Mad Men ended last night after seven seasons. The show was consistently unpredictable and narratively jagged (in a good way) and the ending was as out of left field as everything else that the show has thrown at us.
Spoilers after the jump.
My initial response to the end of Mad Men was “That’s it?” I was surprised by the lack of drama or last-minute catastrophe for the characters. No one died. No one got fired. No one screamed about how they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. Given how unpredictable the show can be (they once chopped up a guy’s foot in a lawnmower, and later Ken got his eye shot out) I half expected the show to end with Pete Campbell going on a rampage through the office with his hunting rifle after his job offer from Lear Jet fell through.
But no. Pete and Trudy got a happy ending. They got on a Lear Jet and flew away from it all. Roger and Marie order lobster and champagne, and they seem happy. Joan starts up her own agency out of her apartment. Peggy and Stan declare their love for each other and make out. It all seemed very neat and tidy, and I couldn’t really believe what I was watching. I was shocked and amazed that there wasn’t more misery or death on screen. It all seemed very tidy.
Over on the other side of the show, though, the finale withheld drama and catharsis from the viewer. We know that Betty is going to die from lung cancer, but the show didn’t give us the kind of dramatic and drawn-out death scene that other lesser dramas would have milked. Instead, Betty was left staring into an abyss, looking death in the eye on her terms and declaring it to be “her business” and only hers, even though her young children are about to lose a parent.
Even though Betty’s story lacked the certainty of a dramatic death scene, it was still final. There was still a bow on the end of her narrative, even though it was dark one.
All of the finale’s mystery, uncertainty, and narrative energy was heaped onto Don. The finale’s focus on Don alone seemed jarring for a show that has had such an excellent ensemble cast, and has very much been about Sterling Cooper as an organization. To focus so thoroughly on the main character in isolation seemed to be at odds with everything else about the show.
Don follows Stephanie, Anna Draper’s niece, to an isolated hippie outpost where people share feelings and do woo-woo exercises to find themselves. The finale was not kind to the hippies. It did not present the camp where Stephanie and Don were ostensibly looking for acceptance as any kind of genuine refuge. Stephanie ran away after being insulted by another woman for supposedly abandoning her child, and Don, when he tried to leave, found that he couldn’t get a car or any other transport within the day. The place seemed isolated and, in that moment, more than a little prison-like.
The one moment of real feeling came when a man called Leonard compared himself to an item sitting in a refrigerator, constantly passed over by the people who would want to… eat him, I guess? This metaphor only kind of works. He talked about dreaming that he spent most of his time in the dark, and that, when the door opened, people were happy to see him, but he was never chosen. It was never his turn. He was ordinary.
Don, filled with emotion, hugged the man. Don embraced another human being, certainly, but the subtext of the scene was that Don the salesman was suddenly hugging the ordinary person he once sold happiness to. In the very first episode Don says “happiness is a new car.” Leonard, the unremarkable man in a pale sweater, was the kind of man who bought those cars. He was the kind of man that Don got wealthy deceiving, and Don was suddenly holding him instead of lying to him. That was as close as the show came to giving Don a moment of narrative closure.
The last proper scene of the show was Don sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed, meditating and saying “om.” The scene then dissolved to the famous "I'd Like to Buy the World A Coke" commercial. Implicit in the cut was the idea that Don Draper took all of his time saying "om," all of that hugging and meditation, all of the raw emotional baggage at knowing that his ex-wife was going to die, and plowed it back into advertising. He returned to McCann, started working on Coke, and made one of the most famous ads to ever grace a television screen. The hippies that he meditated with were turned into smiling, singing extras whose emotional depth did not extend past a nebulous desire for song and soda.
It was a cynical ending, and one that denied the viewer the narrative of Don actually making that commercial. I didn’t care for it when I watched it last night, but I think my opinions have mellowed in the intervening hours. The finale of Mad Men still showed Don as an empty suit, a man who understands desires but who tries to be above them. Even when he steeped himself in raw emotion (like when he hugged Leonard) it all ultimately came back to market research, and to repackaging something that's genuine into something to be bought and sold.
If you read the Coke commercial as Don Draper's greatest work, then Mad Men didn't end with him killing himself. He didn't turn into D.B. Cooper. Instead, Don Draper took you in his arms, cried on your shoulder, looked you in the eye, and at the end of that unguarded moment told you, in no uncertain terms, that happiness is a new car.