“Three episodes into this second season, Mad Men already has delineated the shadings between good and evil — between a sense of fairness and callousness — in a way far more profound than anything in The Dark Knight.”

That’s Steven Rosen, in a Cincinatti City Beat story in which he considers Don Draper, the protagonist of my beloved Mad Man, as “sort of dark knight himself,” and the “moral compass” of a world that may not have devolved into the violent chaos of Gotham, but underneath its outwardly controlled facade is melting into a soup of generational conflict and moral relativism.

Rosen cites the men of Mad Men’s various reactions to the 1962 crash of American Airlines’ Flight 2, the real-life event that inspires the fictional conflict driving Season 2’s second episode, as proof of his point:

Partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery) cynically sees the crash as an opportunity to dump regional Mohawk and pursue American as a new “crisis” client. When Draper resists, asking, “What kind of agency are we,” Sterling answers, ‘The kind where everyone has summer homes.’ Ledger’s Joker couldn’t say anything more devastating.

This is probably where I should admit that I haven’t seen either Batman Begins or The Dark Knight (I’ll beat you to it: yes, I’m bad at my job), but I have seen a lot of Mad Men, so much so that I often find myself idly thinking about the characters in my free time. And all I can really say, is that if, comparatively, Don Draper–a man who may respect the tradition of holding on to new business but, as we see in Episode 3, has no problem resorting to adulterous aggression in order to do so––looks like a “moral compass”, even if a “conflicted” one, then Christian Bale’s Batman must be really fucked up.