One
of my favourite moments in the brilliant 30 Rock appears in the show’s own
finale, when Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon attemps to discourage Jack’s ‘jump’ by
demanding of him: “There’s so much to live for! Don’t you want to know how Mad
Men ends?!”
This
question would almost certainly be enough to bring me back from the brink of suicide. And
after six seasons of illicit affairs, countless cigarettes and more scotch than
even the most committed of alcoholics could handle, we finally, FINALLY appear
to be getting close, at least, to an answer.
Season
six has seen a number of big developments – aside from the rapid rate of Stan’s
beard growth, we’ve seen the the rise of the creepily cheerful and generally elusive Bob
Benson, Sally Draper’s less than pleasant discovery of her father with his
pants down, and the loss of Pete Campbell’s picture perfect family, alongside
his hairline. But one of the biggest developments has to be what (on reflection)
has always been a foregone conclusion: Don Draper finally hits rock bottom. But
while Don fell to an all-time low, Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner
reached new levels of brilliance, with this episode veering deftly from moments
of comedy to nail biting tension.
The times were definitely a changing in this season, with Vietnam
a dark spectre in the background of the lives of all of SCP’s staff , but the
finale focused on the more personal (and questionable) morality and evils in
their lives, and in Don’s, in particular. After Sally is kicked out of the private
boarding school the Draper charm earned her a place in, you couldn’t help but cheer in agreement as she hung up
the phone on her hypocritical father sneering, “Well I wouldn’t want to do
anything immoral.”
This incident also merited another of the now rare but
increasingly enjoyable interactions between Don and his ex wannabe Stepford
wife Betty – her quiet resignation over the phone that with the young Sally
Draper “the good isn’t beating the bad” met with a touching moment of
tenderness between the pair as he referred to her with the pet name of old,
‘Birdy’. This moment certainly wasn’t missed by current trophy wife and soap
star Megan, either, lying by his side.
It was great to see Pete Campbell at his smarmy best, which went some way to
compensating for one of Mad Men’s most far-fetched storylines thus far –
Manolo, the manservant employed to keep Campbell’s mother out of Pete’s receding
hair - apparently having pushed the old crow off the cruise ship they were
travelling on, to her demise. The following exchange between Pete and Bob
Benson, who greets him with one of his typically cheesy ‘How ARE you?’s, led to
one of my favourite moments of this season, and certainly the most comic of the
episode, as Pete yelled in response, ‘NOT GREAT BOB!’
Don’s judgement was questionable from the start of this
episode – punching a minister in the face, attempting to go cold turkey (not
advisable for someone who has whisky on tap), as well as extolling the virtues
of Hersheys, which in my personal experience, tastes like crap and has a distinct
vomit type aftertaste (I digress...). It got worse however, as he proceeded to
ruin the ad pitch to the infamously ad free chocolate by telling them a
charming anecdote about Hersheys bringing him the only childhood comfort he can recall... during his wretched orphaned upbringing in a whorehouse.
The veneer he's spent years
polishing slipped away in a matter of 30 surreal seconds, as Don’s hidden past as Dick Whitman finally crept into his present, and his partners
looked on in dismay and not a little confusion. This erratic behaviour cost him more than just his business partners - at home, Megan slams the door in Don's face, with no indication that she'll be back.
But the Hersheys pitch wasn’t the only unusual decision on Don’s part featured in this episode –
after hijacking Stan’s relocation to sunny California - with utopian visions of
him and Megan poolside, far away from the big city and his “messed up kids”, as she so charmingly put it, he enacted one of the only selfless acts I can
remember in recent Draper history, giving up his place for Ted.
Ted, the supposed good cop to Don’s bad, finally succumbed
to surely the most annoying romance any office has ever seen; he and Peggy's school girl
giggles finally culminating in a night of passion at her Brooklyn hovel. Peggy was the one
who, earlier in the season, told Don she had hoped Ted would rub off on Don,
rather than the other way round. Ironically then, it was the differences she had so liked in Ted that
ultimately went against her; unlike the serial philanderer Draper, Ted
eventually decided he needed to put a few thousand miles between his family and the woman
that could ruin it all.
Season six ended with Peggy quite literally wearing the
trousers – the first time a ‘pantsuit’ has been seen in the Mad Men office - she
had her feet up on Don’s desk, the ‘indefinite’ time off the partners had
forced him into after his recent less than reliable behavior leaving Peggy to take the SCP helm. With both Don and Ted out of the
picture, it will interesting to see which way she decides to steer…