Change of Address

Since we’ve just come from settlement and the danger of jinxing ourselves has passed, we can make the official announcement: We’re moving.

Steve and I bought a house in North Wilmington in the delightfully named development of North Graylyn Crest. We’ve been planning this for awhile and looking at listings and during a tour of houses in April, we found one we loved. It felt like home when we were walking around in there. Our present house has been good to us, and I will miss it and our neighbors, but we’d like something with some more outdoor space that’s closer to work.

We are very happy and very fortunate to have found something with some great Realtor help from Christina. I am also relieved that the process is over because I get nervous with writing out those checks and rounding up obscure documents.

It’s a three-bedroom split level. The living areas have a good flow and there’s an airy family room with a skylight and sliding doors in the back. There’s a den downstairs. It has bay windows that Cerys will probably sit by all day (once she’s done being mad at us for uprooting her). We have a driveway where we can park side by side.

We also have a stupid-big front lawn, so lawn care will be an adventure. We look forward to planting flowers and trees out front and back. The front even has a big rock on the lawn, which I love.

Oh, did I mention the in-ground pool out back? Because we have an in-ground pool. It’s pretty deep. We will be spending our weekends this summer (when we’re not working on the house or pool care) surrounded by that chlorine blue. There is also a shed that we hope to turn into a tiki bar. So bring your bathing suit if you come over.

Both of us will be closer to work, which will be nice. My commute is still an epic poem but it’s a few stanzas shorter, which helps my sanity. We are also closer to all of you up north.

For now, we will be painting and stuff all weekend. We are moving gradually by taking boxes over ourselves in repeated trips and then the movers are coming in a few weeks. I knew we had a lot of crap to move but it didn’t really register until I saw the house buried under boxes. That’s what happens when two people who collect books, vinyl and comics get married.

We are retaining the old house for the moment so I’ll still be around in Elsmere. We’ll be putting it on the market soon but for now, we have two mortgages. So it will be a cheap summer at our house. Good thing we have a pool.

Who or what is the Vision?

The Vision was my favorite part of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Paul Bettany did a great job portraying the character, who is basically an oversensitive android. The movie got him pretty much exactly right. There was a distinct murmur of excitement from the crowd at the theater when the Vision showed up since he's one of the core Avengers. He's such an integral part of the group that through most of the '70s, he was the sole hero featured in the corner box on the cover of the issues, which usually feature head shots of all the members.

The Vision has been a part of the team since about 1968. Ultron, as in the movie, created him to attack the Avengers. The Wasp named him after he spooked her and she remarked how he looked like "an unearthly vision." (So after naming the Avengers team, the Wasp has also named a team member. Yet the movies have cut her out of team history entirely. Not that I'm bitter.) The Vision quickly defied Ultron's programming, turned against his creator and the Avengers accepted him into their ranks.

The Vision is a synthezoid: an artificial body with a human mind. He can alter his density to become intangible or diamond hard. He also has super strength, can fly and shoot solar beams out of the jewel on his forehead (unlike in the movie, the jewel is not an Infinity Gem in the comic). His body originally was the reconstructed android body of the original Human Torch — not the Fantastic Four Torch but the very first Marvel hero who fought in World War II alongside Captain America and the Sub-Mariner. Years later, they retconned this and said the Vision's body was not the Torch's, saying it was a plot by the time traveler Immortus to manipulate the Vision into believing he had roots so he would marry the Scarlet Witch so she could never have children and could therefore not pass on her destructive abilities.

Got that? I love the Avengers but even as a veteran reader, I still need a road map to follow all the retcons.

Ultron based the Vision's mind on the brain patterns of Simon Williams, Wonder Man. After Wonder Man apparently died in an early battle with the Avengers, the team recorded his brain patterns and Ultron plugged them into the Vision. This basically makes the two twin brothers.

