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

That last image of Betty sitting at the kitchen table smoking while Sally did dishes in the background was genuinely sad. Betty was the only character tonight who didn't get her final moment of grace--although I realize she got hers last week, and that the last image and her earlier phone call with Don were extensions of that.

And Sally being there and helping her was maybe hers...Anyway, it was a great image.

Young people on this show were always running away or tuning out or going nuts. Sally grounded herself and assumed some pretty heavy responsibilities.

In a shocking twist, the partner who finally pulled in coke was Joan

gotta say the Peggy reaction to the Stan conversation was increds; that scene was amazingly acted and written.

Because of Peggy's track record with men, I kept thinking "oh shit, he's going to say he was only joking, and it's going to be monumentally embarrassing." But he didn't, and it was great.

Also, Joan literally wears the pants now.

thought this was okay, p good i guess - i think the coke ad kinda saved it but was still sort of a cheap shot.

don didn't really discover a lot about himself in all these last scenes. some of the loose end tying was a bit obvious too - there was some bad writing, the joan and roger scene had one weird and horrible line like "i just want to look after the future of my son" or something.

stan and peggy made me happy but i dunno if it was that real - like didn't he try it on with her already? i feel like that scene (and probably this episode generally) only really ran off the hard-won good will for the characters based on previous work.

but overall i can deal with this as an ending.

i thought don's ending was fairly brilliant, and cheerfully corrosive.

the fridge guy is obviously /not/ don draper, a beautiful man who attracts lots of notice. i think their two moments of catharsis just happened to coincide, and in a weird way don essentially co-opted fridge guy's moment. which in a way reinforces the latter's sad-sack story.

and if you want to read the show as (shaggily) allegorical, and i think weiner wants us except when he doesn't want us to, then it's pretty clear that there's a comment on how compatible the new-agey stuff was with corporate ethos, that it represented a kind of sublimation of the counterculture in something a lot more amenable to consumerism, etc.

of course, this also represents something i've never liked about the show-- as often as not it engaged with a Cliffs Notes version of The 1960s. which makes it perfect for the sort of facile blog/water cooler interpretation that seems to define the limits of "quality TV drama" these days. but as shallow as it can be i still admire the cleverness with which they arrange the various parts.

also thought the peggy ending was clever. it was fan service in a way, although i don't think they'd been really pushing us toward seeing her and stan as a couple until fairly recently in the series (and it was especially obvious this season). but i do think they set up us to see peggy's arc as being about her professional life, whether she could satisfy her talents and ambitions and achieve what she seemed to be entitled to achieve. but i think they kind of resolved that in the early scene where it's made clear that she's perfectly capable of negotiating the politics of McCann. that out of the way, they were able to give her a romantic ending even though her love life has not been a major plot point for quite a while. (there was the abortive fling with her employee's cousin a few episodes ago, i guess.)

one question -- does henry really have no interest in continuing to raise the two boys he's been raising for years? will he be OK with them going to betty's brother? does betty simply intuit that he will be such a wreck after her death as to be incapable of raising them?

Well, they're not his sons, and there would be no woman there to help raise them. Unless he met a lady who had two girls of her own...

I don't know custody law but wouldn't Don have first dibs on the kids anyway?

Dunno if I agree with some of the conclusions:

http://time.com/3881812/mad-men-finale-review/

Most of you and this writer insist that the Coke ad was Draper's brainchild, and I'll watch the last scene again, but for me the direction didn't make it explicit (and for this show I don't want suggestions -- I want connections)

yeah personally i'd like to see betty's test results again. i'm not sure she actually has cancer.

Four to six business days, I was told.

I don't think 'advertising' was the hero of the series, 'work' is, and the characters happened to work in advertising. Freddie Rumsen had that great advice last half-season: 'Do the work!' So it is 'cynical' to think that Don just goes back to selling lies, because that's what he does, but it's genuine in that he does the work, and he seems satisfied doing the work.

he does Peggy, "See you soon."

So it is 'cynical' to think that Don just goes back to selling lies, because that's what he does, but it's genuine in that he does the work, and he seems satisfied doing the work.

I thought a key moment in re that was Stephanie reacting to his "You can leave this behind" spiel by saying something like, "You're always telling people that, but I don't think it's true." It forces him to realize that a.) he is always telling people that, personally and professionally, and b.) it's not even true for him, let alone anyone else. It strips down his sense of himself from Worldly Man Who Knows What's Up to Total Bullshit Artist. As someone else said above, the fridge guy makes him realize that he's always looking for and expecting the light to be on him, so that he can perform his bullshit act, and he feels bereft when he's not. Which, arguably, pushes him toward accepting that he is indeed full of bullshit (leaving open the possibility for a more self-aware personal life), but he is also really good at selling bullshit. As Buddha would say, "When bullshitting, just bullshit."

