Welcome to my viewing diary for Mad Men
. Every Monday I will review another episode until the series finale. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.
Story (aired on May 17, 2015/written & directed by Matthew Weiner): The finale of
Mad Men begins with a natural landscape and a close-up of Don Draper, and it concludes the same way. But these symmetrical bookends couldn't be more different. The opening vista captures the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a dry, parched desert most notable for lacking any obvious signs of life. When we see Don's face, surrounded by his Chevy muscle dragster, he's covered by a helmet and thick goggles (inside of a shell which is inside of a shell). And he is racing outward - "moving forward" - happy for the moment but with the implication that he must maintain motion to stay so. The final image features an idyllic, grassy hillside in Manzia, near Rome, but the scenery is overwhelmed by a crowd of people, men and women, all young but drawn from every corner of the globe, singing joyfully as the camera swoops overhead. This verdant location is teeming with human life. And the calm close-up of Don which triggers this vision stands in stark contrast with our introduction to the speed demon, who is facing inward this time rather than outward (the camera movement even accentuates this inner push in marked contrast to the past six episodes, which all ended with more distanced shots of Don, often accompanied by a backtracking dolly). Don smiles in both shots, but the joy here is relaxed, not intense. His eyes are gently shut rather than staring straight ahead, but otherwise his body language is completely open rather than closed in, surrounded by meditators on the cliffs of Big Sur, basking in the sun, waves rolling behind him, even the collar of his white shirt popped open as he leaves his body unguarded against the penetrating flow of "Ommmmmmm....."
Are these first and last visions of liberation to be weighed and judged against one another? Is one more lasting or profound than the other? And why does the series end not with Don's ambiguous inner revelation but with the infamous 1971 Coca-Cola "hilltop" TV commercial and its catchy jingle ("I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony..."), implicitly the end result of our hero's Esalen epiphany?
Don's arc is central to the episode but not totally unique. In fact all six of the series' most consistent protagonists are featured throughout "Person to Person", with Don's morning meditation the capper to a montage depicting each of their end-states. (I'd say "their end-states for now", but then the series appears quite determined to place a definitive narrative frame around what we see - welcome as an occasional eighties, nineties, even twenty-first century check-in would be over the decades to come.) Unlike Don, the others all end up sharing their last screen space, but Joan at least - who is buzzing around her home office with her child's babysitter Maureen (Amy Ferguson) as her only companion - has, like Don, found satisfaction in a form of solitude. Her newfound business will keep her in contact with others - she may even end up partnering with Peggy, two women with their names on the door of a commercial production company (although Peggy leans toward staying at McCann when the episode ends, there's plenty of time for her to change her mind). And Roger intervenes in his and Joan's final, warm scene together to ensure that Kevin will be his heir. There's a support network around her to be sure, but Joan once said she'd rather die hoping for love than accept an arrangement. She hasn't found love yet when the curtain closes. Richard, who made his peace with her family but can't can't abide the escalation of her busy work life, walks off when she chooses the ringing phone over him. Was this love she rejected, or merely its own sort of arrangement, sacrificing career for romance rather than vice versa?
Roger's major plot development has to do with Joan (changing his will), even though his future is with Marie. That tempestuous relationship may or may not go the distance; they bicker in bed when Roger laughably "forbids" her from seeing, let alone sleeping with, her mopey soon-to-be ex-husband, but it's precisely this equally matched immaturity-in-maturity energy that suits them. Joan initially assumes that Roger has chased another youthful short-skirted underling to the altar, but this time he may have truly met his match, or as Joan puts it, "I guess someone finally got their timing right." His delivery of the revelation is priceless: "Nah, I met her through Megan Draper. She's old enough to be her mother." (pause) "Actually, she is her mother." If Roger is mostly tying up loose ends, the other major character whom Joan intersects with has a more substantial storyline. Granted, Peggy's professional climax either arrived in the previous episode (with the one-two punch of her Sterling Cooper skates and McCann swagger) or remains on the horizon ("Harris Olson...you need two names to make it sound real"). And for the entire series, Peggy's arc has been all about the professional, with her sad succession of disappointing boyfriends playing a decidedly second fiddle. Until now: what's left for Peggy is to discover that the one she's meant for has been in front of her all along - or at least for the four seasons since Stan showed up and sparked their undeniable chemistry.
Not, of course, before the two screwballs in question exchange a few more insults: Stan shoots down her ambitions to start a new business ("stop looking over your shoulder at what other people have"), while Peggy sneers at his complacency ("spoken like a failure"). It's Don who brings them together again; when he calls Peggy in desperation and hangs up, she reaches out to Stan in a panic. Over the phone, he reassures her and offers sound advice: "You've got to let him go. It doesn't mean that you stop caring about him." Peggy apologizes, Stan confesses that he mostly just doesn't want to see her go, and then everything finally spills out. They drive each other crazy in more ways than one, and when she reveals to him - and herself - that she loves him too (after only responding "What?" several times, with delightful incredulity, to his initial declarations) he disappears from the other side of the line...and jogs right into her office for an embrace. This is the episode's great crowd-pleasing moment and a beautiful swan song for the character of the most (perhaps surprising) importance next to the more obvious cable drama lead Don. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Of course Peggy would find personal, romantic fulfillment in the very place that always kept her from finding it anywhere else. Maybe she really can have it all.
