by Victor Pryor
“You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist.”
Much to my own surprise, I’m not sad. I’m actually relieved.
I thought it would be difficult to say goodbye to these characters, and yet a mere hour after the end of Mad Men, I find myself completely and utterly at peace with the idea that there will be no more stories.
Given that just about everybody got a perfect sendoff moment during the last couple of episodes (go back and read my past recaps; every time I use the phrase “If this is the last time we see [blank]…”, do a shot; and then bury yourself, because your liver will surely explode), I had no idea what could possibly happen in this finale.
If the purpose of a series finale is to bring a story to an inevitable end, then Mad Men fails. And in its failure, it succeeds, because Mad Men was never about the stories, it was only ever about the people who lived them.
The long and winding tale of the secret man who drinks at work is over. Or, at least, our window into it has closed. At its finest (which was damn near the entire time), Mad Men built characters who seemed to live their life outside of the frame. They were alive in a way that most shows simply don’t know how to achieve. For all their flaws, for all the shitty things they said and did to one another over the years, they were never anything less than human.
More than plot machinations, more than corporate intrigues, more than storybook romance, Matthew Weiner wanted nothing less than to portray existence in all its maddening complexities and instabilities. And in the attempt, created iconic characters that viewers connected to in a way that rarely happens.
These characters feel real to us. So real that we no longer want the logical end to their stories.
We actual want these fake, not real people to wind up happy.
So in the end, Weiner essentially gives us all the happy endings we’ve been hoping for, and makes them feel earned.
-Joan is her own boss.
-Roger and Marie are sitting in a tree.
-Pete and Trudy are leaving on a jet plane. “A thing like that…”
-Peggy finally found someone who can put up with her.
-Betty’s going to die, but Sally’s sad about it, which… a win is a win, people.
-Meredith gets fired.
(I’d imagine she’s a Congresswoman now…)
And Don Draper…?
…Don Draper smiles.
Actually, Dick Whitman smiles. Which is as about comforting a closing image as one could hope for.
Granted, it wasn’t actually the closing image; the one they did choose is, of course, absolutely perfect.
All told, this is essentially one last dance with the characters we’ve grown to love. With the exception of Joan and Peggy, we don’t learn anything we hadn’t already known by the end of “The Milk And Honey Route” (and it could be argued that we already knew about Peggy; it just took her forever to figure it out, on account of her being Peggy).
And it could be argued that, having been given the necessary thematic closure to most of these journeys, “Person To Person” is nothing more than an extreme case of gilding the lily.
But fuck it; I love these guys. It’s nice to leave them happy.
Granted, it’s pretty dicey for Dick for most of it. Finding out about Betty and realizing the depths of his uselessness as a father sends him from a sweet job as some sort of car scientist back to L.A., where he tracks down Stephanie and has that reunion so thoroughly thwarted by Megan in “The Runaways.”
(Incidentally, that final phone call between Don and Betty… at a certain point, we should probably stop perpetuating the idea that January Jones can’t act. That was quietly devastating…)
Having given up the baby she was pregnant with last time we saw her, Stephanie drags Dick to a commune because it’s the seventies now, and that’s just what people do. But shit gets real as she confronts her lingering feelings of inadequacy, and Dick seizes the chance to be the kind of parent he only managed to be in selected moments.
Of course, Don pops his head out, and preaches nihilism and relentless forward motion, which has gotten him… to a commune, where he’s stuck when Stephanie can’t deal and takes off in his car (the second one he’s lost in as many weeks).
It is not the place we expected him to find himself at the end of last week, where Don sat at a bus stop, happy to not know where he was going or what was coming.
Apparently, what was coming turned out to be rock bottom.
(That all this somehow manages to include a naked Brett Gelman is just icing on the cake.)
In the third of three completely necessary character interactions needed to bring his story to an end, Dick calls Peggy to confess his sins and say goodbye. The scene isn’t quite as affecting as the call between Betty and Don (it’s a much sadder note than I had hoped their relationship would go out on), but it’s still phenomenal.
Of course, at the end of it Peggy probably assumes that Don is dead.
But on the bright side, at least his desperate despair manages to finally bring Peggy and Stan together.
Okay, was that whole scene REALLY heavy on the romantic comedy corniness? Oh, mercy, yes. But if you’ll recall, I’ve been down this road before, and you’ve got to pay tribute when they get it right.
It’s crazy to imagine that the ambitious, lazy, preppie asshole that got a boner that one time would wind up being my second favorite duo in the entire series (running slightly behind Roger Sterling and literally anyone). Jay R. Ferguson and Elizabeth Moss had chemistry to spare, which is the reason people ship characters in the first place. Cheesy as it may have been, it also felt deeply, deeply cathartic.
Almost as cathartic: Joan offering a partnership to Peggy in her new production company. While even if we never saw her after her McCann buyout there was no doubt Joan would land on her feet, it lent a nice bit of symmetry to her journey: her ambitions first took root when Harry brought her on temporarily as a script reader. While I would have loved Holloway-Olson as an endpoint, there’s a kick of subversive charm to the idea that Peggy finds her happy ending being a girlfriend and working for the soulless conglomerate.
(Also, Bruce Greenwood split, but fuck that guy–if you’re not willing to ride the Joan Train to the end of the station, who needs ya?)
If I have any complaints about the episode, it’s that I wanted more Roger. But then, I always wanted more Roger.
Here’s how great a character Roger Sterling is: the man did an entire routine in blackface, and still somehow managed to be my favorite.
That’s fucking skill.
Roger gets one last scene with Joan, where he completes his transformation into functional adult, willing his son with Joan his inheritance and marrying Marie. Which sounds like a terrible idea to me, but he seems happy, so let’s leave him there.
(I also liked the reference to Greg being a piece of shit. Because Greg really was quite a piece of shit.)
Which, all told, brings us right back to Don Draper, a.k.a. Dick Whitman.
Don has a breakthrough at Group when an nondescript little man tells everybody that he feels invisible and inconsequential, mirroring Don as only literally every side character can.
This is as on-the-nose as Mad Men gets (and Mad Men was very often filmed directly on noses, so that’s saying something), and I’m not sure it works as catharsis.
But you throw Jon Hamm at a crying scene and he will eat your face off, leaving nothing but your feelings. So despite its hokiness, he sells it as the point at which he is finally purged of all his fear and self-loathing. The point where he finally comes to an understanding of himself.
Because Don Draper died more than once in these last few episodes.
But now Dick Whitman is ready to be born.
I will leave you with this:
Three and a half months ago, I started watching a critically acclaimed show in anticipation of its final season. Though I’d heard good things, the intention was to be caught up so I could do recaps. And the reason I wanted to do the recaps? Well, who can even remember a thing like that now? Maybe I was bored. Maybe I had something to prove. Maybe there was a girl.
Well, hell: there’s always a girl, isn’t there?
And for twelve episodes, it was what it was: a high quality show that deserves all the accolades showered upon it.
But then comes episode thirteen, wherein the word ‘nostalgia’ is defined, and I find myself crying for the first time in almost ten years.
And now, I have a new, much better reason to write these recaps.
You. Whoever you are, reading this. Maybe I know you. Probably, I don’t. But in this moment, we are connected. We are connected through our love of this show, our love for its characters, and the desire to hold on just a little longer to that sensation of being united by it.
It was a beautiful journey, a wonderful shared experience, but nothing can last forever.
Somebody get me a Coke.
We’re done here.