Btw, what do we think happens to people afterwards? I mean, I loved that this wasn't really an 'ending' ending, everybody landed somewhere, but there was a sense that there stories will go on. I for one am not sure either Pete and Trudy or Peggy and Stan makes it. Roger and Marie, though, that was such a perfect final scene! I fear a bit for Peggy, I have to admit. What I really want is the scene where Don and Peggy talk, now that she knows he stole someone's name, where he also apologizes for giving her wrong advice when she had the baby. But oh well, that will have to be in my imagination.

Btw, the key book to understanding Mad Men: Peter Sloterdijk's 'Critique of Cynical Reason' Always has been, always will be.

the "champagne for my mother" line was subtitled.

and regarding the comment way back about never crediting Don/the show with real ads...It's Toasted was real.

and I called that ending before Slate in this here thread, deserving all the credit.

coming around to fact that i may be wrong about the ending, but i still feel it's sneaky since there was no precedent on the show. (or maybe there was and i forgot.) seems a bit silly to make don responsible for an incredibly famous ad with a well-documented real world history. as fitting as it would be!

on the other hand, i may just keep my private reading of the end as expressing something like a gestalt (to use a favored term at Esalen!) of the age, somehow a pretty fitting coda to the end of the 60s, rather than an explicit link to don's future. of course it can be both!

loved this show.

As I just mentioned. There was a precedent. Lucky Strike's It's Toasted. Lucky Strike had been using that since 1917 but the show claims they came up with it.

would they have had to get permission from whoever actually made that ad, and coca cola etc? not that the latter would have much of a problem with it.

incidentally, that ad really is vile in hindsight, like a deranged cult

sorry dan! i was reading too fast.

Ok, having slept on I retract my criticism somewhat, although a literal CLANG of inspiration is corny as fuck. I guess I just hated the Return Of The King style "let's have one last look at people being happy even though we're finished with their story" scene.

And yes, I'm counting Sally as a happy ending. She finally has a relationship with her mother she can count as loving.

incidentally, that ad really is vile in hindsight, like a deranged cult

http://i.imgur.com/NaKP0.jpg

hahaha

If you go back to that Billboard article posted last night--it's linked on here; the one where Weiner says he hopes people won't judge the whole show on the last five minutes--Weiner says he and Hamm were already discussing the ending three or four years ago. Hamm liked Weiner's idea, and together they talked about how they could make that ending happen.

That also strongly points to the conclusion that the Coke ad is Don's (which most of us agree on at this point, but Alfred and a couple of people aren't sure). The whole subplot about McCann subsuming SC&P, so that SC&P is not just a subsidiary anymore but that McCann is now unambiguously Don's employer, that is in the service of the idea that the Coke ad is Don's. Peggy's insistence that the door is still open for Don to come back if he wants to, that sets it up. The woman at Esalen saying Don can get a ride out with someone else at the end of the week, that seems to serve the idea.

I agree with VG: the fridge guy was not-Don and Don at the same time. In how others perceived Don (even how Don almost willfully learned to view himself, as the guy who'd always come in at the last minute and save the day through the sheer force of his personality), he was completely not-Don. But in reality he was Don. Don even wryly asks Peggy on the phone if everything fell apart without him.

The woman at Esalen saying Don can get a ride out with someone else at the end of the week, that seems to serve the idea.

Just a guess, but my impression is he stayed at Esalen for awhile--more than a week for sure.

I'm probably grasping at straws there: thinking back on bigger developments, though, there just seemed to be things that happened or were said that paved the way for the conclusion that Don comes up with the Coke ad. I think that's the ending that Weiner and Hamm started crafting four years ago.

No I think the ad is his. The ending wouldn't make much sense if it wasn't.

Otherwise the Coke song is a commentary on the entire show--would just seem weird.

The fridge guy section was amazing. Pretty sweet ending, I think.

Time's got a thing on Bill Backer, the guy who created the Coke ad. His words would seem to contain Don's smile at the end nicely:

"In that moment I saw a bottle of Coke in a whole new light...as more than an invitation to pause for refreshment. They were actually a subtle way of saying, 'Let’s keep each other company for a little while.'"

http://time.com/3882313/mad-men-finale-coke-ad/

Yeah, but Weiner cheerfully acknowledged that lift, and some others, I think. And you can take it, in part, as his punchline, Weiner as one more online Mad Men nutter (somebody on Twitter was offering to buy her friend with a Coke, for having guessed the final song, and odds are that others called it too, somewhere).