Here's why writers are wrong to treat the Vision as a machine: From his very first appearance, he has shown deep emotion. After the Avengers first accepted him, he was so moved that he shed tears, leaving the team to remark "Even an android can cry" in one of the most famous moments in Marvel history. Over the decades, the Vision has struggled with his android nature, constantly having angst over the fact that he has an artificial body and was not fully human. The irony of this is that the angst proved he was human, a true machine would not even have the capacity to question its lack of humanity.

Eventually, the governments of the world conspired to erase the Vision's memory and personality, feeling he had access to too much sensitive information from those governments. Hank Pym and the Black Panther restored his body but Wonder Man refused to let the Avengers use his brain patterns to restore the Vision's personality, arguing that he was presumed dead and did not give permission when the team recorded his brain patterns. With the Vision emotionless and essentially dead, this left the distraught Scarlet Witch a widow. This, combined with the revelation that her magically conceived children were not real, drove Wanda to a mental breakdown.

Wanda later began a relationship with Simon, who had always loved her. The Vision later got his memories and personality back, revealing he was still in love with Wanda, but she was already with Simon. These two have always been star-crossed.

Wanda's breakdown over the Vision's condition and her children's issues caused long-term problems for the team. In the notorious Avengers Disassembled story, the Scarlet Witch warped reality and caused so much chaos that she killed or injured several members, including the Vision (she felt suicidal guilt after she came to her senses). There was another Vision for awhile but the original later returned. Despite the fact that the Avengers have mostly forgiven Wanda, as she was not fully culpable for her actions, she and the Vision now have a chilly relationship.

Tom Brady Appeals Ballghazi: A Short Play

The scene is NFL headquarters, high atop the highest skyscraper. Commissioner Roger Goodell sits at an ornate desk carved with arcane symbols. As he sips from a golden goblet, in walks a sheepish Tom Brady.

Goodell: Greetings, Mr. Brady. Are you here to try to convince the powers that be to show some clemency?

Brady: Yes, sir. But ... shouldn't there be others here for my appeal? An arbitrator or someone from the NFLPA?

Goodell: You fool! You have meddled with the primal forces of nature and you will atone! None of the others can help you! I am the judge! I am the jury! And I am the executioner!

Brady: That's not the way it ...

Goodell (yelling): Silence! (lightning flashes and thunder booms) I ask the questions here. How can you expect leniency after the grave ball deflation accusations against you?

Brady: I don't know about grave, sir. I don't think we beat the Colts by 38 points just because the PSI in the balls was slightly lower. Besides, other teams have played similar shenanigans with footballs over the years and not faced such stiff sanctions. The financial penalty against the Patriots is well over the recommended amount. Why did the NFL ...

Goodell: Foolish mortal! I am the law!

Brady: Fine, but we should have some consistency. My suspension is four games. Ray Rice's initial suspension for beating his fiancee was only two. We're talking about deflated balls here, Mr. Goodell, not a brutal assault.

Goodell stands up, turns his back to Brady to look at the storm outside his window. He absentmindedly spins a large globe.

Goodell: I do not have to justify myself, Mr. Brady. I ordered the sky to release its thunder. I drowned the last whale. I pinned the sun down and made it cry uncle. I can do whatever I want. Apres moi, le deluge!

Brady stares in bewildered silence.

Goodell: And how, Mr. Brady, do you explain why you did not surrender your phone when I ordered it before? Surrender it now or your fate is sealed and your penalty is set.

Brady: Well, I'm sorry, sir, but I won't do that. My phone has a lot of sensitive information and I'm not going to trust it to the NFL. With all due respect, sir, you don't have a warrant to seize my phone.

Goodell throws his goblet to the floor. Thunder peals and lightning burns.

Goodell: You son of a bitch! How daaaare you defy meeee?!

Brady (flustered): I do ... I do have rights ...

Goodell: You insignificant gnat! You have nothing! Your career, your very life, only exist because I will them to be so!

Goodell pushes a button on his desk.

Goodell: Appeal denied, Mr. Brady. For your impertinence, I am increasing your penalty. Ten years in jail.

Police officers burst into the room, tackle Brady and handcuff him.

