Indeed, this past Sunday did see the end of Season Five of Mad Men. The penultimate episode (really the previous two) were so filled with shock and awe that it was hard to see how they could top it. And the decision was to not even try. Episode Thirteen seemed like an epilogue of sorts to a season that had a strong beginning, a bit of an unfocused middle and then a powerful, if not completely profound, ending.
What I walked away with from this week's installment was that things have come full circle. Don Draper, the James Bond of advertising, has actually remained faithful to his second wife, if I've got my chronology right from the end of last season, for the better part of two years (last season ended sometime in the fall of 1965, picked up again Memorial Day 1966 and leaves off now in late March '67). That the streak will continue was left ambiguously in doubt in the final scene Sunday. But when Draper, by himself at a bar, ordering an Old Fashioned (his favorite drink we haven't seen him with in awhile), Nancy Sinatra's contribution to the 007 canon playing in the background, is approached for a light by a blond who asks if he's alone, well lets just say the look on his face tells us the Old Don Draper is back, and all that that implies.
But why the backsliding? One constant in this show is that everyone is either not who they say they are or is willing to compromise their morals to get what they want. The one exception seemed to be Megan, Don's second wife. She always came off as the one transparent person amid a sea of phonies, neurotics and social climbers (I guess you'd have to include Peggy with her as well, though even she has a few skeletons). She even quit the agency rather than continue to work at a job she hated, though was very good at, to pursue her life long dream of an acting career. But the pursuit has been fruitless, and she finds herself wallowing in self doubt and pity. Is her mother right, that she possesses an artist's temperament but isn't really an artist? Is she not getting call backs because she's simply not that good? She wants this badly, and so double crosses a friend and pressures Don into recommending her for a commercial the agency is working on. He relents, after trying to convince her that this is not the way she wants to break into the business. The final sequence sees him move from the darkness of the sound stage, where the commercial is being shot, into the dimly lit bar where his old demons await. Don stayed faithful because Megan represented something different, something pure and honest. They've certainly had their share of fights and conflicts, but he didn't stray because I think he saw the relationship as something worth preserving. With Megan he always knew where he stood. This wasn't the cold, emotionally distant Betty, who could turn from loving wife to claw bearing tiger in a spit second. She wasn't like the rest of them at SCDP, who would grovel, back stab, and even prostitute themselves to get ahead. Now, by manipulating the situation the way she did, Megan has proven to be no better than the rest, and with that goes what little idealism the "new" Don Draper was ever able to muster.
All is not dark. After two years of financial instability Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce (now minus the Pryce) is booming, ready to lease more space in the Time-Life building (makes you feel worse for poor Lane checking himself out like he did-Oh the irony). The newly liberated Peggy Olson seems to be getting along well at the new job, though I think we can see cracks in that situation forming as well. Can I go on a limb and predict that we might see the Olson surname added to the list of partners eventually?
While the critics have been generally positive in their response to this season, there has been grumbling that the story telling has been too straight forward, the subplots overly coordinated thematically and the themes themselves too easy to pick out when compared to the relatively enigmatic proceedings of earlier seasons. I'm not so sure I agree, or at least I haven't found the more structured, symmetrical style a problem. What was troubling to me is that the season began with producer and writer Matthew Weiner continuing his brilliant job of keeping the personal stories synced with what was going on in the world at that time. It was done very subtly, but effectively nonetheless. The times were changing, and while some was positive, there were also darker currents at work and the dread was palpable. By the second half of the season I'm not sure that the mid-sixties setting really mattered that much to the story, except that people were drinking in the office and smoking at the bar. An African American character was introduced into the office, but she quickly blended into the scenery. We have a character in Vietnam, but except for some news reports we hear in the background and a few isolated references to protestors and napalm here and there, things could have been happening in 1977, '87 or even 2007. Mad Men has always veered between keen social comment and personality study and soap opera melodrama. Unfortunately this season ended on the soap opera side of the ledger. Though I enjoyed the ride, I hope 1968 is a better year.
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