is tonight at 10, looks like it's 75 minutes according to my DVR. I've watched this season later in the week but will stay up so there are no spoilers.
I'm thinking The entire episode will be Don centric with a few 3-5 minute scenes to wrap up Roger, Peggy, and Joan. The big question for me is whether Don returns home or not; no idea what route they will take. I'm in the camp the camp that thinks he's trying to shed Don Draper but will ultimately get sucked back in once he reaches some semblance of happiness as DW.
That doesn't necessarily mean he has to be a cad. Really that's part of the Dick Whitman that he's leaving behind anyway. Well never know exactly how his personal life worked out, but owning who you are probably puts him on good ground to straighten it out.
Night all!
The only one who did something different was DD. He was able to run away from his identity and re-invent himself. For all his preaching to the kid about not running away from yourself, that is exactly what he did.
Exactly this last season He left his job , family , car ,kids
the implication that Don Draper was going to disappear
in fact it is Dick Whitman who is the one that disappears
The guru at the retreat had the last words in the episode "Embrace the New You" . the new you is not Dick Whitman but Don Draper.
Maybe it will grow on me but first impression is it was not consistent with what we've been watching for seven years.
And that entire trip, down to him crying and sounding almost suicidal on the phone with Peggy, apparently gets cut to an abrupt end when he has an idea for a Coke commercial.
I would've been just fine with Draper going back to being his old self, I just think the way they went about it was lazy, and leaving it open to interpretation (although I don't see how you can really make a case for things ending differently) was just CYA by the writers.
The other characters had obvious, quick and definite resolutions to their future. Joan dumps the guy to go into business for herself. Pete gets Trudy back, Peggy finally lands Stan, Betty's dead - everyone else is sorted out, but apparently Don, who spent all this time trying to discover himself, who got himself knocked around in east buttfuck trying to help out a kid looking to start out the same way Don did - all this time, and he ends up right back where he started, no worse for the wear, with nothing more than a 'ding' and the start of the Coke commercial.
To each his own, but I thought it was lazy.
And that entire trip, down to him crying and sounding almost suicidal on the phone with Peggy, apparently gets cut to an abrupt end when he has an idea for a Coke commercial.
I would've been just fine with Draper going back to being his old self, I just think the way they went about it was lazy, and leaving it open to interpretation (although I don't see how you can really make a case for things ending differently) was just CYA by the writers.
The other characters had obvious, quick and definite resolutions to their future. Joan dumps the guy to go into business for herself. Pete gets Trudy back, Peggy finally lands Stan, Betty's dead - everyone else is sorted out, but apparently Don, who spent all this time trying to discover himself, who got himself knocked around in east buttfuck trying to help out a kid looking to start out the same way Don did - all this time, and he ends up right back where he started, no worse for the wear, with nothing more than a 'ding' and the start of the Coke commercial.
To each his own, but I thought it was lazy.
The finale really could have used an extra 15 minutes to show Don flying back to NYC, shaving, putting on his suit, walking into McCann Erickson, into the board room and delivering an epic pitch for Coke. One last Don Draper signature pitch and when he completes the pitch - cut to Coke commercial, end scene.
If Weiner's going to end it like he did - seemingly tying up all these loose ends, why leave it up to us to think for a second, check online and go "Ohh, Don wrote that Coke commercial." It's not some deep ending that left me stroking my chin hairs, pondering life like so many episodes in the early seasons did.
And despite so much wasted air time throughout the final season, the ending felt rushed to me. If that's where you're going, why end the series with Don still at this commune with that naked fat guy that plays the same role in shitty comedies?
The problem is that he IS a pat, reformed character and his name is Don Draper.
That is what Don has been doing in all of his relationships from the very beginning of the series. It's all over the first episode:
He pushes away Rachel Menken. Walks out of the meeting.
He pushes away the Old Gold clients and only has his epiphany as they're walking out the door.
He pushes away Pete: No, I won't go to your bachelor party.
He pushes away Peggy: "I'm not your boyfriend."
I need to go back and watch it again to see if he pushes away Roger. Pretty sure he does.
His epiphany in the final episode is that moment when the old lady pushes him away. Suddenly he realizes what he's been doing his whole life: Pushing everyone, including himself (and his brother), away.
Once he embraces "the new You," himself, he will be able to embrace his life and everyone in it. It had to start with himself.