Brady: Ten years! This is insane!

Goodell: Just for that, let's make it 12. I know how you like the number.

Goodell laughs maniacally as the police lead Brady to a maximum security prison.

Mad Men S7 E14: Person to Person

The first time we saw him, Don Draper walked into his office and put on a fresh white shirt after a night of carousing, smoked and drank the day away, slept with his mistress and ended up in his suburban New York house with his family. Ten years later, finally broken, he chants Om overlooking the Pacific Ocean and smiles.

That last shot is reportedly an image Matthew Weiner always had in mind for the end of Mad Men. Don’s fate in the series finale was the only one that really surprised me but makes a certain amount of sense. It would have been cliché for him to rush home and comfort Betty and Sally. Betty’s wishes have a depressing logic: the kids need normality and Don being absent is normal so he should stay absent. I liked how the story was open-ended since Don could very well complete his meditation and return home healthier and happier and better able to deal with the crisis in New York.

That phone call between Don and Betty may not have been their last word ever but it was just devastating. Hearing Don choke out Betty’s pet name “Birdie” as his face crumpled made me choke up.

The end of the series played out in large part as a series of conversations between two characters, sometimes over the phone, making the title “Person to Person” fitting. As with Don and Betty, these people may see each other again but they still had a chance to express some deep emotion for one another. This wasn’t entirely what I was expecting (I actually had no idea what to expect) but I liked how this finale didn’t do anything gimmicky like jump decades ahead. I also liked how for a series that could be dark and cynical, it ended with a surprising amount of hope.

I was so happy Joan’s resignation from McCann a few weeks ago was not the last we saw of her. It was inevitable that she and Richard would not work out. She is too young to retire with him and do coke in Key West. She needs a career and he doesn’t want to make plans. Still, on his way out, Richard offered some great motivation for Joan: “Your life is an undeveloped property. You can turn it into anything you want.”

Then we get the tantalizing prospect of Harris Olson starting their own production company and not answering to anyone. It’s not to be but it’s a thrill that Joan is making her own way and attaining the power she deserves. I liked her healthy goodbye to Roger. She didn’t seem disappointed that he’s marrying Marie and finally accepted the one token of love he can give: inheritance money for Kevin. Joan and Roger have been star-crossed from the start of the series, never available for one another at the same time, but this was good closure for their story.

With her dress from two episodes hanging in a garment bag on the wall, waiting for another strut down the hallway, Peggy turns down a chance to attain true independence with Joan, opting to keep her head down at McCann and navigate the brusque treatment of her superiors, maybe becoming creative director by 1980. She’ll be alright. As Pete sweetly notes, “Someday people are gonna brag that they used to work with you.”

Maybe the scene with Stan and Peggy confessing their love was more romantic comedy than this show usually gets, but I don’t care. I was squealing and applauding with delight when these two finally got together. Stan has evolved from the jerk who would only work with Peggy after she called his bluff on stripping in that hotel room into a serious, nurturing man. I loved Peggy’s repeated “What?” to his love declarations and her final realization that of course, of course she feels the same. When Stan hung up the phone, I knew he was on his way to her office to kiss her and even though I saw it coming, I loved it.

I was glad Peggy and Don had an official goodbye as they’ve barely had any time together this half-season. That phone call was a heartbreaker. “I know you get sick of things and you run but you can come home. Don, come home.” Years ago, Don took Peggy’s hand and silently begged her not to leave Sterling Cooper. Now she begs him to stay.

“I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am,” Don says. He confesses a litany of sins to his protégé, the most damning of which is “I took another man’s name and did nothing with it.”

What a devastating summary of a life. This is Don’s final confession, to a person who was in a sense his soul mate. He is completely broken now, truly at the bottom and lying limp by a payphone after being abandoned by Stephanie. He’s in what for him is a sort of hell, a touchy-feely ‘70s retreat where people not only have to say what they feel but also say how saying it makes them feel. Don’s philosophy is to “move forward” but after Stephanie’s rejection, he finally seems to get that it won’t work. His breakthrough comes when another guy at the retreat confesses that he feels like nobody at home knows he’s gone. Maybe Don’s tears at this mean he identifies with the guy but I would hope he knows it’s not true. He should know plenty of people, from Sally to Peggy, know he’s gone and want him back. Maybe he will go back after he clears his head.

