Diana, the waitress who Don Draper successfully stalked into romantic submission on this week's Mad Men, seems less like a person and more like a figment clothed in various waitress uniforms. If you watched last night's episode, "New Business," and grew increasingly convinced that Diana was actually an imaginary sex-friend Don conjured to provide comfort as his second marriage came to an ugly end, you probably were not alone. Because of the out-of-left-fieldness of their relationship and the rushed nature of their story arc, something about this woman's entire Mad Men existence so far feels a little surreal and untethered from reality. The Mad Men writers have created weird dream sequences for Don before. (Remember that time he fake-murdered Mädchen Amick in season five?) The notion that he might hallucinate an entire human being who would happily rush over to hop in bed with him at 3 a.m., even though in last week's episode she never wanted to see his face in her diner again, is not entirely out of character for Don, or this show.
But given that Diana has been seen by other people—including Roger, and, in this week's elevator exchange, the Rosens—it doesn't seem like Matthew Weiner and co. are actually suggesting that she's a specter. If Diana feels unreal and not fully fleshed out, despite a concerted effort by actress Elizabeth Reaser to infuse her with genuine emotion and complexity, it's because the character, at least so far, has been created to serve more as a literary device than actual human being. Diana has suddenly appeared at this eleventh hour in the Mad Men story because she is a composite of every woman—really, everything—Don has left behind. "You think you're going to do your life over and get it right," Pete said to Don as they drove to that golf meeting. "But what if you never get past the beginning again?" In Diana—a woman who shares a name with the Roman goddess of, among other things, fertility and childbirth—Don seems compelled to go back to his beginning again and be reborn.
Break down the name Diana. It sounds like "Die Anna," as in Anna Draper, the widow of the actual Don Draper and, in a sense, Don's first wife. Being with Diana, for Don, suddenly looks like a path toward burying that part of his story and getting back to who he really was, and maybe still is. "I've been separated a long time," he tells Diana toward the end of this episode. "You're not the first thing to come along. I'm ready." He's technically referring to his relationship with Megan, but subtextually, he's saying that he's been divided in two for a while and thinks he's ready to be whole again. (Other dialogue in this episode suggests that Diana sees Don for who he actually is, too. "Are you a private detective?" she asks during their phone conversation. "You look like one." Yes, Diana, you are correct. Don Draper is actually a Dick, privately.)
Diana also represents multiple partners and paramours from Don's past.
Diana is Dot, the waitress Don slept with in season four's "Waldorf Stories" after he won the Clio and celebrated a little too hard. Diana is also a bit Tricia, the flight attendant who made a middle-of-the-night Draper booty call in last week's episode. Really, the sudden nature of her sexual encounters with Don allow Diana to signify all the women Don has ever casually hooked up with; the fact that she has sex with him initially because she assumes he expects intercourse in exchange for his (really Roger's) $100 also gives her something in common with the prostitute who, years ago, took Don's virginity.
With her dark hair and sharply-defined yet simultaneously delicate facial features, Diana has all the physical markings of a classic Don Draper side piece. Midge, Rachel, Suzanne, Sylvia, even Megan: they were all pretty brunettes, and all shared the same coloring as Abigail, Don's stepmother. (Go study that in your master's in psychology classes, Betty Francis.) Speaking of Betty, Diana even manages to align herself with the other former Mrs. Draper by mentioning that she bought her shampoo from an Avon lady, in the living room of her ranch house with a two-car garage. It's a wistful memory of the suburban life she ditched and that Don did, too.
While Diana may possess some physical attributes that are similar to Megan, albeit more Wisconsin than French-Canadian, her behavior in this episode established that she's nothing like Don's now former wife. While Megan's mother makes like the Grinch and strips Don's apartment bare, right down to the last can of Who hash, and Megan pockets Don's $1 million after blaming him for the fact that her career has been reduced to lunchtime propositions from Harry Crane, Diana does not seem to want anything from Don. When he shows up at her sad, small one-room apartment—a place that's only slightly less depressing than the temporary lodging once occupied by Adam Whitman—all Don offers her is a guidebook to New York. That's where Don is now; instead of throwing $5,000 at Adam to make his old life go away, he's writing checks for $1 million to make his younger wife and their supposedly sexy, successful couplehood disappear so he can help another woman navigate a world in which she has nothing. Technically, that counts as evolving, I guess.
Which brings us to the other person that Diana is a reminder of: Don himself. Or, to put it in the cruder terms used by one Mad Men fan on Reddit: "She's Don with a vagin*."
Diana lies to Don the same way Don has lied for an entire lifetime, first about the fact that she had a daughter who died, then about the fact that she actually has another one who is still alive. (Her confession that she has lied to him prompts one of Don's more classic responses: "Already?") She is consumed by regret because she lost one child and abandoned another, a sentiment that echoes the post-milkshake-making melancholy Don clearly feels when he leaves his two sons in the first scene of this episode. She drinks alone when she feels sad, which is seemingly often and also totally Don. Her name probably isn't even Diana.
But unlike Don, she doesn't want to completely wipe her slate clean. "When I was with you, I forgot about her," Diana tells Don, referring to her older daughter. "I don't ever want to do that." Don forgot about everything from his past for a long time. Now he wants to remember again, and can't seem to find anything to anchor him to it.
Presumably, this episode marks the last time we'll see Diana. She entered the proceedings to make a thematic point and, as most people disguised as thematic points do, will probably depart so that Mad Men stories about the characters we actually care about can move forward.
"There's a twinge in my chest," she tells Don one evening at Don's apartment.
"A pain," Don immediately responds. Those words trip right off of Don's tongue when he hears that word—"twinge"—because Don has said them before, during the Kodak slide carousel pitch in which he talked about how Teddy, the Greek copywriter who worked with him at the fur company—Greek like the guy who helped Don track down Diana—taught him about the potency of nostalgia.
"Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound," Don said in what was probably the most compelling pitch he ever made. "It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again."
Diana is Don's twinge, the pain from his old wound personified, his time machine. But both the way she rejects him and the fact that afterward, he returns to his apartment to find it completely empty, are proof that it doesn't matter what Don Draper does or who he sleeps with or where he lives. He simply can't go home again.
