TV and radio blogMad MenMad Men: season five finale, episode 13 – The Phantom
Mad Men's fifth season came to a close with Don Draper back on the Old Fashioneds. What did you make of the season finale and this series as a whole?SPOILER ALERT: This blog is for those who are watching season five of Mad Men on Sky Atlantic. Don't read on if you haven't seen episode 13
Paul MacInnes's episode 12 blog
Let's begin at the end. The languourous final montage is a staple of glossy American dramas, allowing us one last glimpse of our favourite characters and a chance to speculate on what will become of them before we next see them. (In the case of the Sopranos, that was usually "take a lurch closer to death").
So, as the curtain falls on this series of Mad Men we see Roger Sterling standing in the window of his hotel room, embracing the rays of the sun as many hippies would soon be doing, naked. Peggy is in Virginia, on her big new tobacco account, drinking alone and bemusedly watching two dogs screwing. (I would say it's a symbolic reflection of the dog eat dog world of Madison Avenue, but I wouldn't want the image to linger in your minds). Pete Campbell is at home doing his best Lives of Others impression in his cutting edge headphones. Don Draper? He's drinking Old Fashioneds in a bar.
I vaguely recall that Don Draper used to drink Old Fashioneds quite a lot. And get hit on by glamorous blondes, shortly before returning the favour. There hasn't been much of that this season, what with Don being happily married to sophisticated modern woman Megan. In this final hour, however, we see Megan in a new light; one that suggests that maybe all the behaviour that annoyed the viewers wasn't entirely unintentional.
When faced with the choice between the long, hard road of the artist and a cossetted path to fame (via a Butler's commercial) Megan chooses the latter. What's more, she asks her man to fix it for her. This is no longer the woman who can do it all, who so beguiled Don during the Heinz pitch. This is a spoilt child for whom gratification is more important than satisfaction. Don, I think we're invited to conclude, does not consider this to be a pleasant revelation. He'll give her what she wants, but take back parts of himself at the same time. There will be secrets again, and there will be infidelity.
As I wrote after earlier episodes, Don's dark side is not without its allure for him. His brooding, fatalistic jags often stimulate his best work – and on another, cruder note, if there is an emotional distance between Don and his wife, then he's less likely to feel guilty about shagging around. It could be that this is a result of a tension between Don's two identities – the soundtrack to this montage is the theme tune to You Only Live Twice – but it's also a conflict that many humans might identify with. They can aspire to being a moral, family man (or woman!) and yet feel stimulated by baser, more selfish desires. In this episode we see Don both set about doing his best by Lane's family and decide his wife isn't worth the candle; it's this tension that makes him such a great dramatic character.
[Kudos to all of you who predicted that Lane's suicide would cause Don to reflect on the death of Dick's half-brother Adam. This week he reappears as a ghost, complete with contusions on his neck. I think you know how I feel about these fantastical elements being dropped in the show, but I certainly found the encounter in the dentist's surgery to be distinctly creepy]
****
For all of Don's pre-eminence in Mad Men, this season has, at least in part, belonged to Pete Campbell. His actions throughout – half tyrannical, half tantrum – have seen him assume an ever greater importance within Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce as well as forcing his domestic life to the point we always knew it would reach; that of semi-detachment. As Pete sits there in his cans, we might wonder what he is contemplating: the next big client, the contents of his pied a terre; his tryst with Beth Dawes or, could it be, the big black void where his soul should be?
There were three central scenes featuring Pete this week, all of them magnificently played by Vincent Kartheiser. The way he shifts his countenance during the hotel room assignation with Beth is perhaps the most impressive, switching from fury to (hilarious) piety to sympathy as he learns of Beth's planned Electroconvulsive Therapy. A bit like being Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas, a man who gets to touch the ball so rarely that his biggest enemy is losing concentration, the chance to portray a genuine winning human emotion comes rarely to Kartheiser as Pete, but he pulled it off with aplomb.
I also found the scene where Pete reveals his existential ardours to an ECT-dazed Beth to be well done. Others have not (perhaps a reflection on how divisive this season has proven amongst fans). But Pete's behaviour being the result of self-loathing is certainly more comfortable an idea than it being something borne of simple ambition.
The scene I loved most though was Pete's altercation with Howard Dawes in the train carriage and subsequent biffing by the guard. For me, Pete and Peggy are Mad Men's nod to the future. Peggy, quite obviously, is a trailblazer for subsequent generations of professional women and an embodiment of (some of) the aspirations of feminism. Pete, meanwhile, prefigures the advent of the atomised, consumer culture in which we live now (ie the man in his headphones blocking out the world around). Pete's scrap on the train starts out as something traditional; a man trying to defend the honour of a woman. But it ends as something else; a man attempting to assert his control over someone he believes to owe him his due.
In breaking up the brawl, the conductor asserts an old, patriarchal role, claiming his patch. "Oh, it's your train!" spits back Pete. "You're paying to ride on it? We're paying YOU to ride on it." That's the attitude of the late 20th century right there. We pay your wages mate. Of course, the irony is that post-war Pete is speaking to a man of the Greatest Generation, who just turns and lamps young Campbell out.
Peggy Olsen ends the episode in Virginia, stuck in the backwoods but quietly content. This may be because, as we see when she first appears, Peggy is now in a position of real authority where she can boss people with impunity: "Why is this so hard? It has to be 125 words and 15 of them have to be Ajax!" It may also be because her new, slightly uncomfortable polo-neck wearing boss, Ted Chaough, is nowhere to be seen.
Where will Peggy go from here? One suspects that, for the sake of the drama, she will continue to go upwards (either that or out). She will make a success of her tobacco account – Philip Morris's Virginia Slims were launched in realtime 1968 with their tagline, You've Come a Long Way, Baby perceived to be one of the more evocative phrases of the age. She may return to SCDP in triumph or become Don's most unexpected rival. Topaz comment on how much they value a woman's insight into women's products, something no one gave a fig about even five years previous. That trend is hardly likely to change.
You do wonder, though, how long it will be before the conflicts that all professional women have to face, the dilemmas around career and family, will start to weigh on Peggy. That and the potential problems caused by her burgeoning appetite for alcohol. Still, right now, it seems Peggy is happy and alive. Long may that continue.
This week's notes
Both Homeland and Mad Men have ended their seasons with women undergoing ECT. Coincidence or something more? And, as three is a trend, will Breaking Bad's Skyler get it too?
Those SCDP directors really do love walking like the Rat Pack. First the Jaguar presentation, now walking into their new office space, They should have themselves a team bonding trip to Vegas.
I don't have much time for Megan's mum (eez there heny moar stereotypical characterrr een zees show?) but I like what she says to Roger just as he lets his vulnerability show: "Roger please don't ask me for anything, please don't ask me to take care of you".
I can't decide regarding Matt Weiner's attitudes towards Brits. On the one hand – as seen through the actions of Lane and here Mrs Pryce – we're stoic and principled. On the other there's some massive overwhelming coldness that can allow a widow to say: "You had no right to fill a man like that with ambition"
Culture club
Don and Peggy are watching Casino Royale, the first non-Broccolli-approved Bond and, alongside, You Only Live Twice, one of two 007 films that year.
Time Stamps
"I heard the parachute company upstairs got a big contract and went to Washington to be closer to the cemetery or something?" – Harry Crane may be typically clueless, but the war in Vietnam is only growing.
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