I, too, wanted to puke at the touchy-feely California angle -- "White people problems." MLK and the black secretaries didn't get to go on woo woo retreats. But Don wasn't a God or Jesus kind of guy. Still, he needed some kind of spiritual renewal. He had always found renewal, acceptance and inspiration in California....but always returned to NYC because it was and is, as Roger said, "The Center of the Universe."
The finale really could have used an extra 15 minutes to show Don flying back to NYC, shaving, putting on his suit, walking into McCann Erickson, into the board room and delivering an epic pitch for Coke. One last Don Draper signature pitch and when he completes the pitch - cut to Coke commercial, end scene.
If Weiner's going to end it like he did - seemingly tying up all these loose ends, why leave it up to us to think for a second, check online and go "Ohh, Don wrote that Coke commercial." It's not some deep ending that left me stroking my chin hairs, pondering life like so many episodes in the early seasons did.
It may be an age thing. I'm older and the instant it faded from him smiling into that iconic coke commercial I knew that they were saying that he wrote it and he (Don Draper) ended up just fine. Maybe you had to have been old enough to remember the moment that commercial aired for real to get it in that way, I don't know.
If you had to think about it a little plus go online before really getting it then I would agree that the ending would have lost it's immediate impact and your correct showing him going home and actually doing it probably would have been better to watch. But for me it would have lost it's ahha moment that instantly wrapped up everything for Don Draper in our minds and not been near as good.
I guess the writer couldn't have it both ways, either not as good for those that didn't instantly get it or have it lose something for those that did.
I do agree though that much of the last episode could have been better. IMO it was only the very ending that saved it.
While I agree I also think it took when the niece let him have it when he tried to console her and give her the jewelry "family heirloom". The only historical family he connected with over the years as Don Draper had been with her aunt, he even rejected his kid brother who hung himself as a result. The niece rejecting him so absolutely in any way as "family" was his true rock bottom and imo and allowed him to relate with the man in the meeting who felt distant and unloved by his immediate family.
If the point was to show Don not running out on relationships anymore, what about having Don showing up at the Francis house, giving Sally a hug and saying we are all in this together? I think that makes the point without hitting everyone over the head with it and still leaving it up in the air as to whether he went back to ME.
The dude who broke down hit a nerve with Don not because he was talking about not being loved by family. He hit a nerve with Don because he was talking about being lost, irrelevant and forgotten. That's how Don was beginning to feel at McCann.
Don Draper is back. For better and worse.
About as subtle as a Mack truck. And in an episode that featured some great acting (Don on the phone with Sally or Betty), bailing out on the ending sucked. I'm with AJ, I'd rather have seen Don sitting in the conference room, pitching the Coke ad, with a smile on his face realizing that he is who he is and will never change, no matter how many hippie retreats he goes to.
It was a sloppy episode filled with saccharin happy endings, with a few great moments of acting and writing mixed in. The show had jumped the shark a long time ago, and unfortunately this last season did nothing to reverse that trend. Definitely doesn't measure up to the Sopranos very well.
If the point was to show Don not running out on relationships anymore, what about having Don showing up at the Francis house, giving Sally a hug and saying we are all in this together? I think that makes the point without hitting everyone over the head with it and still leaving it up in the air as to whether he went back to ME.
IMO the Coke commercial told us he was done running from, finally accepted being, and returned as Don Draper. I'm not sure it was intended to show us how good of a husband or father he ended up being in the future.
From the ending I just think he was done running from himself as Don, I'm not reading anything more into it.
The interesting part of the finale is that for several episodes, we watched Don takes steps to try and shed himself of Don Draper, but what really happened, is that he realized that he could actually shed himself of Dick Whitman and be Don Draper and be happy.
The show, since the very first episode, was about finding happiness. Don never really accepted the idea that he could be happy because he considered himself a fraud. But anyone who had any connection to Dick Whitman or to the identity shift was either gone or didn't care. But what he's created as Don Draper is an actual identity, and it is an existence that could have happiness. He has people who care about him (those at SCDP imploring him to "come home") and he has a family who will need him, and that was a product of the Don Draper that he created.
Now, it's open-ended as to what Don does with this revelation/internalization going forward. Is he forever changed by his new outlook and continues to be the pitch man that he loves to be but perhaps more open to the ideas of actual happiness and contentment? Maybe. But it may also be possible that it's just a micro-revelation, a short-lasting feeling of contentment that will eventually fade back into his misery as part of the same cycle that we've seen with him before.
