by Victor Pryor
So this sentence here, and most likely the one after that, are completely irrelevant to this recap, and are only here to provide a nice buffer for people that don’t want to be spoiled on the events of this episode by reading the header. Please enjoy the essential uselessness of the words you’re reading at this moment, as once this sentence is concluded, we will be talking about the major shit that just went down.
So… apparently Betty’s going to fucking die.
I have to confess, I did not see that coming. Not that Mad Men is a show that’s contingent on twists or anything like that. But this is drama, and you’ve got to ramp up that pathos as the finish line nears. And while we were all expecting Roger to have that final heart attack, or Pete to jump off the roof, or Don to get into a spaceship that explodes before it reaches orbit, Matthew Weiner hit us with something we never saw coming.
I mean, really: who could have possibly guessed that the victim would be the character people most love to hate?
We all should have been suspicious since Betty has been so contented and warm (it’s a relative term) whenever we’ve seen her this season. She’s on pretty good terms with both Don and Sally, and she’s actively trying to improve herself via her college studies.
Looking back, it couldn’t have been more obvious what was going to happen if she was three days away from retirement.
We’ll get back to the Betty stuff later, but first let’s get into Don’s rambling misadventures on the road.
Having seemingly (and if so, thankfully) gotten over his obsession with Diana, Don is hitting the open road, taking Route 35 to 40 to 29 to the Grand Canyon. But he’s not just searching for two-headed cows and tourist traps, man; he’s searching for himself.
Which is not the challenge he might think, because Don literally can’t go anywhere without meeting himself. This time his doppelganger takes the form of “Andy The Ghetto Concierge,” an uneducated hick that smuggles booze to him when his car breaks down in a dry town in Kansas and he’s forced to stay at a tiny motel.
Lack of booze aside, Don seems to be adjusting to his stay as well as can be expected. He charms the elderly couple who own the hotel, what with his fixing of typewriters and Coke machines, and winds up getting invited to a Veterans Fundraiser.
And here, a revelation is made.
The entire sequence with the vets is unnerving in the extreme. There’s an undercurrent of menace to all the joviality and drunken shenanigans, and it always feels as if the men around him could turn on him at any moment.
Don, being Don, tries to demure from speaking on his time in Korea, but after a few drinks and a haunting story from a WW2 vet, Don opens up and reveals, possibly for the first time ever, the fact that he killed the real Don Draper.
Which was another thing I didn’t see coming, and kind of floored me. Up until now, we’ve never really dealt with the very basic idea that Don might feel bad about that inciting incident. The real Don Draper has became some kind of abstraction, an unfortunate bit of business that led to a better life.
The show (and by extension, us as viewers), tended to gloss over the fact that he was actively responsible for the death of someone.
And so, we’ve seen the guilt from his self-perceived complicity in the deaths of Adam Whitman and Lane Pryce, but never anything on Don. Having been absolved by Anna Draper seemed to life the weight of it off of his shoulders. Or so we just assumed.
The Vets’ acceptance of this truth made me breathe a sigh of relief, and worked wonders to deflate the tension lurking beneath every moment at the party.
Then the Vets kick down Don’s door and hit him in the face with a phonebook and I realize I’ve been played yet again.
Accused of stealing the money from the fundraiser, Don gets the shit kicked out of him by the Vets. Of course it was Andy all along; that was obvious from the minute they busted into Don’s room. But of course, they’re going to blame the outsider throwing around his money and not the poor, broke, resentful dumbass that actually needs that kind of cash.
Don sees himself in Andy (because of course he does), and dresses him down for being a shitty con artist. Then he gives him a car, warning him not to waste ‘it’, ‘it’ being his second chance.
And we leave Don, in this penultimate episode, sitting at a bus stop, not sure where he’s headed next and seeming pretty pleased about it.
Andy isn’t the only one who is Don, of course. Pete has always been Don, in his own Campbellian way. And thanks to drunk-assed Duck Phillips, Pete finally achieves the dream he’s been searching for this whole time.