I come here to high-five many otm comments here over the years, incl. Vegemite Girl and tipsy re Don and Therapy Guy waiting for the door to come open and the light to go on---also to high five myself (ouch) for getting it right about the New Age Cali connection (and even about Anna's niece) being in there at the end. I imagined her getting busted, being pressured to give a name, figuring Don's ancient identity theft and military desertion might be just enough, and not *that* big a deal--but it was, because somebody wanted to make an example out of the smarty-pants who wrote that full-page open letter to Big Tobacco, a pillar of our republic. He gets out of jail, goes to California, becomes something like used car dealer Jack Rosenberg-->Wernr Erhardt, founder of EST. But later I realized Whitman-->Draper would never put himself out there like that, despite any breakthrough: he's a star of the office suite, not the big rooms. This was right/plausible for him, at least at this stage, as Peggy's professional choice was for her. Personally, agree she's realizing and selling herself on being in love with ol' Stan---and yeah, she may well love him, in a way, but the office romance may not last, any more than her previous relationships---but Weiner leaves us to speculate about lives of characters after the end, as he indicated he would, in one of my recent posts.
Also called it re Joan going into ad-related business, and even getting Peggy into it (working late, maybe on another script, when Stan comes up behind her---interesting look when he starts messing with her shoulders).
Could see Draper continuing his New Age tour on weekends, maybe, as many did, with the handiness of TM, Transcendental Meditation instead of those office naps (come to think of it, saw an article in which brainwaves of TMers and nappers turned out to be p. much the same).
See also Powers of Mind, by Adam Smith, the 20th Century financial writer/novelist/Public TV host/Wall St. & Zurich financier, who went looking for enlightenment in the 70s (met Rolfe, Feldenkrais, Lars Ulrich's tennis guru Dad, many others).

offering to *buy* her friend a Coke," not "buy her with"! Guess somebody else noted Joan and geezer "sniffing" the other coke eh

don draper achieves spiritual enlightenment by realising he's don draper, sure why not.

more like "don draper achieves enlightenment by realizing he loves big brother"

there was also another nice callback to Peggy realizing his shtick about walking away from things will be as if they never happened -- he tries to pull that, again (and about walking away from a child!), and gets called out on it as bullshit

don't really think that it is bullshit. People walk away from their kids all the time. P sure not all of them are all conflicted about it.

(xpost)Stephanie calls him out on that too.

Two writers I've liked a lot the last few months:

http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/mad-men-recap-season-7-episode-14.html
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/18/8619419/mad-men-finale-recap-review

It's not as if it never happened, though!

Don's kind of been wallowing in the stuff he walked away from for years. The entire "I'm going to walk away from New York and McCann and occasionally talk to my daughter on the phone to acknowledge I have family" thing fell apart the moment he found out Betty was sick. Her calling him out on never visiting his sons was kind of the end of that.

clemenza, that's what I meant -- Stephanie's baby.

Don Draper is the persona that sells Dick Whitman's emotional needs and suffering back to America, consumerism as panacea.

em326 16 minutes ago
The notion that Don may have created the Coke ad went right over my head. I blame the 8 Manhattans I had before the finale started.

"do you have any liquor I've been drinking beer all night"

oh god that line

he basically just said "I am the man who drinks" multiple times in the episode

I really was hoping that the circle of people talking it out after Stephanie left would have him saying "I'm Dick Whitman, yowza!"

I'm probably grasping at straws there: thinking back on bigger developments, though, there just seemed to be things that happened or were said that paved the way for the conclusion that Don comes up with the Coke ad. I think that's the ending that Weiner and Hamm started crafting four years ago.

― clemenza, Monday, May 18, 2015 9:26 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw, the original idea for the ending was what ended up being the season 6 don story arc and finale - that with happiness (megan) just in his grasp he would backslide, as he did, into cheating and the abject alcoholism he had cut back on, go through that whole mess as that season progressed and then finally purge at the hershey pitch, and then finally be honest with sally and bobby by showing them where he came from. that said, i'd believe this ending probably began taking shape in weiner's mind (and hamm's), fairly quickly.

fairly quickly into development of the final season (or seasons, depending on how you view 7A/7B), that is.

the opening with don soaring across the desert reminded me of

https://40.media.tumblr.com/f513900f843adbfc15253c6e0200bd92/tumblr_ncw5md5LnT1rllo7mo1_500.png

Another take on the ending is that, just as Don's habits came from being part of a certain era, the ending showed that he was in sync with the new era. He just doesn't have a job anymore that gives him the detachment to analyze it from afar, so he's just in sync with the times and the ad.