There’s been
a lot of talk lately about how MAD MEN’s final season doesn’t seem to be going
anywhere, or that the writers don’t even know where it could go. People have
expressed sheer frustration over the fact that there are still many new faces
on the show, in each episode, taking up too much screen time, which, let’s face
it, all us fans would want to be spent on the established characters. I
somewhat agree. I do think that the second part of the final season has already
given us some golden moments of the brilliantly-written Peggy-Don relationship,
the hilarious anger of Pete Campbell, the masked insecurities of Joan Harris,
and the coming-of-age of Sally Draper. But I get greedy. I want more of
Roger Sterling, more of Ted Chough, more of Pete Campbell, more of Megan and Betty, and everyone else.
The truth is
that MAD MEN has never been an indulgent show. There’s always been strong
control over how much of a character is exposed to us at a time. There have
always been supporting and guest characters who may have only served to uncover
the emotions of our main characters, but their presence has always been crucial
to the narrative, to the glimpses of the characters’ lives that we see in every
episode, and to them being realized almost as though they’re real people. And
why should the final episodes be any different? MAD MEN has never been a show
about big moments in season finales and premieres. Marriages have begun and ended
from one season to another, without us having seen even a glimpse of a wedding.
And the turn of the decade has been introduced to us without a hint of a fuss
about it. The biggest changes are seen subtly and beautifully, without unrealistic dramatization or melodramatic break-downs. And that’s the beauty of
the show. In fact, if it wasn’t for the developments in last Sunday’s episode,
I might have thought that the entire thing would end without so much of an
acknowledgement of the fact that we would never be seeing these characters
again.
I speak of the
most recent episode because despite the fact that the show has always shown great
restraint with exposition, episode 10 (‘The Forecast’) of season 7 has probably been the most indulgent one yet. And that’s true especially for Don Draper. We’ve
seen him telling off people before, we’ve seen him being proud and arrogant
before, we’ve seen him being charming and flirtatious before. We know him well
enough to know that what we saw of him in ‘The Forecast’ wasn’t
uncharacteristic of him. However, there were moments in the episode that showed
him as not holding back, not keeping the entirety of his feelings to himself. His
endeavor to write the speech, which Roger Sterling asks of him, sends him into
examining his own life from that point forward… What he wants from it now, and what
more there was to accomplish or what he hasn't been able to accomplish yet, after becoming
rich from SC&P becoming a subsidiary of McCann-Erickson, and also after his
second marriage has failed.
When Mathis
says “…You always had to be at the [Lucky Strike] meetings so [Lee Garner Jr.]
could think of jacking you off,” Don holds back, and only says, “You have a
foul mouth. Take responsibility for your failure. That account was handed to
you, and you made nothing of it because you have no character.” But when Mathis
attacks the ease with which Don seems to go about life, Don doesn’t hold back,
and says that everybody has problems, and that some people can deal with them
and some people can’t. In this moment, he may have been implying that he was
probably one of those who can deal with their problems, but we don’t know that
for sure. We know that he’s struggling to grab on to something—which he was
clearly trying to do, with that waitress in the previous two episodes. On the other
hand, he forgets subtlety when he’s trying to write that speech and Peggy asks
him to give her a performance review. He chuckles condescendingly at the things
that she aspires to be and to have, knowing well that he’s already accomplished
those things, and is searching for what he wants from life beyond all the
career-related goals. Peggy says, “This is about my job; not the meaning of
life,” yet he doesn’t give in, urging her to continue about the meaning of
life. Finally, she says to him, “Why don’t you just write down all of your
dreams, so I can shit on them.” And the sad part is that he just doesn’t know what
they are anymore.
Yet, we see a
side of him that we haven’t seen before. It indicates that he is, in fact, on
some level, trying to right his own wrongs, without apologizing for them, and simply
acknowledging that he is aware of them, and is on a path to find meaning. He
continues to ‘survey’ what kind of meaning people search for from their lives,
even asking Sally’s friends what they want. Sally, who we had just seen getting
disgusted by her mother basking in the ‘inappropriate’ attention being given to
her by Glen, is further disgusted by her father responding to her 17-year-old
friend’s flirting. She declares that she wants to be nothing like either of her
parents. And Don doesn’t hold back with expressing how convinced he is about knowing
Sally better than she knows herself. “I’m your father, and you may not want to
listen to this, but you are like your mother and me. You’re going to find that
out,” he tells her. And in probably his most fatherly moment, he says to her, “You’re
a beautiful girl. It’s up to you to be more than that.” Trying to make her
realize that eventually, she’s going to want answers about her own life—like he’s
had for a while now—we see him being more expressive than he’s ever been with
her. And this moment had been a long time coming, since we saw him being caught
by Sally cheating on Megan with his neighbor, in season 6. And in this moment
he’s striving to bridge the growing distance between his daughter and him,
probably as a part of his recently renewed quest for the meaning in his life.
And that’s
really what these last few episodes are about, as I see it. The show will not
end with a big event, or the achievement of absolute fulfillment for Don and
the others. But I don’t think that the writers and Matthew Weiner will
disregard the need for there to be some kind of an end to the journeys that
these people set out on seven seasons ago. Even
if they simply end with a minor glimpse of the next thing for the characters, I
think that there will be a conclusion. We may want to actually see Peggy as SC&P’s
creative director, or Joan finally finding lasting happiness in her personal
life, and Don actually finding out what he wants, among a lot of other things, but we most probably won’t. However, I think there will be an
end to the journeys in some way. That’s something I don't think we'll be denied.