For all the wild speculation, the bonkers theories, and the over-thinking, it’s satisfying to know that while many viewers (mostly me) lost their way this season, Matthew Weiner never wavered. Last night’s phenomenal, heartbreaking, devastating and ultimately redemptive season six finale is the exact place that Weiner meant to take the season, and just as he did with The Sopranos, Weiner brought it all back to family. He dropped Don Draper into the circles of Hell to cleanse him, and while paradise still eludes Draper, he knows who he is more than any other time in the series. It was a virtually flawless season finale, where each of the major Sterling Draper and Partners’ characters seemed to get what they were due, for better or worse, while television’s most compelling and mysterious character, Bob Benson, turned out to be more slick than we ever could’ve wished.
Let’s dig right into it.
This is what I wrote after the premiere episode of season six, my first Mad Men theory of the season:
The grand sum of the episode’s symbolism seems to be pointing toward the death of Don Draper, NOT a physical death, but the death of the Don Draper’s identity. I think by the end of the series (if not sooner), Don Draper will die, but there will be a rebirth of Dick Whitman. “I just want you to be yourself,” said the photographer. Note in the pitch for the suicide ad that Draper also says it’s about a man who “sheds his skin.” I think Draper wants to shed his fraudulent identity. He wants to start all over. In Paradise. Not as Draper, but as a reborn Dick Whitman. The man he was. That’s his death. His clean slate. His paradise.
It was there all along, foreshadowed in the season premiere, and while there was nothing as overt as Don Draper announcing himself as Dick Whitman, this is as close as you can imagine Matthew Weiner might get to a big reveal. Now we understand why Weiner took all that detours into Draper’s youth, to make the payoff so satisfying and that Hershey’s speech so satisfying.
But let’s back up, and explore the rest of Sterling Draper and Partners before we return to Don, starting with the season’s most crowd-pleasing character: Bob Benson. Turns out there is more to Bob than an ambiguously gay slickster fraud: he’s also a bad ass smooth operator, and perhaps even a murderer. The second that Pete found out that his mother had thrown overboard a cruise ship, my immediate thought was: Manolo (alias Marcus Constantine) did it! That’s what Bob Benson’s “Pete Campbell is a son of a bitch” conversation was about last week. I’m absolutely certain that Benson orchestrated the death of Pete’s mother, and when Pete called him on it, Bob quickly reminded Pete of who has the control in the situation. I’m Bob Benson, and don’t you forget about it, Pete Campbell.
(via)
“Jesus, you can’t drive a stick?” BOB IS NOT TO BE CROSSED. He is an architect of disaster. At the end of the day, Bob Benson got exactly what he wanted: The Chevy account all to himself.
Well played, Bob Benson. (via)
Meanwhile, Pete continued his season of fail: He was pushed to the outside by the merger, he lost his father-in-law’s account after getting caught in a brothel, and he lost Trudy, who called him on his philandering. He finally wormed his way back into a position of power, and Bob Benson thwarted him, just as Don Draper had thwarted him seasons ago. If only Pete had realized — like Ken Cosgrove and Ted Chaough — the importance of family. Had he kept his focus there all along, he wouldn’t be transferring to California. There was, however, a glimpse of hope at the end of the episode, where Trudy saw in Pete Campbell that perhaps he is not completely unredeemable: Maybe he can be a good father. Maybe he can find his way back. Maybe one day Pete Campbell won’t be a total sh*t.
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The theme of family was no more apparent than with what finally transpired between Ted and Peggy. The tryst that they’ve been working up to all season finally came to fruition, thanks to Peggy’s revealing outfit (my notes: “HOLY JOAN HARRIS, PEGGY”) and her scheme to make Ted jealous.
It worked. Ted had finally decided that he wanted Peggy all to himself, they made love, and then Ted promised Peggy the world, though it was a promise that Ted could not ultimately follow up on. He couldn’t leave his wife. He couldn’t leave his kids. He could not become Don Draper. A lot of viewers were hard on Ted, suggesting that he’s just as slimy an adulterer as Don is, but I think that, in the end, his innate goodness won out. Loyalty and family mean more to Ted than love.
“I have to hold on to them, or I’ll get lost in the chaos. I love you that deeply. I can’t be around you, or I’ll ruin all those lives.”
“Well aren’t you lucky to have decisions.”
Meanwhile, once again, Peggy rose the career ladder, and once again, it was at the cost of another emotional casualty. You could sense that Peggy knew, right after she and Ted consummated their affair, that it was doomed. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Peggy wanted a good guy, and as soon as Ted had left his wife, he’d have ceased being the man that Peggy wanted. Luckily, the Stan Rizzo and Peggy Olson ship is alive and well.
