I'm not sure that I have much to say about the just concluded season of Mad Men, since I wrote a pretty extensive post two weeks ago. I guess pleasantly surprised would be the best way to describe my reaction to the last two episodes. Last year ended with a bang, by way of Lane Pryce's suicide in the penultimate installment, with the final episode serving as a kind of epilogue meant to tie up loose ends from the season and give us hints as to the future. I'm glad they didn't follow that same strategy this time out. Here the entire season seemed to be building to this big crescendo that didn't happen, though the conclusion was far from uneventful. The whole Rosemary's Baby motif ended up being for atmospherics, not foreshadowing. Megan wasn't murdered. Bob Benson wasn't whatever it was people were imagining him to be; everything from a corporate spy to Don Draper's long lost son (some out on the Web even suspected he was a time traveling Don). And Don didn't die.
Or, did he?
The one constant in a sea of shifting relationships, alliances and corporate configurations over the past six seasons of the show is that Don Draper doesn't change. He might be tempted to run away, change local or even business, but he will always be the same secretive, controlling fraud hiding behind a made up persona. He has only lifted the veil over his past in small ways to different people over the years, like when he told Peggy that he grew up on a farm, or Conrad Hilton that he was born in Illinois and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. But in the final episode of Season Six Don Draper for the first time publicly acknowledges his true identity as Dick Whitman, if not by name then by story.
As I wrote previously, Don was very much a mess as this season came to a close. Like two seasons ago he was drinking way too much and was beginning to show physical and behavioral signs of alcoholism. In the past he was the top creative dog at the agency (know known as SC&P), so if he blew off a partners meeting or disappeared for a few days, or weeks, people put up with it because they knew that the work would get done and done well. Now, in 1968, we see that Don is not the creative force he once was, and now that he has real competition from Ted Chaough, people are less inclined to put up with his erratic behavior.
They say an alcoholic doesn't begin to turn his or her life around until they hit rock bottom. For Don that was spending the night in jail after hitting a preacher trying to evangelize in a bar. But as usual, Mad Men doesn't take a simple view on things, including religion. Yes, this particular preacher probably deserved the belt for implying that Martin Luther King and the Kennedy's met their tragic ends because they weren't true believers (another stereotypical caricature of a hypocritical religious person). But when he flashes back to his teen years working in the brothel, and the preacher who was kicked out for trying to convert the prostitutes, the words that stuck with the adult Don Draper / Dick Whitman was when the minister said, "The only unpardonable sin is to believe that God can not forgive you."
So he goes home after his night in the drunk tank and dumps the booze down the sink. He plans to move to a proposed branch office in California, convincing Megan that they can make a fresh start there. Then he hits a conundrum. Ted, who is also trying to save his marriage, pleads with Don to trade places. He appeals to his conscience, which may seem like his least vulnerable spot, by telling him that he knows that there's a good man inside of him.
Something does click in Don's mind. At a pitch to Hershey's Chocolate he begins with his usual smooth delivery, speaking of his own, mythical, childhood experience of getting a Hershey Bar as a reward from his father. A total lie, of course, but it's working as always. Then inexplicably, after it appears the deal is done, he starts up again, this time telling the truth about himself and his orphaned youth, serving as a pick pocket in a bordello, getting the candy as a reward if he stole more than a dollar from a given john. The candy to him was his only link to normalcy and goodness, and he tells the representatives that they don't need a man like him to explain to a child what a Hershey Bar means, they know already. For the first time I felt true pity for the man, because for the first time he was really owning who he is and what he's made of his life.
I'm not sure if he was trying to make it up to Ted for being bad to him, especially when he embarrassed him at the St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin pitch, but this act of self sabotage showed the first act of total unselfishness Don has ever done. It also sealed his fate. Though he eventually yielded to Ted's request, California wasn't going to happen for him now anyway. The other partners essentially dump him, under the guise of a leave of absence. Megan, rightfully angry that she had quite her job to relocate to the Coast, now in career limbo, walks out, presumably for good. Don had shifted careers before in his life, and even identities, but always stayed the same self serving con man. Now he is stripped of everything, not to escape into some sort of alternate reality, but to confront himself as he truly is. That little "meltdown" was the first step in that process, and was as much an act of redemption for himself as it was a favor to Ted.
The end was perfect. Don brings his three children to the house in Pennsylvania where he spent those painful years. The house is now completely rundown, surrounded by housing projects and factories. The quintessential suburban kids, they're nervous at stopping in such a bad neighborhood. After he explains that this was where he grew up, his daughter Sally, who he's been estranged from since she discovered his infidelities, gives him a knowing look, as if to say, it's still not right what you did and what kind of father you've been in general, but think I get it now.
One way or another all the major characters end this season with clean slates. Pete, whose marriage is over and whose mother joined his father in a watery grave, is also going to California to start over. Peggy, knowing that Ted will not leave his marriage for her, is last seen giving Don's office chair a tryout. Roger is starting over with Joan, but on different, platonic terms, so he can be close to the son that only he and Joan know that they have. Mad Men seasons have always left off with a dose of uncertainty, but never like this. What 1969-70 has in store is wide open. Will Don be let back in to SC&P after his leave of indeterminate length is over, or will he branch out on his own? Will Peggy get Don's chair for real, and a partnership (as I've predicted in the past)? Will the show be switching focus to Los Angeles, or really be bi-coastal, as Don proposed for Megan and himself? Is Bob Benson gay or just an opportunist (which is my opinion), and so his designs of Joan are more than just business related?
All these questions are interesting, but to me everything comes down to Don Draper, who is now dead as many predicted that he would be, just not literally. The only question is whether or not he'll go back to using his birth name at some point. The years of running from his past are over, and next season will be a time of self discovery for the man whose solution to every problem was denying the truth to others, but mostly to himself.
It would probably be too much to ask for the writers to include God in Don's transformation. They have shown a fairness to religion in the past, by way of Fr. Gill, and Ted's religiosity, which I have to believe effected his decision to stay with his wife. Don's violent reaction to the preacher was not so much that he was a preacher, but that he was judgmental fool. I get the feeling Don wants to believe, but has seen too much bad to cross that line. But as the aforementioned Ted observed, there is a good man inside there, and I do believe someone open to believing again, or maybe for the first time.
I guess that I had more to say than I originally thought. Until Spring 2014, that will do it for Mad Men. Though you never know, I might have some other musings on the show before then.
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