MAD MEN on AMC - Seasons 7(a) & & 7(b)

Don never goes back. he rides the rails hobo style all the way to Hawaii. Show ends with him calling the Francis household, talks to Bobby and tells him he's not coming home. Fade to black as Cats in the Cradle plays.

did anyone think he was going to proposition Draper?

lol yes I totally thought this too

Don't mean to be glib--thematically, why did they do this?

everybody forgot about Betty's previous cancer scare eh

love ramblin mystery man Don, could see him trying to reunite w his kids out west (he's gonna leave his kids to Francis?!). Betty was ice cold to the end.

it's a bunch of life-goes-on and people-don't-get-what-they-deserve simplicity
fuck's sake, betty literally walks up the stairs to heaven

Fade to black as Cats in the Cradle plays.

I hit upon CCR's "Someday Never Comes" yesterday, an even better "Cat's in the Cradle" (which I like).

No, I didn't forget the previous cancer scare, just why did they bring it back? I'm just trying to figure out the overriding purpose...there may not be one at all beyond the inherent drama.

betty's end was one of the stodgiest pieces of TV writing i have seen in a long time. it's a shame.

CCR--Long as I can See the light?

(xpost) I don't know, I thought it was handled very well. Little things like needing Henry there before the diagnosis is given, Sally holding her hands over her ears, Betty initially walking right past Sally, etc. Definitely going full-out for sentiment, but that's been something the show does now and again, and I thought it succeeded.

I agree the "aand... Betty's dead!" did seem a bit abrupt this close to the end, but it wasn't entirely out of the blue, it didn't strike me as unrealistic. thought it was handled well myself.

i've never found the musical choices particularly notable (and i'm not a fan of much of the incidental music either) so it's p baffling to me that it's now taking up like a third of the discussion here

betty does not strike me as the type of character who would just accept death like that. she was never that saintly. no believable character, in the face of death and having to say goodbye to her children, would be so succinct.

you forgot the part where she's an emotionless robot tho

helped immeasurably by Jones' wooden acting

Writing that stiff, correct letter to the daughter whom she's resented as an imposition for years strikes me as exactly the kind of response for which Betty was trained.

so it's p baffling to me that it's now taking up like a third of the discussion here

Basically how I feel about gifs and Megan's blue dress. Everybody takes away different things from the show.

Alfred otm. It's not saintly, she's thought about cancer before, re her mom and her own previous possibility, and she's thought about what she would do (not a lot of great options back then, even if they'd caught it earlier). This isn't her being cold, either, but characteristic stubbornness and reserve helps, in this case.
So much for sticking to contemporaneous hits eh

i think the whole cancer plot came at the expense of the symmetry and continuity that had been quietly and judiciously firming in the previous episodes, but i guess they handled it ok. last shot of Betty battling up the stairs was a bit laboured though.

Also, yeah, that Main Line training, leaving with class, in just the right dress. Via instructions to her daughter, the kind she might have gotten ( or wanted to get, at the very least)

betty may have always been robotic, stubborn, reserved, or whatever you want to cal it - but the issue here was more about how nobly and gracefully she gave into death. the betty i knew would have had something else to say about it.

that last shot was awful xp.

nothing noble or graceful about death

like I said, Betty handled it exactly as I expected.

no, there is nothing noble or graceful about death. which is why it comes as a surprise that someone of Betty's impermeable, almost child-like temperament would handle it with such nobility.

the crux of her power as both an actress and character on the show was a result of the dichotomy between her maturity and sheer immaturity. when this contrast worked, it was because it was presented with complexity. there was nothing at all complex about this ending.

for me, Betty has been a secondary character for so long that i have difficulty recalling the values that she is supposed to represent. it doesn't help that they were so complex and contradictory to begin with. most of the characters have grown more familiar to me over time to the point where their actions and responses are defined by how true to character they are. Betty, on the other hand, has grown progressively distant. i rarely feel like i have a firm grasp on what she's angling for or where she's arrived.

imo betty's like a pissed off madam bovary, more or less.

the 'pissed off' part is what i was missing. i mean, i didn't cry. i was ready to cry, and i cry at everything. it was mother's day, and i didn't cry. if that doesn't say something, i don't know what does!

actually i take that back, betty is pissed off because she bought into the whole marriage/kids/suburbs thing and was miserable anyway. she spent most of her life being the object of other people's fantasies, and rarely articulated her own.

feel like betty doesnt mind dying (maybe its a relief?) as long as her kids are going to be ok. her main concern by the end of the ep is literally leaving a good looking corpse.

i cried a little at the last line of her note to sally, tho. whoever said it upthread was right, that this is about betty having no choices in life but getting to choose how to die, whether to fight death, etc

Betty may yet revert to petulance, strained terseness etc as her illness continues, but in the scene with Sally, she managed that rare Betty balance, which the last scene with Glen may have helped her to achieve here (dovetailing with their scenes of long ago, esp. when lost boy put his hand on her knee, and she gently dissuaded him).

Gotta go to work, so no time for lists (awww), but let's be thinking about all those awesome Duckpoints in Mad Men history. We may not have seen the last of him yet!

Finale is two hrs., or did I hear that wrong last night?

Ducktales spinoff

finale is not two hours! Unless there's an hours worth of ads

looks like running time on AMC's website says hour and 15 minutes-

i heard 65 minutes somewhere

wow duh the irony of Pete going to work for an airline totally eluded me until just now

DEADLINE: Is there a special song at the end?
WEINER: I can’t tell you that. There’s music in the whole show. There always is. It is a Mad Men episode, the finale. That’s all I can tell you, and it’s a little bit longer.

DEADLINE: Really?
WEINER: It’s about 10 minutes longer than a regular episode. The last two have longer running times. Number 13 is about five minutes long and 14 is 10 minutes long.

Man, it would have been awesome if the finale was literally ten minutes long.

just a montage set to American Pie

slow-mo shots of people drinking + smoking

Roger = the father, Don = the son, Bert = the holy ghost. Lots of candidates for the Jester--Pete, Duck, Stan, too many (including Roger).

i think another way to look at betty accepting death is that her character has always been, at least in part, about self-denial -- from her giving up a modeling career to marry don, to her denying herself multiple affairs that she was well entitled to, she's frequently come close to freeing herself but has always at the very end re-chained herself to her husband or her family or the morals of the time. so now she is accepting death as a way of finally giving herself permission to act selfishly (slash freely) for once, i.e. henry being surprised that she's happily bouncing off to school because he expects her to be wallowing in her fate.

like the last shot -- she's happier wheezing her way up the school steps, knowing she's gonna die, then she's practically ever been at any other point in the show?

the fact that she had to die at all was unnecessary; it's become all too common a cliche in television insofar as last seasons are concerned

gimme a break

I doubt we're going to see her actually die

she could live forever WHO KNOWS

this show has what, 15-20 regular characters? having one of em shuffle of fis entirely reasonable.

yeah idk why betty of all characters had to die but no death in mad men -- a show about upper/middle class people who live exceedingly normal lives -- was ever going to be necessary. in that it feels wantonly sad is not unlike life itself!

cancer does not pick its victims reasonably

otm

surprised they don't all have lung cancer frankly

^^^^