I loved the vignettes at the end showing the main characters’ status as the series closes. Pete ends up the happiest of all, finding success in love and career, jetting off to Kansas with the family. Roger has a little more purpose at work and has found contentment with Marie, ordering lobsters in French. Joan is still stuck in that old apartment but is taking professional control and starting Holloway Harris with her mother, her name finally on the door. Peggy and Stan have the chance to become more than work spouses. Betty is hanging on and although it looks pretty grim, Sally is already showing she can take charge of the family in her mother’s absence. She’ll be OK.

These people haven’t all gotten exactly what they want, and their successes are elliptical and may not work out in the long run, but they have enough and they’ll be OK.  

Now about that closing Coke commercial. There are a few different ways to interpret this. We can infer that Don went back to advertising and used his newfound Om serenity to come up with “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” to sell carbonated beverages. Or maybe Don will always be tied to advertising and expresses his happiness through tag lines. Whatever it is, it will be a lot of fun to debate the ambiguity of that ending.

What a staggering brilliant series Mad Men was. As a character study, it was incomparable. I’ve rarely seen anything that rewards immersive viewing like that, where you can feel the history of the characters weighting down every scene. It’s primed for repeat viewing and I think I’ll do just that.

Bravo.

Is Iceman gay now?

Apparently. The founding X-Man of the past recently came out as gay but it remains to be seen if the present Iceman is also gay.

This is all due to time travel shenanigans. The present-day Beast, disgusted with the increasingly militant behavior of Cyclops, decided to bring the founding teenage X-Men from the past to show them their dark future so they could avoid it. Iceman starts ogling at a woman and Marvel Girl thinks he is putting on an act.

Jean pulls Bobby aside and basically says, you can drop it because we all pretty much know you’re gay. Iceman reluctantly admits it. Readers have pointed out that Jean’s behavior of reading Iceman’s mind without his permission, as well as pushing him out of the closet, was unethical. This is of a piece with Jean’s character, as she could be brash and as the Phoenix Force started influencing her, she used her telepathy to “change” people’s minds without their permission.

Anyway, I assume the present-day Iceman will come out but time travel screws up so many things in the Marvel Universe that you can never be sure. The tendency is to look back and see if there were any hints in the past that the character was gay. Iceman never really did well with women. He had a girlfriend in the ‘90s but acknowledged that he’d rather be going on missions with the X-Men than spending time with her, so they broke up. Emma Frost once had sustained telepathic access to his brain and hinted that he was holding something back but kept his secrets. It’s pretty rich that Emma, who a lot of characters regard as unethical and catty, would keep Iceman’s secret, while her mortal enemy Jean did not. (In fairness, this is teenage Jean so she might get a pass for immaturity.)

The whole thing is amusing if you remember X-Men 2, when Iceman’s coming out as a mutant to his parents was staged just like a gay coming out.

Iceman would be the oldest Marvel character to come out. There aren’t a ton of gay Marvel superheroes but there are a few notable ones. Northstar famously came out around 1993 and it was a big deal then. They had hinted for years about his sexuality in the pages of Alpha Flight but Marvel would not allow gay heroes in the ‘80s (there is an infamous story where he got an AIDS-like illness and was revealed to have an Asgardian faerie heritage but it got retconned to hell and back). Times have changed because when Northstar married his partner a few years ago, the reaction was a deafening shrug. Young Avengers members Hulkling and Wiccan (sort-of son of the Scarlet Witch) are also gay.