Some interesting things of note:
In the season 2 (?) finale, he wanders into the Pacific with his clothes on as if he were shedding his Don Draper albatross. But here, it's with his back to the Pacific Ocean, facing East-- facing home, that he shows that smile of contentment, and we hear the "dings" of a typewriter-- the dings of an idea/epiphany as we cut to the Coke commercial.
Also, what made the group discussion more compelling was the man in the suit talking about how maybe he did have people who cared, but he just couldn't recognize it it and didn't se it in front of him. This is a common thread we saw in the conclusion for all of the characters-- recognizing that what was going to make them happy was in front of them and that they just had to see it and accept it.
The dude who broke down hit a nerve with Don not because he was talking about not being loved by family. He hit a nerve with Don because he was talking about being lost, irrelevant and forgotten. That's how Don was beginning to feel at McCann.
Don Draper is back. For better and worse.
Although I agree that's what happens, I don't see how it fits with his big hug with the ignored family man. Don's been a shitty human being to everyone around him, his family first and foremost. If he's just resolved to that fact, wouldn't his reaction to that guy been a lot more indifferent? If not, wouldn't it have driven Don to change?
Would've made more sense to me if Don had smacked the guy, returned to NYC, accepted who he was and went back to the old Don Draper.
Don made the decision to go back. You don't need to see him traveling cross-country to NY, getting drunk with Roger or having a dick measuring contest with Hobart. It's well established that if Don get's an idea in his head, he pulls it off.. Watching him go through the motions again would be superfluous, IMO. All you need to see is him work out the inner turmoil in his head.
Why should it have to compete with the Sopranos? Simply because Weiner was involved with both?
Not to mention that lots of people out there who think the Sopranos ending was terrible (though I'm not one of them).
I thought the ending was very solid. Not on the level of Six Feet Under, but not on Seinfeld level of bad, either. Don is who he is. He longer has any guilt re Dick Whitman, and is back to doing what he loves to do/is great at. Even though it faded this season, overall it was a terrific show...
Don made the decision to go back. You don't need to see him traveling cross-country to NY, getting drunk with Roger or having a dick measuring contest with Hobart. It's well established that if Don get's an idea in his head, he pulls it off.. Watching him go through the motions again would be superfluous, IMO. All you need to see is him work out the inner turmoil in his head.
Agreed and that was my original point. We have seen him make a pitch hundreds of times showing the entire process to warp up the series would have been the easy way out. Doing it the way they did it was more impactful and left it to the viewers to fill in the pieces. Much better IMO.
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Is that the "new" Dick, i.e. Don, is a mad man. That's the guy he's just learned to embrace and come to terms with, even if he repels people, like the woman pushing him away. Family man? Maybe. But Don is a mad man first and everything else second from now on.
The dude who broke down hit a nerve with Don not because he was talking about not being loved by family. He hit a nerve with Don because he was talking about being lost, irrelevant and forgotten. That's how Don was beginning to feel at McCann.
Don Draper is back. For better and worse.
Although I agree that's what happens, I don't see how it fits with his big hug with the ignored family man. Don's been a shitty human being to everyone around him, his family first and foremost. If he's just resolved to that fact, wouldn't his reaction to that guy been a lot more indifferent? If not, wouldn't it have driven Don to change?
Would've made more sense to me if Don had smacked the guy, returned to NYC, accepted who he was and went back to the old Don Draper.
I don't think it's the family part that resonated with Don. I think it was being ignored and irrelevant in general.
I also like to think about the line from the very first episode in the series, during the meeting with Lucky Strike: "Advertising is about one thing: happiness."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSNVy7FeL3g - ( New Window )
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Is that the "new" Dick, i.e. Don, is a mad man. That's the guy he's just learned to embrace and come to terms with, even if he repels people, like the woman pushing him away. Family man? Maybe. But Don is a mad man first and everything else second from now on.
The dude who broke down hit a nerve with Don not because he was talking about not being loved by family. He hit a nerve with Don because he was talking about being lost, irrelevant and forgotten. That's how Don was beginning to feel at McCann.
Don Draper is back. For better and worse.
Although I agree that's what happens, I don't see how it fits with his big hug with the ignored family man. Don's been a shitty human being to everyone around him, his family first and foremost. If he's just resolved to that fact, wouldn't his reaction to that guy been a lot more indifferent? If not, wouldn't it have driven Don to change?
