I’ve enjoyed this season of “Mad Men.” Then again, I’ve enjoyed every season of “Mad Men.” I tend to be a person who enjoys “Mad Men,” even when I have problems with particular episodes. And honestly, that finale was peculiar—I think a lot of it didn’t work. But then, this is the problem with “recaps,” which are by nature first reactions. It’s possible I’ll change my mind! Drop acid, gain a fresh appreciation. Or gaze at it through a projector, air motes swimming in the lens light, feeling a fresh affection for the show I still adore.
The truth is, it would have been difficult for “Mad Men” to pay off perfectly on those last two brilliant episodes. Still, I did think the pacing of “The Phantom” was odd. Some scenes jolted me; others left no trace at all. I liked seeing Trudy and her sad pool sketch. I’m always happy for Roger to behave badly (and that shot from above, with him on that gold hotel sheet, was gorgeous) and yet I found it hard to care about that slight escapade. I learned little that was new from the scenes with Don and Joan, or Don and Peggy, although it was nice to see them together (and what was up with those two dogs humping outside Peggy’s window? There are only so many double-images I can take).
Personally, I was made seethingly uncomfortable by the Megan plot, and I’ll interpret that as a good thing. I love it when I have no idea where the show is going. But my best guess is that when Megan finally showed her cards—when, like Don and also like almost every woman in this world except Peggy, she made a dirty trade—her bad behavior, her vanity, freed Don back up, set him loose from his own virtue. That last expression certainly looked like Don-as-wolf, one among the show’s several erasures and re-inventions.
Don tells Megan, “You want to be somebody’s discovery, not somebody’s wife.” Just a few scenes later, Megan is completely blotto, twining around Don like a supplicant, moaning, “Please, it’s the only thing I’m good for…. This is what you want, isn’t it? For me to be waiting for you. So you won’t give me a chance.” Perhaps this is just what being married to Don Draper does to women. Maybe every young actress has moments of this kind of insecurity. Maybe Megan’s bravado was always skin-deep.
Either way, it didn’t help that Megan’s mother apparently possesses as many undermining zingers as Roger Sterling, with the winner being “Not every little girl gets to do what they want, the world cannot support that many ballerinas.” Still, while I like Jessica Paré very much as an actress, I simply don’t feel fully invested in Megan’s success or failure. When Don gazed at her screen test, it was a callback to the first season’s Kodak carousel, but one that felt oddly on the nose: same glowing screen, same gaze of nostalgic affection, but to less effect, somehow. Which is the point, I guess.
And then there was Don himself, suffering from a toothache. From the first scene of him probing his mouth, I kept thinking: “It’s not his tooth that’s rotten.” When his ghost brother announced that to him, I groaned. I don’t mind a Freudian show, but the symbolism might play a little harder to get.
On the other hand, the crisp, bitter scene between Don and Lane’s widow, Rebecca, was wholly effective, from “We’re not ones to wallow” to that oddly devastating side shot of Rebecca, clutching the photo of a woman that Lane stole from a man’s wallet—another meaningless riddle for her poisoned life.
The one development I can’t get onboard for was Pete’s affair with Beth, which for me, was a story that was broken from the start. There’s nothing new in Pete’s self-pity: he clearly thinks of himself as a tortured, existential romantic, and perhaps in some sick way he actually is. Yet the entire situation felt phony and programmatic. It was an Anne Sexton poem stuffed into a John Cheever story, with a bad performance by Alexis Bledel that made the whole thing that much more sour: crazy-girl catnip. I recognize the theoretical poignancy to Beth’s memory being erased by electroshock, but her character always read as an erotic fantasy, not a real girl—she was a screen for Pete’s fantasies, but also for ours. Beth continually explained that Pete didn’t know her, but that didn’t quite excuse the flat quality of their scenes together, which lent even Pete’s most heightened, poetic lines (“a temporary bandage on a permanent wound”) less weight, so that they cast little shadow.
Despite these complaints, there was a fair amount of power in the episode’s end, that startlingly cinematic sequence of Don walking from the light into the darkness, to the James Bond theme, “You Only Live Twice.” If the finale felt flawed, “Mad Men” still had a memorable season, full of threat and risk and shock—worth thinking about, and re-thinking about. So I’ll be sipping my drink, trusting that there’s a future to this relationship. Or, to quote Roger Sterling, “Remember, Don…when God closes a door, he opens a dress.”
Photograph by Michael Yarish/AMC.