There are a handful of Marvel lesbians. I believe former New Mutant Karma is gay. There have been heavy hints that Rachel Summers is gay and Kitty Pryde’s close friendship with her and Illyana Rasputin was implied to be more than platonic, but nothing ever came of it. One of the Power Pack girls is also gay but I forget which one. Storm was heavily implied to be bisexual in the ‘80s and to have slept with Yukio, an ex of Wolverine.

There are probably a few gay characters that I forgot.

Mad Men S7 E13: The Milk and Honey Route

When Mad Men started, who could have guessed that Pete Campbell, once dismissed by Lane as a “grimy little pimp,” would be one of the characters to get a happy ending? He walks around in perpetual high dudgeon, with a life full of disappointment despite his privileges. Like many of the other people on the show, he engaged in terrible behavior, such as pimping Joan out to Herb from Jaguar, cheating on Trudy and forcing himself on an au pair.

It was surprising to see Pete jump ship from McCann Erickson, given his comfort there in the last episode. He’s the third partner of the old SC&P to defect. It took the machinations of incorrigible drunk Duck Phillips (seeming desperate like Gil on The Simpsons) to get him a job with Lear Jet. I could have predicted a reunion with Trudy, given their closeness over Tammy’s schooling. He may have made that decision when asking his cheating brother why he was always looking for something better and then realized that’s exactly what he did with his ex-wife. When things were good with the Campbells, they were very good, and Trudy is one of the few people to understand Pete. Plus, none of them have anything better going on.

What surprised me there was that Pete, a New Yorker to the core, was willing to go to Wichita. This could mean he has escaped the cycle of repeating mistakes that plagues so many on this show. The always level-headed Trudy tells him she never stopped loving him but will not allow him to hurt her again, another character breaking a pattern. “Good morning,” he tells Trudy as they make their new beginning.

The Francis family is not so lucky. Just last week, I noted how nice it was seeing Betty happy as she started her psychology courses. Now metastasized cancer gives her nine months to a year and she doesn’t want to get treatment. She’s not the most sympathetic character but deserves better than dying in barely-middle age. It was tough watching Sally and Henry crumble at the news. The development is a little soap opera-esque but that’s true to Betty’s arc.

“I’ve learned to believe people when they tell you it’s over,” Betty says, invoking the weight of her history with Don. “I’ve fought for plenty in my life. That’s how I know when it’s over.”

Henry’s comment about suing the hospital makes me think they foreshadowed the cancer in season five with Betty’s thyroid scare and maybe the doctor missed it then. There was also foreshadowing then with Betty’s nightmare of the family eating breakfast without her on the morning of her funeral, with a callback last night with Sally sitting down at the table with her brothers.

Betty’s actions in the face of the diagnosis might seem cold but they’re in keeping with her personality. I understood why she wanted to keep up her studies and it was devastating watching her trudge up the steps in pain and fake a smile when someone saw her. She watched both her parents die and wants to go with dignity and save her children from that agony; another instance of a character breaking a pattern. Years ago she resisted discussing funeral arrangements with her father so now she spares her daughter that pain and gives her a letter detailing the plans.

“I always worried about you because you marched to the beat of your own drum,” Betty writes to Sally. “But now I know that’s good. Your life will be an adventure.” That’s beautiful and heartbreaking but it’s also something Betty didn’t want her daughter to know until after her death.

The question now is what will happen to Sally. She was scarred by Grandpa Gene’s death when nobody explained it to her or comforted her. Will the same thing happen after her mother dies? Will this force Don to come home?

Somewhere in the Midwest, Don escapes his past again. However, a few little things from his old life are haunting him: He lingers at a vending machine selling his erstwhile account Coke, he corrects the bellhop’s grammar like a writer would, and he fixes a typewriter that he doesn’t need to use anymore. He is free to adopt any cover story he wants and assume any identity but he is still calling himself Don Draper, even if he looks and acts more like Dick Whitman.

At the VFW, Don is reluctant to admit he is a Korean War veteran, afraid a fellow veteran will recognize him as Dick Whitman. After hearing a horrible story from a World War II vet who “did what he had to,” he tells a story that is more bumbling than heroic: “I killed my CO. I blew him apart and I got to go home.”

