's death, and this episode ended with Betty going into big Gene's former room in order to tend to little, baby Gene. Life and death, the cycle. Blood is a visual representative of that--murder, the blood smeared mop, the birth of a baby, the fight for survival--all of it, in a sense, marked with blood.

ITA. Blood = the life force.

I must say thirteen you come up with great threads. I think the girls above me got it. But I also think the blood and the birth represent the death of an old era and the birth of a new one. An era when people stopped coloring within the lines. Betty's birth and the first big assassination of a civil rights leader is the start of that era. like Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. All things must pass. All things must change. To quote a tired proverb, "The times they are a changing". I so narcissistic I am going to post this on the open thread.

That's a great point too @adamx6000. 1963 was such a tremendous year of change in so many ways, historically and culturally.

And perhaps, and most significantly, a foreshadowing of the assassination of JFK.

I thought the blood theme was very interesting. I thought blood represented the physical experience that the characters were dissociated from in various ways. Betty was dissociated from her physical experience by drugs. Her daughter was separated from Gene's death by not being allowed to participate in the funeral. The family is not present to Gene's death but gets the information through a third person, the policeman, in an impersonal notification. The closest anyone seems to get to the physical reality of birth or death was when Don holds an egg up to the light, squints at it, and has the discussion about embryos and blood veins with his daughter. Children don't belong in grave yards. Fathers don't belong in birthing rooms. Mothers aren't present for births. I thought they did a great job when Betty became aware and didn't know if she had a boy or a girl. There had been no connection to the baby prior to her coming out of the demerol fog. I wondered if her sense of relatedness to her children had been negatively affected by lack of bonding during the birthing experience.

@ thanx bluegirl and Katie I think there has been a lot of foreshadows of changing and JFK in this season. I posted this before but let briefly comment again.
The book sally reads: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
When grampa says," pretty soon all hell is going break loose".
The smashing of the ant farm.

In a way the summer of 1963 reminds me of the summer of 2001. like the school teacher says," it is going to be a beautiful summer"

48 wrote: "I thought blood represented the physical experience that the characters were dissociated from in various ways....Children don't belong in grave yards. Fathers don't belong in birthing rooms. Mothers aren't present for births."

Whoa! 48, awesome analysis there! You're so right! Everyone sees the blood smeared on the floor (or on Sally's face), but never the actual event that spilled the blood. It goes along with that idea of living in a fog. And you're right, even when it comes to the egg, Don tries to see it through the shell. There's always something between the people and the actual thing.

Katie wrote: And perhaps, and most significantly, a foreshadowing of the assassination of JFK.

!!! Yes! You know, Matt said he wasn't interested in the JFK assassination, but I bet that almost every episode this season is going to have some hint in it--he's keeping it there, hovering in the corner of our eye--and why not? We know it's coming, and he knows we know. And the thing about the JFK assassination, as compared to what 48 so brilliantly said about blood being spilled "off-camera," is that it happened "on-camera" for everyone to see.

That, I suppose, is the moment when the fog dissipated. When they experienced death first hand, coming into their living rooms, and saw the blood spilled rather than just being mopped up afterward.

You know, this association with blood smears and not experiencing things first-hand brings Betty's dream of her dad into focus.

In the last episode, Betty didn't want to hear about "the arrangements." And her dad talked about how he'd sheltered her. In the dream, he's mopping up the blood; he has always been the one to keep unpleasant things from her, to clean it all up before she saw it. But now he's gone.

In a way, there's a decision made by Betty in that dream to be more of an adult. So when she squares her shoulders before going into her Dad's old room to tend to the baby, it's like she's altered her perspective. "Eugene" was the adult who protected her, the child; now "Eugene" is the child, and she is the adult who must protect him.

@Thirteen: You make some great comments here. The open thread for the last episode talked a lot about how TV coverage of the Vietnam war brought, for the first time, the bloody, brutal reality that is war into Americans' living rooms. Maybe the assassination of JFK is the watershed moment, the preface, to an era in which that which stands between us and the thing begins to disappear.