Mad Men S7 E11: Time and Life

After a few episodes of table setting, “Time and Life” is the first one that really feels like the beginning of a goodbye for Mad Men. There were plenty of callbacks to past episodes and little instances of characters expressing affection to each other as people do before saying the end. The last half of the season has more of a purpose now.

Sterling Cooper and Partners, the scrappy little ad agency that started out of a hotel room, is soon to be no more, absorbed into McCann Erickson. It was clever the way the show set up the partners making one last save, trying to establish Sterling Cooper West and maintain their autonomy, before the show throws a curveball and they surrender to assimilation. Those scenes of Don, Roger, Joan, Pete and Ted staying at the office all night to round up clients were a little thrill, a callback to the end of season three, when they broke into the old agency, stole clients and struck out on their own (nice callback to good old Secor Laxatives, which has been a client and source of jokes from the beginning).

Back then, there was a sense of possibility and excitement. Now, the five partners realize they can’t outmaneuver Jim Hobart and with their contracts and non-compete clauses, they can’t run away like they did in 1963. In that conference room, he tells the five they passed the test and they will attain a sort of advertising nirvana with dream clients. Roger gets Buick. Pete gets Nabisco. Ted gets Ortho Pharmaceuticals. Don gets, as Hobart says in hushed tones … Coca-Cola. This could be a dream but knowing this show, it’s more likely a nightmare. Will these creative, driven people be satisfied being the fat and happy cogs in a machine? This is the problem Mad Men has three more episodes to solve. At the end, the five partners sit pondering this at a conference room table. It was a visual echo of the scene at the end of season five, when they were lined up in the second floor of Sterling Cooper, but there was more possibility then. That was a beginning and this is an ending.

It’s not lost on Joan that while the four men get big clients, she gets nothing. It’s one of the tragedies of this series that Joan, the one person on the show who is good at everything in business, can’t be taken seriously.

I liked all the little signs of affection in the episode, like Joan comforting Roger in the office, Pete telling Peggy about the assimilation (in a scene reminiscent of her confession about the baby during the Cuban Missile Crisis), Pete complimenting Joan in the cab, Peggy and Stan staying on the phone just to have a friend on the other end, and Joan telling Don, “We went down swinging.”

I also loved the group going to the bar and toasting Bert. There was a revealing little exchange when Roger hugs Don and tells him, “You are OK.” This is a callback to the pilot, when Don explained that advertising is ultimately a way of telling people they are OK. Is this some absolution for Don that will let him heal the many demons he carries around?

Speaking of affection, might there be a chance for a reconciliation between Pete and Trudy? Neither of them seems happy being divorced. At least in that fight with the school administrator, Pete finally got to punch someone instead of being punched. The whole idea of a 300-year-old feud between the Campbells and the McDonalds was hilarious. Of course blue-blooded Pete would have an ancestor working for the British king.

Peggy, already rattled by the kids running around, gets further rattled when the stage mom tells her, “You do what you want with your children. I’ll do what I want with mine.” She remembers what Don told her to forget and the show gives us a very rare example of Peggy looking back at her adopted child. I liked the scene of Stan subtly realizing Peggy is talking about herself when she talks about mothers leaving their kids because they have no choice. It’s not that Peggy doesn’t care where her child is, it’s that she “doesn’t know because you’re not supposed to know or you can't go on with your life.” Stan’s kindness was very sweet in this scene and Peggy’s tears were just heartbreaking.

What the partners don’t seem to realize is that they may have saved themselves by going to McCann but the rank and file employees at Sterling Cooper are not so lucky. I loved the scene of the employees talking over the announcement and leaving. Back in season five, Don could make a triumphant speech and make working the weekends for the Jaguar account seem like an amazing adventure. Now he can’t sell this assimilation. He tries to tell the employees that it’s a new beginning but nobody wants to listen. For them, it will be redundancies and pink slips.

The partners end the episode alone with nobody listening, gathered maybe for the last time in the modern ‘60s office. There are three more big goodbyes to go.