It was stunning hearing this for the first time. The veterans give Don his absolution but then falsely convict him of something else: stealing donation money. Stripped of his money and career but forgiven for his sins during the war, he helps the bellhop escape and assume a new identity, ending up alone on a park bench.

Don is now truly free, but his daughter needs him more than ever back home.

Like his dying ex-wife says, it’s almost over.

I'll be on the couch

Once in awhile I will read an article arguing whether TV is superior to movies or movies are superior to TV in terms of quality. I fall firmly on the side of TV. While there aren’t a ton of movies we want to see in the theater, there are more than enough prestige and non-prestige TV shows to keep us occupied.

For instance, take The Master (please!), which we watched a few weeks ago. I figured it would be a slam dunk, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, both of whom I like. I thought it was terrible. It was a movie about a bullshit artist (a thinly veiled portrayal of Scientology) that turned out to be two hours of bullshit. Or maybe it was nine hours because it certainly felt that long.

Don’t tell me “You’re supposed to be bored and frustrated” while watching a scene of a guy repeatedly running back and forth between a window and a wall because I don’t like being bored and frustrated. Joaquin Phoenix gave such a pretentious performance, running around drunk and having a hissyfit in prison and I just hated it.

I went to bed all pissed off because of this movie.

Anyway, I just get so much more out of good TV like Mad Men, The Americans and Breaking Bad. I can find oceans of depth in characters like Walter White, Don Draper, Elizabeth Jennings, Peggy Olsen, Jesse Pinkman and Joan Harris and just can’t find as much in characters in movies like The Master. Granted, shows like those I listed have had years to build characters and we watch them with the weight of their history informing the scenes. But I think I could edit a few episodes of Mad Men into a movie-length feature and it would just be so much richer than nonsense like The Master.

I am just giving up on managing our Netflix queue because I always manage to pick out these turkeys. I like watching prestige movies from the past but there are a few older, well-regarded movies that kind of underwhelmed me: 2001: A Space Odyssey (beautiful but boring), Repulsion (the sad sack main character annoyed the hell out of me and I had no sympathy for her) or Taxi Driver (it was OK but movies about the dirty New York ‘70s wear thin with me).

From now on, it will be blockbusters in the movies and prestige on TV. You can keep the multiplex; I’ll be on the couch.

I'm suing you and you and you and oh yeah, you

I was reading about a woman who is suing gay people. All of us. For being gay. She wants a judge to rule for all time whether our behavior is sinful or not.

This will be awkward. I don’t particularly want to get served at work, not do any of the other gay people in this country. I’m also not looking forward to taking a day off so I can sit through a lengthy trial as every homosexual in America testifies. I hope I don’t have to go after Barry Manilow because I know he’ll upstage me.

There are some positives to this lawsuit, however. The main one is, I didn’t know you could just sue broad categories of people! What an eye opener. I’ve been brainstorming and I would like to sue the following groups of people:

·      Drivers who are behind a car turning left on a two-lane road and even though there’s enough shoulder space to pass on the right, they start passing but then stop and block half the shoulder, ensuring that not only they but also none of the less timid drivers behind them can get by.

·      People who hate people who hate Taylor Swift.

·      Those who can only see social problems and issues through the prism of themselves.

·      Smartphone users who take their videos in portrait mode rather than landscape mode.

·      People who smirk while apologizing.

·      BMW drivers who feel that their hood ornament exempts them from using turn signals.

·      Ketchup lovers.

·      Atkins Diet adherents.

·      Native English language speakers who have no problem that the dictionary definition of “literally” now also means “figuratively.”

·      Double-jointed people.

·      ATM users who take 27 minutes to make a simple transaction, refusing to give it up and go inside the bank because they clearly have no idea what they’re doing, while you stand behind them trying to do a transaction that would take you (a competent person) 0.006 seconds.

·      Circus peanut manufacturers.

·      People who don’t put “the” before “prom.”