Interestingly, the other central player Peggy shares the screen with in "Person to Person" besides Joan and (sort of) Don is Pete. These two were linked from the beginning and there's a well-earned sweetness to Pete's farewell to Peggy - in which he offers her a cactus that's supposed to represent Kansas and tells her "Keep it up, and you'll be a creative director by 1980". Probably the true apex of their distanced but deep relationship was the moment in "Time & Life", which I didn't even find space to write about yet, when Pete is shaken by the sight of a little girl hugging Peggy and invites her into his office to tell her that SC&P is going under. Here, he's mostly just making an appearance before jetting off to the Promised Land, his big moment wrapped up in the previous episode. Others at, or formerly of, the office also get to wave goodbye; Ken is the one who offers Joan her path into commercial filmmaking, Harry pompously parades offscreen in a very early seventies fur-collared coat, and a cheerful Meredith accepts Roger's dismissal - given that her boss never returned - by hoping Don is in a better place. "He's not dead," an exasperated Roger asserts. "Stop saying that!" But Meredith has the impossible-to-beat rejoinder: "There are a lot of better places than here."
Don may not be dead, but death plays a large role in what drives him back to California for one last fling with his desperate dreams. A routine phone call with Sally finally reveals what Betty demanded her daughter withhold. Phoning his ex-wife to talk to her for what both tearfully know will be the last time, Don can't do a thing for her, or for himself. He certainly can't save her, but he can't even convince her that she should trust him to raise their children; she's made arrangements for the boys to reside with her brother's family because she wants them to be in a two-parent household (even Henry gets the cold shoulder here). "I want to keep things as normal as possible," she informs him. "And you not being here is part of that." Even their final words to one another are loving lies. "I'll talk to you soon," he tells her. "OK," she chokes out before hanging up. This is Betty's only real scene in the finale (a later scene in the Francis household shows Sally arriving home from school but Betty is already bedridden, and Bobby knows why). All that's left is the closing moment with Sally washing dishes as the dying woman smokes her last cigarettes at the kitchen table.
When Don shows up at Stephanie's doorstep in Los Angeles, he really has nowhere left to turn. It was a visit with Betty that sent him down the exit away from New York to begin with, and this chat is the final rocket boost he needs to fling him all the way to the end of the line. Washed out of his leadership position at the agency he helped found, dumped by his second wife after a long, numbing wind-down at his moment of greatest professional vulnerability, bluntly if still fondly warned off from returning to the bedrock of his original nuclear family- almost all of the official Don Draper ties have been severed. The Whitman curse has fully poisoned the Draper redemption, and will continue to do so when "niece" Stephanie (who puts that relationship back into quotation marks) invites him to a yogic self-realization retreat up north. Distressed by other members of a group therapy session who judge her for abandoning her child, Stephanie in turn rejects Don's attempts to comfort her. "You're not my family, what's the matter with you?" she sputters. When he delivers his usual pep talk - the one he gave Peggy, the one he gave Lane, the one he gives himself all the time - she looks astonished. "You can put this behind you," he insists. "It'll get easier if you move forward." All she has to do is observe the messenger to know this message is wrong. When Stephanie leaves in the middle of the night, stranding him on the precipice of a final breakdown, he finally calls long-distance to Peggy. The phone booth is a one-way confessional: he can spill his shame, but she cannot provide absolution. Who can?
Invited back inside the circle of the sad, Don listens - either raw or numb, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes - as seminar participants share their pain. One man, Leonard, a nondescript, balding fortysomething with a light blue sweater and a plain face unvarnished with pretense or pride, takes his turn. He speaks for three minutes before he is weeping so hard that he cannot finish, and then Don stands up, crosses the circle, falls to his knees and hugs the stranger in an embrace as enveloping as any he's offered - to himself as well as the recipient. This is what Leonard says:
"My name's Leonard and, uh, I don't know if there's anything that complicated about me. Which is why I should be happier I guess. ... Well, [what you said about 'should' to Daniel] is good for him. He's interesting. I've never been interesting to anybody. I, uh, I work in an office. People walk right by me. I know they don't see me. And I go home, and I watch my wife and my kids. They don't look up when I sit down. ... I don't know. It's like no one cares that I'm gone. They should love me. I mean, maybe they do, but I don't even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you're not getting it, people aren't giving it to you. Then you realize they're trying and you don't even know what it is. I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off. And I know everyone's out there eating. And then they open the door and you see them smiling and they're happy to see you but maybe they don't look right at you. And maybe they don't pick you. And then the door closes again. The light goes off."
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