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WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED SEASON 7 OF MAD MEN.
Every time I tell someone I watch “Mad Men,” I’m asked the same question: “What is it about?”. I explain it’s set in New York, in the 1960s, and that it’s about the an advertisement agency in Madison Avenue (hence “Mad”). The follow-up question always is “and then, what happens?”, as if something more “exciting” should happen to justify watching the show.
There is no big event that happens: they won’t try to save the world from attacks, they don’t solve crimes, they aren’t fighting for thrones nor are they becoming drug dealers or plotting to become president of the U.S. They are simply living their lives in the 1960s, with the problems and conflicts that arise from a working environment (especially for women). So “Mad Men” is a portrait of that decade (clothes, hairdos, everybody smoking all the time) and it covers the major events that happened (JFK’s death, Dr. Martin Luther King’s death, the beginning of the hippies, etc.).
So the experience of watching this show is different than watching other shows. You have to watch more than one episode for something to “happen” to a character. But that’s more like real life, right? Not every day something exciting happens. This is a “character-driven” show, rather then “action-driven”, which means that all characters are fully developed and extremely complex, with the main character Don Draper (John Hamm) being the most complex one. In seven seasons we learn that he is sort of a legend in his field, because he is very good at his job, but also that he stole someone else’s identity during the Korean War, cheats repeatedly on his wife, has 3 children who he barely sees, gets divorced and remarries (and continues cheating on his new wife), drinks a lot and never seems happy.
Even though I have been watching it for seven seasons, I had no idea what ending Don would have. A few weeks ago I was talking about it with a friend and none of our hypotheses came even closer to what happened on the series finale that aired last Sunday. During season 7 Don was lost again: he gets divorced, his firm is sold and he doesn’t know what to do, so he just walks out of a meeting some day and starts a road trip.
On the series finale, set in 1970, we see that Don’s road trip leads him to California, after he finds out that Betty (January Jones) is dying from lung cancer (I was wondering if the constant smoking would have a consequence to any character…) and wants to leave their children to her brother, to see Stephanie (Caity Lotz), Anna’s niece, and ends up being dragged by her to a spiritual retreat. At first, he doesn’t really embrace the experience. He’s Don, after all. The guy who doesn’t show his feelings that often and who almost never opens up to anybody. Then, something different happens in the last minutes of the episode: he breaks down, calls Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and basically says he has failed in everything in his life. Minutes later, during a group therapy, an unknown man is telling the group how invisible he feels in his own home (his family won’t even look up when he walks into a room). Don stands up, goes to the man and hugs him, crying profusely.
Finally, in the very last scene, we see Don meditating (!) and smiling and the scene is cut to the Coca-Cola ad from 1971: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”. I stared at the screen for a while, wondering what that meant… Were they telling us that Don, went back to New York and ended up making that iconic ad? We don’t know! It’s very likely, but it’s definitely ambiguous. After the show was over I looked for information about the ad online, as probably many others did, and the ad agency that actually made this Coke ad was named McCann Erickson, which is exactly the name of the agency where Don works! So maybe the writers knew all along that they wanted to make this connection.
Meanwhile, in New York, Peggy and Stan (Jay R. Ferguson) finally get together in a sweet and hilarious scene; Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) moves with his family to work for an airline (which is ironic, since his father died in a plane crash); Joan (Christina Hendricks) is dumped by her sexist boyfriend, who refuses to accept that she would work and he would not be her number 1 priority (ah, 1970…); Roger (John Slattery) includes his son with Joan in his will and marries Marie (Julia Ormond); and, the saddest ending of all, Betty is seen smoking in her kitchen, reading a newspaper, while Sally (Kiernan Shipka) does the dishes. So Betty made peace with her faith and went back to the thing that was killing her: the cigarette.
Of course it would be possible to write much more about each ending, especially the women’s, but only a longer and separate article would do this show justice. It really deserves to be properly studied (and I’m pretty sure it’s already being studied somewhere) and watched by everyone.
So, to sum up, even though Don’s ending was the most ambiguous one, I’ll take the interpretation that he is fine, after all. I really thought he would die in the end. But I’ll keep the image of him smiling and pretend that he finally found happiness – while drinking Coca-Cola.