I can’t exactly parse what Duck is up to here; his plan is the sort of elaborate plate spinning that only an experienced drinker can even conceive of. But his endgame seems to be to set Pete up with a job at Lear Jet. Which Pete doesn’t want to do, because he’s thriving at McCann-Erickson (and while we’re supposed to be on board with this successful, less skeevy version of Pete, learning that he managed to save the Avon account was a bit of a knife twist to all us Joan lovers out there).
It’s interesting to compare Pete’s journey here to the Roger plotline from last week. Pete is contented at McCann-Erickson, and therefore afraid to take the plunge into something new.
But Pete’s reluctance to take the job makes him irresistible to Mike Sherman of Lear, and the offer keeps getting better and better. And Pete makes a pitch to Trudy to pose as a couple for a business dinner, where she seemingly rejects him once and for all.
Look, this show is making me soft as baby shit. There’s no way around that. There’s no logical reason I should be rooting for Pete Campbell, who has done some of the shadiest shit out of everyone on this program, which is quite a feat. But for some reason it feels like he’s earned that amazing job. And the moment where he finally reconciles with Trudy warmed my heart all out of proportion.
They’re going to make another go of it in Wichita, and I can’t help hoping those two crazy kids make it work this time.
So, then: back to Betty.
There actually isn’t much to say here. Betty is going to die, and she’s at peace with it. Henry Francis remains his basic, ineffectual self and is unable to deal (though good work with her cigarettes, dude. Your timing wasn’t perfect, but “A” for effort!).
So of course the actual handling of the situation falls to Sally.
It was always going to be this way.
Watching Sally react to finding out about Betty by grabbing her ears and trying to fold in on herself was heartrending. For all her smarts, for all her sophistication (and because Kiernan Shipka is a powerhouse of an actor), it’s easy to forget that Sally is still basically a little girl. And for all the hatred and discord between the two over the years, it’s still a mother and a daughter who will soon be out of time to make things right.
Only on death’s doorstep can Betty become the mother she always should have been. Her reasoning behind not fighting the cancer (a speech I am not unfamiliar with in my own life) and the way she basically places Sally in charge and admits that she’s capable of being the adventurous woman Betty was never allowed to be… these are moments that have been seven years in the making, and the weight of it is overwhelming.
And though it seems unlikely, if the last shot we ever see of Betty Draper is of her struggling to climb up a flight of stairs while her voiceover finally says ‘I love you’ to Sally, then I can’t imagine a more perfect ending to her story. And maybe even the show as a whole.
Okay, not the show as a whole.
Still pretty good, though.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
-Pete’s horror at being compared to a Princeton graduate was hilarious, as was Duck’s response about them jacking each other off.
-In fact, I don’t know that a curtain call for Duck was at all necessary, but Mark Moses acquitted himself quite nicely here. There was something endearingly pathetic about his momentary, drunken confusion about which direction to go when he was leaving Pete’s apartment.
-Vincent Kartheiser’s delivery of the line “You’re being very menacing right now” is why Vincent Karthesier should be making the big bucks.
-Also, “reasonable chub,” but that probably belongs in someone else’s recap.
-“Why was I ever doing it?”- I don’t care what anyone says, I’m gonna miss that girl…
-With one episode left, I may as well just accept the fact that I’m completely incapable of being able to tell when Don is dreaming. Which is to say, the opening scene made me very confused.
-Also the scene where there was a hot lady sunbathing. I love this show, but there’s a part of me that won’t miss trying to figure out what the fuck everything means all the damn time…
-That doctor basically forcing Betty to call her husband before she got her diagnosis; kind of fucked up, right?
-This is probably a little condescending of me, but somehow I just assumed they wouldn’t air a show with Nispey Russell and Redd Foxx on Kansas TV in the first place…
NEXT WEEK: Everybody else dies. Maybe.