The flip side of Peggy’s emotional catastrophe, however, is her rise at Sterling Draper and Partners. She is the new Don — Weiner made good on the Star is Born allusion in the premiere episode — but for now anyway, her home life seems to be defined by her new cat.
But on the subject of that family theme, it looks like Roger may finally be coming around to the importance of that himself. He finally relented and gave his daughter the money she wanted, and more importantly, he made inroads into becoming a presence in Joan and his son’s life, though that damned Bob Benson is still clouding the picture. You can sense, however, that the end game is for Roger and Joan to be together, which is the way it should’ve been from the beginning.
Finally, that theme of family was no more apparent than in the life of Don Draper. He finally realized, after he punched a goddamn minister and spent the night in jail, that he had to change.
I think he’s still very uncertain about exactly what new life it is that he wants, but he knows it’s not with Megan in California (side note: Megan is going to California, and she’ll be there in 1969 when the Manson murders take place. I’M JUST SAYING). When Don promised her paradise and couldn’t deliver on the easy solution to his own life (instead, gracefully giving the easy way out to Ted), Megan left him (or, presumably so), recognizing that there is really little in their relationship to save. “You want to be alone with your liquor and your ex-wife and your kids,” Megan suggested, and she’s not wrong. Don does love Megan, but I think the Dick Whitman within him wants, ultimately, to salvage his own kids’ lives so that they don’t end up becoming Don Drapers themselves.
That began to become apparent in Don’s conversation with Betty about Sally. The two seemed to recognize, finally, their failings as parents, and in that conversation, Betty felt real and relatable again. When Don called her Birdie, you could just sense that the two were emotionally linked. Reconciliation may not be the end game for Don and Betty, but they belong in each other’s lives, and that move to California would’ve precluded that.
Everything, of course, came to a head when Don delivered first a bold, perfect old-school Don Draper pitch to Hershey’s before faltering — before reaching deep within him, below the haze of booze that has allowed him to escape his past for so many years — and did something Don Draper seemed almost incapable of: He was honest. He was sincere. He was human. In one five minute pitch calling back to his own childhood, Don Draper erased an entire season of sins. He became not the bad ass Don Draper we love from earlier seasons, but the decent man within him that Ted knew existed. He became Dick Whitman: tortured, damaged, and human.
“And I would eat it alone, in my room, with great ceremony.” Hersheys: The Cure for the Common Chocolate Bar.
(Image via John Merriman)
All the fetal imagery from last week’s episode makes perfect sense now: He is becoming reborn.
Of course, being Whitman would cost Don his position at Sterling Draper, but the forced leave is precisely what Don needs to reclaim his life. He needs to seek forgiveness. He needs to make things right, and the first person he needs to make things right with is the last person he let down: his daughter. By showing Sally who he is, and where he came from, and by demonstrating the ability to be honest and sincere, Don is making that first step toward redemption. Maybe, finally, the good will start beating the bad.
******
Random Thoughts:
— Don stole Stan’s idea to go to California, echoing the “cure for the common cold” theft in an earlier season, but you knew that when he did that, he was still clinging to “Don Draper.” Stan’s comeback was brilliant, though: “I’m going to have that sandwich on my desk. I’m going to eat it before you get there.”
— Roger, as always, landed some great lines in the season finale: “It’s all fun and games until someone shoots you in the face.”
— “I wouldn’t want to do anything immoral.” — Sally Draper. SHOTS FIRED.
— Another amazing line:
— In fact, that entire exchange with the minister was solid gold.
Preacher: What if I told you that Jesus could offer you not only eternal life but freedom from pain in this life?
Don Draper: I’m doing just fine. Nixon’s the president. Everything’s back where Jesus wants it.
Preacher: He doesn’t work that way.
Don: Because he’s mysterious. Did he offer the same deal to Kennedy? Martin Luther King? Vietnam, for Christ’s sake? Studies show Jesus had a bad year.
Preacher: Well I’m afraid there’s not one true believer in that list.
Don: What did you just say?
— We’ve seen Lou Avery, the man that Duck Phillips brought in at the end of the episode before, in this seasons’ sixth episode, “For Immediate Release.” His firm, Dancer Fitzgerald, was one of the ones competing for the Heinz account. I cannot for the life of me, however, recall the significance (if any) of Lou Avery in that episode.
— Oh, and if you’re not Mad Men theory-ed out, this one about Don eventually becoming D.B. Cooper is kind of intriguing.
Your own thoughts and observations are welcome in the comments. See you back here for Mad Men season seven in 2014.
