Mad Men Season Finale: There’s A Good Man In There Somewhere
Don makes peace with himself - but it's a little too late to stop the war.
Mad Men is in full swing (wink, 1960s joke). Each week we’ll take a look at who’s shilling what to who; follow our recaps here. Obviously, spoilers.
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MAD MEN CLIENT MEETING
6.13: ‘In Care Of’
THE PRODUCT:
Hershey’s. Chevy. Honesty. Consequence.
THE PITCH:
“Nixon’s the president, everything’s back to where Jesus wants it. Did he offer the same deal to Kennedy? Martin Luther King? Vietnam, for Christs’ sake? Studies show Jesus had a bad year.”
Everyone had a bad year in New York in 1968. Though the Martin Luther King riots were smaller in the city than elsewhere in the country, violence seeped into Manhattan from the under-serviced outer boroughs. Central Park decayed, trashed by the student and counter culture marches, concerts and vigils, and left to the criminals at night. Tenement buildings were torched, city services were down, and the murder rate tripled in less than a decade. Those sirens that we heard every time Megan dramatically stepped forth onto the balcony of marital woe weren’t just omni-present to sell the scene; Betty was right, the city was dirty.
Those dark and rotten days dropped some unsettling stinkers into the mix of Mad Men‘s sixth season, forcing the stuffy shirts to acknowledge race and the renegades to act out at their elders. I’d say the squeeze viewers felt this year, the wringing out and rescrubbing of plot and action, had more than a little to do with the times. It’s easier to sell ham and candy in a boom year, and it’s easier to let yourself feel better for buying them, too. Imagine the soul-sucking de ja vu of hearing that another Kennedy had been shot, then going into work and coming up with six more slogans for sandwich spread. It’s a terrible time to realise you hate yourself.
Don hits bottom in the prison drunk tank, comes home and empties his bottles, and pitches a last ditch, burnt out run to California: “We’d be homesteaders.” Megan says yes, without realising that Don makes a break for the exit every twenty minutes and his life is still in shambles.
Will another new start fix anything? How much sunshine has to pour through a window before it warms up that little inner Whitman?
“Yes they have balconies in L.A. What are you, an idiot?”
Peggy’s season-long inner-scuffle to sort the wheat from the Chaough comes down to a jaw-dropping, interest-piqueing, va-va-voom number in the office, followed shortly by a full-of-future-promises rendezvous that night. And then Ted — horrible, terrible, squirrely and sincere Ted — packs up his family and puts three thousand miles between him and this thing called love.
Ted drops the funky flip on Don’s old song once more – he makes a move, but he takes his life with him. He doesn’t start over, he starts fresh. And he leaves a pretty shitty Peggy in his wake.
“Well you’ve ruined turtle-necks for me, I’ll tell you that much!”
Don put-put-sputters out right in the middle of a pitch to Hershey’s. He lets it all hang out – the orphan story, the whorehouse – and the queasy, greasy look of guilt-ridden relief that emerges is just sad. A bi-product of going dry and a rejection of his highly-tuned flight response, Don tells the truth. Or, as Roger puts it, “shits the bed”. There are probably better places to discuss your john-pilfering past than the boardroom, but sobriety can make fools of us all.
He won’t go to California, and the company will have him dry out, and he’s stuck Megan with a plane ticket and no job — but after all of that, he’ll show his kids the now ghettoised shamble wherein he grew up. And Don Draper gets a little true and honest peace.
“Up there’s where I used to hide with the town’s slow kid, and everyday I’d pray, ‘Dear God, make me a bird. So I could fly far. Far far away from here…’”
TAGLINE:
“The wrapper looked like what was inside.”
OLD BUSINESS:
“So this is what power feels like. Now I know why Cooper’s so content all the time.”
Oh Pete. Just like Don, you learnt this season that as long as you’re stuck with yourself, maybe you can be your own change. Or maybe you should have paid more attention in driving class instead of perving on teen girls. Two lessons, then.
Pete drives a car backwards indoors, and hastily books a ticket for Cali with Ted. Those two are going to be such a funny, mismatched pair on Mad Men: L.A. next year. Also, in the funniest scene Mad Men’s ever played, Pete and his brother silently weigh up the costs of tracking down their mother’s killer, and then calmly bid her adieu. Probably don’t tell your children that you never loved them before going on a ship with a murderous gold digger. Three lessons.
NEW BUSINESS:
“We’ll call it Mad Myn”
Don’s kicked out of the cubicle until he can complete a meeting without weeping for the childhood he never had, and Ted’s busy flying his family to California, one by one, in his tiny airplane. That leaves Peggy with the keys to the liquor cabinet and all the inappropriate, inspired-by-horror-film choices she can make on the margarine account. “It’s based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!”
“Bob Benson. Accounts. Side dishes. Might still be plotting to kill Pete Campbell. Stuffing?”
And we leave this season’s man of mystery exactly where we expected: wearing an apron and carving turkey. And I guess waiting for a call from his friend who killed Pete’s mum. Did he and Manolo meet at Drifter and Grifter Technical School? Would Manolo hurt a rich fly? So many questions. So much turkey.
ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF MAD MEN:
Who knows! It might be set in 1983! That’s the year I was born! I might meet Don while I’m a baby! Hopefully it just picks up where it left off, with Don trying to pitch increasingly disturbing stories from his past to clients. “We open on a farm. A red barn sits on a hill; a golden field of corn stretches out behind it, all the way to yesterday. And then a horse kicks someone, a brother, a father, in the head, and he dies. Then the tag: St Joseph’s baby aspirin, for light pain relief.”
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Matt Roden helps kids tell stories by day at the Sydney Story Factory, and by night assists adults in admitting to stupidity by co-running Confession Booth and TOD Talks. He also illustrates for Junkee; you can find more of his work here – and relive the sixth season of Mad Men with him here.