Would've made more sense to me if Don had smacked the guy, returned to NYC, accepted who he was and went back to the old Don Draper.
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In comment 12290946 RB^2 said:
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Would have also made sense if occasionally over the last 5 years, the Whitman/Draper guilt trip had actually reared its ugly head so as to be resolved in the finale.
But that's the thing; it was ALWAYS there. It didn't need to "rear its ugly head", because it was one of the basic tenets of who Don was, what he was struggling with - his identity. It's why he cuts/runs when things get tough, why he's a (borderline) alcoholic; he's trying to forget, but at the same time always worried it would catch up to him. But now he has embraced it head on, and shed it completely.
He is Don Draper.
"The last shot will be Don at Big Sur, staring out at the ocean."
Link - ( New Window )
Think back to the Carousel Kodak commercial where he showed all the pictures of his family from the wedding to the children growing up. Think back to his last visit with Anna Draper and the things that were said. He tells her that her annoying sister is still family and that "not everyone has that". She mentions though "he has his children and she bets that's better" and he says how "that's different".
As Don he rejected Dick and what little semblance of family he had of the Whitman's. Never getting past being a fraud he never allowed himself that as Don other than with Anna and the connection he felt with her family. (which was soundly rejected at the end with the niece)
In that last visit when he told Anna about telling Betty "everything" he said that the moment he did he could tell she would never look as him the same way and that was why he had never told her. He never allowed himself to truly feel that Don's family was his family the way a person normally would. Remember one of Sally's early birthday parties when he went to pick up the cake and then simply couldn't return with it and drove off? The guy was a mess and family had a lot to do with it.
I don't think the finale episode tells us if he ends up a good father or eventually a good husband or not but I do think it tells us that he will allow himself to embrace his (Don's) family where he couldn't do so prior to this.
As stated earlier he embraced his "new me (Don)". In the blink of an eye I went from WTF is this? To WOW!
That commercial touched another nostalgic nerve for me and wrapped the show up beautifully. And we know he had that Carousel moment in the board room, we just don't get to see it.
Does he become Daddy Draper? We don't know, but he does become, once and for all Don Draper... Mad-Man.
The entire show features him relapsing into his old formula constantly. It's a constant cycle.
I didn't see anything in the last episode that makes me think that just because he hit a new low at the retreat that he became a changed man. Did he really accept anything about himself, or are we just assuming that?
The only thing I saw is that all his old ties are finally gone from his life. Anna made it clear he wasn't family, Betty is dead. He still has his kids, but he only gave lip service to actually caring about them. He never sees them.
The thing the guy was saying before he broke down was that maybe his family loved him, or tried. But, he didn't even know what that meant.
I think he's saying that he's been pining for something but he realizes he didn't know what it was or what it would look like if he had it. HE didn't know what love was, so he can't get it from others because the void is in him.
I think this speaks to Don/Dick. Based on his Fed up childhood, he doesn't know what love really is, so he's searching for something but the emptiness is in him so that's why the emptiness follows him through relationships, flings, and across continents.
Then I go home and I watch my wife and my kids - they don't look up when I sit down. It's like no one cares that I'm gone. They should love me, maybe they do, but, I don't even know what it is.
You spend your whole life thinking you're not getting it, people aren't giving it to you. Then you realize they're trying, and you don't even know what IT is.
I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off, and i know everybody's out there eating. And then they open the door, and you see them smiling. They're happy to see you. But maybe they don't look right at you, and maybe they don't pick you.
Then the door closes again. The light goes off.
Notwithstanding the direction of the finale, I thought it was a beautiful piece of dialogue that captured some of the feelings of depression tremendously well. The wanting to be loved and wanting happiness being described an item on a shelf in the dark that wants to be chosen when the refrigerator door is opened was the perfect metaphor for the show to conclude with the "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" commercial.
Do you have an interpretation of it?
A.
I do. When we find Don in that place, and this stranger relates this story of not being heard or seen or understood or appreciated, the resonance for Don was total in that moment. There was a void staring at him. We see him in an incredibly vulnerable place, surrounded by strangers, and he reaches out to the only person he can at that moment, and it’s this stranger.
