In a show which rivals The Good Wife for uncomfortable elevator scenes, this was really something. (Courtesy AMCtv)
Is that all there is?
For the entire gang at Sterling Cooper & Partners, that's the question, isn't it? All the partners are, in Peggy's words, "filthy rich" now, as the Cosgroves have always been, but does money make any of them happy? Does the work itself? We see nothing in the workplace this week which gives anyone joy; the sole product pitch was Joan and Peggy's efforts to bring Topaz hosiery into the Age of L'eggs, which was met with even more boorishness and sexism than usual for the show.
So check your answering service for messages, put down the golf clubs, and join me at the diner counter, under the orange squiggle.
It is April 1970, and Don Draper still can't get no satisfaction. One-night stands, alley-way stands, a bevy of women standing in his office clad in little more than a fur coat, and of course he's not happy because he's Don Draper, and the absence of his children (especially Sally) from this episode helps sell the point that when it comes to the world of grownups he remains adrift and unfulfilled. Of all the women in his life, the one most squarely on his mind is the former Rachel Menken, who briefly consumed his affections back in 1960, and is now, sadly, among the formerly alive. (F--- cancer.)
Don learns at the shiva call that Rachel "lived the life she wanted to live. She had everything." That door's closed, as is the one with Di ("die"), the waitress, who insists that next time he visit accompanied.
Meanwhile, back at SC & P, Joan and Peggy remind us that as much as we want them to unite and take down the patriarchy, they've each maintained different strategies over the past decade to accommodate it more than subvert it. Joan tries to compensate by spending her eff-you money at Bonwit Teller; Peggy by ... wait, is that MSCL's Brian Krakow?
But Peggy may never get to Paris, and Ken may never leave advertising, and Joan can only keep her composure for so long, and Pete ... Pete's little more than comic relief, right now. And as for Don Draper, I can't imagine a happy ending, can you? Only four more episodes to go until the antepenultimate episode, gang.
New this week: several era-appropriate mustaches; Ken Cosgrove's desire for revenge.
M.I.A.: Don's kids, Don's ex-wives, Jim Cutler, Lou Avery, Sal Romano, Bob Benson, the giant computer that made Ginsberg go crazy.
* * * * *
Molly Lambert: "The carousel goes round and round, but you end up right where you began. At the start of the final season of Mad Men, Don Draper is living all the phases of his life at once: the high-powered executive, the fur coat salesman, the boy who grew up in a brothel. Don has finally absorbed Dick Whitman back into his body like a vanishing twin. The opening sequence is purposely dislocating: It could be any year. But it’s still Don Draper all the way. He’s smoking a cigarette indoors, undressing a girl with his words, same as it ever was."
Alan Sepinwall: "It took me a few viewings to entirely track what goes on between Don and Diana over his first two visits to the diner, but it seems to be this: Roger leaves her the $100 tip as an apology for being a jerk (and also to show off to the models, knowing at least one of them will be going home with him), and when Don returns to the place a few nights later and requests that she serve him, she assumes that he is there to cash in on what his friend already paid her for. (Note how puzzled Don looks when Diana mentions the $100; he surely didn't pay her himself.) She's likely not a waitress-by-day, prostitute-by-night, but in that time and in her socio-economic situation, she makes assumptions of what's expected when a strange man hands her that much cash."
Matt Zoller Seitz: "Every Don scene has a dream-logic connection with every other Don scene. Every one is about sex and death, and chances at happiness that were thwarted, or seemingly thwarted, by fate, or inattention. It’s also about Don’s sophisticated caveman’s sense of what a woman should be (an embodiment of fantasies, and a mother-whore-angel figure). Even the scene with the flight attendant is a mother lode (ahem) of un-packable symbols: His date is a woman who, in more than one sense, comes and goes, which at this point is exactly how Don prefers his women. The flight attendant spills red wine on Don’s white carpet. Don covers up the wine stain with a blanket rather than cleaning it up before it sets — Don’s strategy for dealing with every screw-up in his life. The Romans considered the accidental spilling of red wine to be a bad omen, and the very next Don scene is his dream about Rachel, which presages the revelation that Rachel died."
Linda Holmes:
That [flight attendant] scene alone has spilled wine, a literal coverup, a lost piece of jewelry, a throwaway attitude toward Megan and, by reference, blankets soaked in urine. I looked at it and thought, "Oh, heavens. Don Draper is a gross old drunk horndog."
None of these things — the sex life, the drinking, the looking messy — is entirely new, but more than ever, the show is letting Don fall apart, not just psychologically but style-wise. Look-wise. And on a look-obsessed show, that tells you a lot. Don has sometimes looked troubled and been awful to people, but now he looks ... uncool. And in this show's world, that's how you know everything's gone wrong.
...Don has now gone from merely falling apart to becoming an even more unreliable narrator than before. Why did he walk into a diner and start spilling his guts about Rachel and his dream? Is this waitress really saying this oddly prophetic and seemingly random thing to him? Is he dreaming this, too? After all, we ended last season with him hallucinating Bert Cooper doing a musical number; is this diner scene a hallucination as well?
This is decay taken to an extreme: His life is actually in pieces in such a way that they may not even be in order anymore. Reality may well be mixed up with dreams. (Pete says earlier in the episode that California felt like this for him.) What was once a strictly corseted show about the dawn of the 1960s is becoming a much messier, sloppier-looking show (in an entirely intentional, meticulous way) about the dawn of the 1970s. And Don Draper isn't looking so hot.