·      Anyone who diagnosed his or her own gluten problem by consulting Dr. Google rather than Dr. Actual Doctor.

·      People who are too dimwitted to be condescending or cop an attitude but they go ahead and do it anyway.

I am writing the legal petition out now by hand on looseleaf paper as you read this.

Mad Men S7 E12: Lost Horizon

As predicted, Don is unhappy being a little fish in a big creative pond at the staid gray offices of McCann Erickson. He’s one of a dozen creative directors in a board meeting for Miller Lite. Another guy makes a pitch that sounds almost like his, with a similar cadence and emotion, but it’s regimented and a little soulless. There’s a nice shot of Don looking out a window at a plane flying past the skyscrapers. He’s lost sight of the horizon and needs to be free so he starts running, looking for …

Christ, not the waitress again. Why, Don? Why would you drive all the way to Wisconsin to find this woman who clearly didn’t want to be with you? It backfires anyway as her ex-husband tells Don he lost her to the devil. Don drives farther to escape the future. He hates his job, his kids get along fine without him and he has nowhere to live. He’s as adrift as the Major Tom of “Space Oddity.” He’s already taken a fake name so he might as well run away again to escape Don Draper like he did to escape Dick Whitman.

I’m sure he’s going to the west coast. The most daring thing Mad Men could do is not show Don at all next week and freak out the viewers before showing him settled somewhere else in the last episode. 

Joan ends up running, too. She is deeply unsatisfied at the new firm, paired up with a doofus who ignores her instructions and makes the faux pas of inviting a wheelchair-bound client to go golfing at Augusta (which Joan wasn’t allowed to play on back then anyway). She complains and gets paired up with the sexist Ferg. At Sterling Cooper and Partners, she was a respected partner but on the new totem pole, she’s just a “girl” no man will work for.

Jim Hobart is unmoved by Joan’s complaints and wants to pay her $500,000, half of what she is owed, to go away. She threatens to sue, invoking the ACLU and Equal Opportunity Employment and Betty Friedan and correctly saying that she would be the first of many women who would stand up and follow her example of not accepting the sexist treatment there. APPLAUSE. That was a thrilling moment to watch. It was Joan’s character attaining self-actualization after a decade. I’ve always loved how they subverted expectations for her from the beginning. From the surface, she looks like a party girl and you might assume she’s a ditz but she’s always been highly competent and savvy and proven herself many times over. Joan has to an extent always used femininity and whatever tools she had at her disposal to get ahead but she also has her bedrock strengths to rely on. She’s one of the people on the show that I admire.

It was a victory to see Joan stand up but it’s bittersweet to see her agree with Roger that she should cut her losses, take her money and leave. She grabs the two things that are indispensable, a photo of her son and her rolodex, and takes the job and shoves it. It’s a tragedy that she didn’t go even further than she did in standing up but I can’t blame her for having had enough and wanting to enjoy her life a little more. Maybe she’s on to something better. I don’t know if this is the last we’ve seen of Joan Holloway Harris but if so, this was an appropriate ending for the tone of the show — a character walking up to the precipice of change and then walking back. I’d still like to see a postscript for her in the last two episodes.

On the other end is Peggy, who runs toward something. It was some obvious symbolism that her new office at McCann wasn’t ready for her yet. Of course she and Roger are the last two left at the old office to turn out the lights. At first, I thought the eerie organ music was a little cheesy but I loved the reveal that it was Roger playing it. I also loved Peggy roller-skating around like Peggy Fleming. It made a certain sense to have these characters together because they both value the old firm tremendously for different reasons — him for past glories and her for future ambitions.

At the end, Peggy is off to a new start, with Bert’s Japanese octopus painting tucked under her arm as a provocation. I wanted to stand up and cheer at the sight of Peggy strutting through her new office, sunglasses on her face and cigarette in her mouth. Once she carried a box of belongings through the old firm, a nervous ex-secretary grateful for a break. Now she acts like she owns the place. This is one person more than ready for the future.