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.
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