Screen: AMC
Whenever Mad Men returns, it will be for its last season, which is hard to imagine after the one that's just ended, because where can it go from here? In some ways, in fact, this season finale could have almost been a series finale in the ways it squared things away for some in the cast: Roger (John Slattery) and Joan (Christina Hendricks) achieved détente regarding Roger's relationship with their son; Megan (Jessica Paré) is apparently being dispatched to California, along with a few others (Kevin Rahm's Ted; Vincent Kartheiser's Pete) who have good reasons to start new kinds of lives. Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) ended her last scene in bitter frustration, but screwed-over is practically Peggy's resting state this season. Of course, there is one character for whom the future is uncertain: big, dumb Don.
At this point, I feel like we know almost as much about Don (Jon Hamm) and the formative moments that made him what he is as we would if the show had started with his birth -- or with his biological mother's pregnancy, even -- and followed his course through life in chronological order. Early on, we forgave his theft of another soldier's identity because the real Don Draper was dead and didn't need it and even his widow (Melinda Page Hamilton) was pretty cool with it. Then we forgave it some more when we learned the precise nature of the misery Dick Whitman was trying to flee, because that shit was rough. This season has gone further than ever by taking us inside the brothel where Dick grew up and showing us how he may have arrived at some of his more badly warped ideas about women and relationships and sex -- and what specific things he might have started drinking to forget.
But in the time since Dick's terrible youth, Don has managed to arrange a life for himself that is, by most measures, pretty great. He got two nice women to marry him (well, one nicer than the other) who would have had plenty of other options. He has three kids to neglect benevolently in the manner of most fathers of his generation. And above all, he's got a very fancy job that compensates him well for doing work most people he encounters seem to regard as savant-like -- or did regard that way, until last night, when he nailed a pitch (and not even a particularly special one), cracked, and volunteered detail about his sordid past that reflected badly on him and brought disgrace to the agency, so he's out. He asks for a return date; he is not granted one.
Being good at his job was always supposed to be what redemptively papered over Don's many shortcomings as a person, which is why, after a season of successively bottom-er rock bottoms -- getting caught cheating by his daughter (Kiernan Shipka), beating up a minister and spending the night in the drunk tank, jerking his wife around with regard to something as important as whether they are going to continue living in the same state -- fucking up a pitch with excessive candor is finally what causes action to be taken against Don: it's a slip/breakdown he can't possibly take back, and though it's had business consequences that affect all his partners, that it's forced them to change the way they see him may be the worse effect. If Don has become the kind of person who would not just drag his mess into the office but lay it on the boardroom table in front of potential clients, is he still even Don?
Don is not so far gone as the episode ends not to live up to his responsibilities, as he picks up the boys from the Francis manse and Sally from school, ostensibly for Thanksgiving. But he doesn't take them straight back to the Upper East Side; he takes them to Pennsylvania, to the ruined brothel, and tells them it's where he grew up -- presumably the first true thing he's ever told them about his childhood, if he's told them anything at all. This is progress, of a sort, in that even though this sabbatical has been imposed upon him and he'll need to tell some people in his life what has happened, these are just kids, and if he doesn't want to, he can probably get away with not telling them anything. It feels like we're supposed to think this is the first stage of the inevitable integration of Don and Dick -- that getting kicked out of his one safe place is already so cataclysmic that Don is reacting to it immediately and making positive adjustments in his life. But as Linda Holmes points out at Monkey See, Don is good at breakthroughs. (How many times have we seen him get rid of all his booze, as he did last night, and then have "just one" hours later?) In this case, we still don't know what form Don's follow-through will take. If work was always the constant for Don, the thing he could still do after he lost a brother or ruined a marriage or let down a child, then a totally unmoored Don could be an even worse mess than we've seen to this point. Work was the most significant aspect of his Don-ness; we have no evidence that Dick is qualified to lead an adult life.
In the Season 1 finale, we got Don's pitch for Kodak's slide projector, bolstered by old photos of a beautiful life based on a big lie. The story of what Hershey meant to Dick was true -- but Don's life works, inasmuch as it does, because he's surrounded himself with people who value truth as little as he does. He and his colleagues spend their days crafting beautiful lies; his wife pretends to be other people for a living; even the people who know his real name never use it. Despite the crisis that split his life open in the finale, Don seems less likely to re-engineer his whole world to accommodate the truth than to figure out which new lies will get him further.