Some notes on the finale, jotted as it happened:
● Don needs a root canal. It’ll go away. It always does. Hmm. This might be symbolic.
● Joan, grieving for Lane, says maybe she should have given Lane what he wanted. Don, having pegged Lane for an effete and sexless nonentity, wonders what that might be. Her look. You of all people.
● Megan drawing a bath after failing to get her husband to put her in an ad because she’s failing as an actress: tell me you didn’t think she wasn’t going to open her wrists.
● Megan getting a gentle introduction to reality from her mother: the world cannot accommodate so many ballerinas, my child. We learn the other side of the season’s subplot: she’s just not that good. It’s New York, dear. You’re out of your league. Just as Betty was pretty enough to be a model, but lacked the snap and crackle to bewitch the camera, so your skills are good enough for the first round. Thank you for auditioning. Next!
● Roger wants to take LSD with Sexy French Mom, and you think: so he’s going to have a bad trip and throw himself out the window. C’mon, the show’s half over. Someone has to go.
● Ah hah! The tooth is symbolic. In the dentist’s chair, Don gets nitrous and see his dead brother, Adam. This is not that unusual; he’s seen him the last few days, in the elevator, in the office. That’s what toothaches do: you see dead relatives. Add the nitrous, and they get chatty and tell you things about your character. Look: I had a hot tooth last month, and I remember the electric pain, the timpani throbs, the strange zen detachment as the dental sedatives soaked in. Dead people in my office, not so much. There was nothing remotely plausible about this. You don’t imagine dead people unless you are mentally ill or appearing in an M. Night movie. It’s there because the writers loved it, and no one took them aside and said “the client is going to hate it.”
● Pete’s speech to the post-shock-treatment lady was very sad, and everyone felt touched when he smothered her with a pillow, then threw a water cooler through the wall and escaped. It was a pathetic little speech, but he’s a pathetic little man, and I have no sympathy for him.
● Don and Peggy meeting in the movie theater didn’t feel forced AT ALL, did it? “So, why are you here?” “It’s in the script. And you?” “Same deal.” Peggy’s working on cigarettes now, and it looks like she invents Virginia Slims. The music that plays when the lights go down is the score for Casino Royale, the dreary Bond spoof from 1967. Which sets up . . .
Hadn’t know it was the season finale.
That may be life, but it doesn’t sound like even remotely interesting television. I can see life with my own eyes every day thanks. Being able to see something other than life is why I pay my cable bill.
Excellent post, and so to-the-point.
The Rolling Stones, not the Beatles.
But the last scene was really deep, the question of Don being alone more of an existential one.
That’s odd. I don’t remember you in the scene sharing that tab of acid with Roger.
“That may be life, but it doesn’t sound like even remotely interesting television. I can see life with my own eyes every day thanks. Being able to see something other than life is why I pay my cable bill.”
Ahh, but it’s life in ultra-swanky New York, just before the iceberg hits. The production design alone makes it fun to watch.
Thanks for the City Journal link to the recent “reassessments” of the crash-and-burn career of John Lindsay, reviewed by Fred Siegel, which I very much enjoyed. There have been few greater examples of the gap between liberal image and actual ability than hizzonor’s handsome if disastrous reign.
Extra points to Siegel for describing Lindsay as “once a shining star in the liberal firmament.” Somewhere, Lina Lamont is surely smiling!
This was by far the worst written season of Mad Men’s short existence. The finale had more flaws than Melanie Griffith’s face after plastic debauchery. And may be the trigger that kills it for good, putting everybody out of their misery.
Between its uneven character development and logic challenged writing, it was amateur hour every week.
Yet, I did detect a subtle irony.
With all due respect, the writer of this piece, James Lileks, was a mirror image of the weakness in season 5. His points seemed to come out of a joint smoked brain. His writing was as confused as a Lebron James post game interview. Did I mention James misunderstood every move every actor made?
Although the all time worst moments were the ones spent in the 28 flavor ice cream parlor named after a N.Y. Mets ballplayer, Roger’s bare bottom was a close second.
28 flavors at Howard Johnson’s was a good idea. A sixth season that never happens may be a whole lot better.
Rumor has it, the finale caused George Lois to jump out of his bedroom window. Luckily, he lives in a ranch.
What? No mention of the obvious ‘doors’ theme carried to excess throughout the episode? Nearly every scene opens with a character entering through some door – office, apartment, hospital, etc.
I’ve always wondered why people obsess over television shows, rock stars, pop stars, movie stars, movies, and other obviously ‘created’ novelties as if they really mattered in the greater ‘real life’ of life.
All of us, I suppose, are in awe of the ‘aweness’ of the mundane. It’s why a ‘creation’ such as an Obama can succeed in politics without any true merit to justify his status.
We deserve what we get. Get over it, Ed, it’s just a television show that can’t figure out where it’s going, but just keeps going because we want to make more it than it deserves.
Anybody think that the blonde in the bar at the end is Megan’s actress friend that she snaked the commercial from?
Zeoman, not only did the blonde at the bar look like megan’s actress friend, the girl she pointed to in the distance looked like Megan….
Nonsense. Almost all of it, tho’ witty, as always. Sorry you missed it – what a brilliant story. At least you’re watching it. Someday you’ll see it again. You’re a very smart dude, James – see it again — your story clearly shows you are on a very tight deadline. This final episode is a brilliant braid of all their predicaments. James, I have faith in you. You will get it.
Ciao, buddy.
Don Draper will revert to the Don Draper we’ve all come to know and love in the prior 4 seasons. He’s through playing father to Megan, the spoiled child. The door he existed from the photo session signifies a return to the Dark Don of the past. Yada, yada, yada, ya…
correction: “The door he exited during…”
Shouldn’t the show be making it more clear that the small c capitalists are more virtuous than the small c communists in this world? Sheesh, from this show, you’d think that they were just as flawed as Megan’s professor Daddy or various schoolteachers and hippies who have come and gone.
I suppose that their main virtue is that they rise or fall in the context of their own ambition, ability, some luck and connection and the whims of the marketplace. People in government work are generally more insulated from that “reality,” but are not necessarily better or worse in character. Is that kosher?
I traveled to Manhattan once or twice a month on business in the sixties and these writers have captured the Booze, Babes and Burnmarks from careless cigarette smokers of the period. The series started something like a blend of the old Clark Gable – Sidney Greenstreet film, “The Hucksters” (1947) and a couple of Vance Packard critiques of the Ad industry from the same era. Let’s face it though, the basic source material is pretty thin to start with and after the main faults of the speaking part characters were hung out to view there wasn’t much left.
The best I can offer for the season finale that they sure jumped a healthy herd of sharks!