My take is that, the next day, he wakes up in this beautiful place, and has this serene moment of understanding, and realizes who he is. And who he is, is an advertising man. And so, this thing comes to him. There’s a way to see it in a completely cynical way, and say, “Wow, that’s awful.” But I think that for Don, it represents some kind of understanding and comfort in this incredibly unquiet, uncomfortable life that he has led. There was a little bit of a crumb dropped earlier in the season when Ted says there are three women in every man’s life, and Don says, “You’ve been sitting on that for a while, huh?” There are, not coincidentally, three person to person phone calls that Don makes in this episode, to three women who are important to him for different reasons. You see the slow degeneration of his relationships with those women over the course of those phone calls.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/mad-men-finale-jon-hamm-interview/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Arts&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body&_r=0 - ( New Window )
More seriously, also from a John Hamm interview:
I liked the Joan part of the ending particularly. She had an interesting new boyfriend, but he seemed to only want her on his terms. Joan came of as wistful, but not devastated.
As far as the rest of what Hamm described above, it pretty much comes down to Wiener's decision to leave an awful lot open-ended--like life, not like a movie or TV show with a complete arc that ends in a comprehensive conclusion. I like that, at the same time as it frustrates me. Living with a character like Peggy for so long, I wanted some more of an idea as to where she was headed.
When Don hugs that guy, it's the first time he actually behaves in an empathetic way in response to someone else's neediness. It's the first time he moves towards someone's neediness...embracing it and bringing comfort to is.
Also, that guy he hugs might as well have been Don's own empty invisible core staring right back at him. Don finally looked into the gaping void at the center of his very being and embraced it. He stopped being ashamed of his own neediness. Don finally had compassion for his own pain at being rejected, unseen and unloved...and wanting love.
So he finally reached out and hugged someone. He really hugged himself. The earlier, unevolved Don would have regarded that guy in the group as a whiny pussy and told him to snap out of it.
Once he embraced the guy/himself, he could then embrace everyone else in his life. I don't think it's fair to say that Don didn't care about his kids. It's just that if he could not relate to himself in an authentic way, he could not relate to his kids or anyone else, for that matter, in an authentic way.
Don always gave off glimmers of actually being cool...like when he was taking photographs while hanging out with Midge and her Village hipsters... Or when Betty was being a cruel, horse's ass about their kids, wanting to punish the children, particularly Bobby, for being a kid, Don didn't see the sense it that. He was much more accepting, less rigid, than Betty.
When Betty talked about how horrible it would be if Sally got a scar on her face, Don's reaction and expression indicated that he just couldn't relate to this bullshit societal convention. It's what enabled him to mentor Peggy, who, while cute, let's face it, is pretty average in the looks department. Peggy spends the latter half of the first (second?) season being somewhat "fat" but successful in her career.
There were glimmers that an authentic Don would be an amazing fellow.... And it's not ONLY that he produces one of the greatest ads of all time. What *that* indicates is that while he was emptying out, rejecting rejecting rejecting himself, his creativity was SHOT. He SUCKED as a Mad Man.
Footsteps in the sand, leading into the sea? Come to Hawaii and kill yourself?
Remember the German researcher who talked about Freud's Death Wish in the first episode of the first season? Back then, Don knew that an angle like that would be Dead on Arrival with the clients. He wasn't wrong about that when he seemed to forget himself and presented that morbid Hawaii campaign and SHAT the bed.
I would have really liked to have seen what Don became capable of beyond his ad work. I suspect he would have been a marvelous photographer, like my Dad was, and a wonderful artist for the sheer love of it, as my Dad could have been.
I really missed my Dad during this series. There is SO MUCH he would have related to and so much that would have challenged him.
I read interviews with Weiner where he mentions this ad and while the client shot it down in mad men .. it is actually a brilliant ad and ahead of it's time . (In the mad men universe) .
His point was Don is an amazingly talented creative director .. even when He was losing it in his personal life .
the other interesting thing about finale is that Don was never a touchy feely person , unless it involved sex or if he was drunk
so the fact that he hugged a complete stranger after he told this story
signified the break thru don made
all of the characters on their journeys experienced both success and sorrow, to varying degrees.
I think one day down the road when I have more time I would like to re-watch the entire series and re-read all of the great TIME and Grantland essays about the show. there are so many different themes, metaphors, historical periods, literary references, etc.
I disagree - I think his reaction was well established. He's retired and wants to have a life of travel and leisure. Finding out she had a small kid was nearly a deal breaker for him. Finding out she's starting a company and will have no time to spend with him was too much.
And there was a point to it: it was to show that Joan had grown to where she wasn't going to let her desires take a back seat for a man.