[This discussion of the Mad Men
finale gives away all kinds of information about the Mad Men
finale, so if you don't want to know things about it, please stop reading.]
The hippies were probably inevitable.
Over the course of
Mad Men's
history, Don Draper's fascination with California has returned again
and again — it represents something dreamlike for him, a land of endless
possibility and escape. Similarly, long-haired, peasant-bloused people
with good drugs and goofy, soothing words have popped up here and there
in the show. They're rarely there to be humans; they're there to
represent, as everything does, the way the world is shifting under Don's
feet.
I must confess that the hippie and California stories
have always been among the least compelling elements of the show to me
personally, so my heart sank a little as I realized we were going to
spend the finale with Don on a commune, being spoken to gently about
attending seminars while mellow girls say everything but "groovy." The
long sequence in which another man poured out his heart during the
seminar and Don eventually went over to embrace him so they could weep
together didn't land for me, simply because I've seen Don supposedly
break down and embrace people before, and it rarely means much. I know
better than to suspect Don is ever learning anything. Indeed, the payoff
— the gag? — at the end of the show is that Don has been sitting on
this hippie commune supposedly trying to grow as a person, but (and this
is implied but not shown) he just goes back to McCann and uses the
experience to create the "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coke ad.
You could theoretically believe the ad was shown at the end of the
episode because someone else at McCann created it based on Don's
experience, but most likely not; most likely, this means Don sat on the
commune for a while, and then he did as he always does and he went back
to his life and made everything he'd learned into horsepucky.
One
of the reasons I never signed on to the fan theory that Don was going
to turn out to be D.B. Cooper — a theory, I should point out, that had
some intriguing evidence to support it — was that it seemed like it
would be too ...
cute for this show. Too "ta-da!" Too much like
a very long story about a regular kid who perseveres that ends: "And
that young man's name ... was NEIL ARMSTRONG." For me, going out on the
Coke ad had a lesser but still palpable sense of "ta-da." It was a
little neat. It also made his entire road trip feel unnecessary as a
narrative element, like a head fake by somebody who head fakes in every
game, because the "Don Draper seems like he's going to turn things
around and then he doesn't" is a story that has been told on this show
over and over and over and over.
But the hippies were easy to
overlook, given how much of the rest of the episode worked really well.
There was a beautiful scene on the phone between Don and Betty, in which
there was coolness, then prickliness, then a collapse into a ghostly
tenderness between these people who married each other and had children
together and hurt each other so much. (If it's been a while since you
watched the early episodes, you might be surprised how much they liked
and loved and were hot for each other.) January Jones only began to get
her due in the last couple of episodes as it became clear that she
played Betty as shallow and brittle because
she was supposed to,
not because that's all she's got. She calls him "honey." He calls her
"Birdie." But she tells him, "I want to keep things as normal as
possible, and you not being here is part of that." And he cries, of
course. As he has before.
Don and Sally, too, had their last
scene on the phone, as she, perhaps inevitably, became the parent,
telling him that he needed to listen and take her seriously, and that he
needed to pull it together enough not to come back and take her
brothers out of their home. Effectively, he needed to love them enough
to leave them alone. It's been said a lot, but
Mad Men got
incredibly lucky with the casting of Kiernan Shipka as Sally when she
was just a little kid, and while it might have been nice to imagine Don
going home to take care of his kids and get serious, it's much more a
natural extension of this story and these characters for Sally to take
over. That is sad, but it's honest; it's fair to this story. And in a
way, it's happy: These two parents, messed up as they are, have built a
kid who is a better person than either of them.
Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson.
Michael Yarish/AMC
Don and Peggy said goodbye on the phone as well — not a forever
goodbye, as he presumably returned to McCann and they went back to
working together. But they said goodbye to this relationship they've
had, in which for her, looking up to him as a mentor morphed into
understanding him as a friend, which morphed into the always thankless
role of The One Person Who Understands Him. That role made her feel
special when they danced and when they argued and when he called her on
the phone and said he wanted to hear her voice, but her best friend Stan
had to eventually tell her to quit it, to leave Don on his own. When
Stan told Peggy that Don would be fine because he's a survivor, Don was
still semi-catatonic on the ground by the phone, and it seemed like Stan
was entirely wrong to tell her to let go of him. But of course, Stan
was right. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, at
least when it comes to Don Draper.
It was a little surprising to see
Mad Men go
for what seems on the surface like such an overtly romantic ending for
Peggy and Stan, in which he finally declared his love and she first
acted baffled and then reciprocated. And if the entire point of the
story had been "Peggy gets a boyfriend," it wouldn't have meant much.
But they, too, had their declaration on the phone, which tied it to her
conversation with Don (as well as Don's conversations with Betty and
Sally). And when it got important, he dropped everything to be there in
person, as Don did not. That phone theme was so well used, because Stan
began by telling her effectively that he loves her the most when they're
not together, but he came back anyway. Because that's what you do if
you're
not an emotional vampire. (The same thing happened with
Joan and Peggy — a phone call, then a follow-up in person. Roger came to
see Joan in person. It's like they say: So much of life is just showing
up.)
This wasn't only a story about Peggy getting a boyfriend;
it was a story about Peggy getting free of trying to emotionally
connect with Don Draper, which she's been trying to do since the pilot.
It was a story about Peggy stepping away from a relationship from which
she gets nothing to make room for a relationship from which she gets
something. Stan started out as a jerk, but Don
stayed a jerk.
Learning to stop throwing good emotional money after bad is one of the
most important elements of adulthood; despite its cinematic-swoon
elements, this was more than met the eye: It wasn't just a story about
getting what you've always dreamed of. It was just as much a story about
when to give up.
For all the flack shows take for sweet love
scenes, the really unearned love scene here would have been Peggy going
to get Don and his collapsing into her arms and sobbing and thanking
her.
That would have been pure romantic fantasy.
This was
a pair of people who have flirted with each other for years and gotten
to be very emotionally intimate — remember, she told Stan about the
baby, and she doesn't tell anyone about the baby — finally having head
space at the same time. Yes, the structure of the scene made it play
like cotton candy, but to be able to make that step, she had to get her
foot out of the tar pit that is trying to be friends with Don Draper.
The unlikelihood of real change in a person is what has animated
most of Don's story — and that of eternal goof-off Roger Sterling — but
that doesn't mean nobody changes.
Mad Men began with Joan
telling new secretary Peggy that if she played her cards right, she
wouldn't be working for very long at all — she'd get married and move
out to the country. Joan was presented in the finale with that very
choice, only to realize she needs to work to be happy. Pete Campbell,
too, seems to have realized he does not want to be Don Draper, divorced
and divorced again and drinking and leaving a cloud of sweaty
insincerity behind in every room. So he did the only thing he could: He
grabbed his family and got out of town. He also had a gentle, brief, not
overwrought goodbye with Peggy, which is exactly what they both needed.
"Someday,
people are going to brag that they worked with you," he said easily and
kindly, before acknowledging, with a total lack of bitterness, that
he's not talented the way she is. The writing of that scene is so smart,
because it feels effortless.
It was an uneven finale. The Don
stuff was too tidy for my tastes and felt too much like a shaggy-dog
story that ends with a studied joke, and I simply won't ever care about
hippies who don't get past their status as props. But the Peggy stuff
was great, and the Joan stuff was solid. And this is the close, after
all, of seven seasons of a show that doggedly pursued its own vision.
Its task is not to give you everything you want, or me everything I
want. It's not a test, and the last episode isn't an answer key. It's a
story that's over now.
Frank Masi/HBO
