Mad Men – Season 7, Episode 14 – Phone Calls 1

At first, the finale annoyed me. But I rethought it, and before I start reading other recaps, I’ll toss out a few thoughts.

As you’re all probably tired of reading by now, I have never found Don’s secrets nearly as fascinating as show creator Matthew Weiner, who wrote and directed the episode. Don’s road trip across the country has started to seem like what Jules, Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction, imagined himself doing after he quit being a hired killer when he said he would “walk the earth.” Don keeps dumping possessions, starting before he left New York City, and seems determined to leave Don Draper behind, to the point where he was giving away his car to a stranger who did him a bad turn in the last episode.

But one of the things that bothered me about his walkabout – that he had familial responsibilities he was blowing off – was actually addressed rather pointedly.  Sally finally can’t stand listening about her father’s adventures anymore and tells him Betty is dying. She didn’t want him to know, and has made arrangements for her brothers to live with her brother and sister-in-law. Sally tells him this because she wants him to persuade Betty to convince her to let them stay with Henry and keep some stability in their lives – same house, same schools. While Don initially says he will come home and that he will care for the boys, Sally says she has thought about the issue a lot more than him. Don says adults decide such things. But who’s the adult in the conversation? It’s not him. (It is Sally, later in the episode, who is dealing with the crummy reality of the situation, and dropping the planned trip to Spain to deal with her family.)

In Don’s first person-to-person call of the episode, to Betty, Don is upset but also insistent that he should take care of the boys. Betty shuts him down. The boys need a woman in their lives, and he needs to keep his distance, even after she’s dead. That will create less disruption for them. Don isn’t in a great position to debate a dying woman, and her icy argument – that Don hardly ever sees the boys anyway – is absolutely correct. He’s wandering the country, acting like an idiot. He may love his kids, but he’s no responsible father – and the show has rarely shown him even in the same room with his sons. Sally is another matter, of course, but she’s at boarding school. I was pleased to see the show address one of my longstanding gripes. And the truth is that some kids don’t end up living with their father when their mother dies, especially when the parents are divorced. None of this makes Don evil, but he just didn’t have the moral authority to claim the kids had to live with him, even if he would have a strong legal claim.

And of course, Don doesn’t really want the boys living with him anyway, or to visit a dying Betty. It’s off to California, to see Stephanie and reconnect with his Dick Whitman roots. Things aren’t going well for Stephanie, but she recognizes that it’s worse for him somehow. She convinces him to go on some ’70s hippie retreat that seems rather pricey. After Stephanie splits, leaving him stuck there, he makes a person-to-person call to Peggy, but he doesn’t really have an agenda beyond saying he never said goodbye. Peggy tells him to come back to McCann Erickson, the advertising firm he left. There are hints left that he could return, that people have been welcomed back before. After the call with Peggy, in which he confesses to various sins of comission and omission that she finds understandably baffling, Don seems totally distraught.

The non-Don parts of the final episode wrap things up more tidily than I expected. And those characters get happy, or happy enough, endings. The most interesting story revolves around the women, Peggy and Joan, who have been rivals since the show’s beginning. Joan has had a humiliating year, getting tossed out of the firm and getting involved with a retired developer who wants her to pal around with him and certainly doesn’t want her to start her own business – an option which comes up when Ken (now at Dow) needs help making a short film. Joan, who was happy being an account executive, now sees a chance to be her own boss, and approaches Peggy of all people to be her partner. Joan’s career ambitions end the relationship rather abruptly, but no one really liked that guy anyway. Peggy, meanwhile, is undaunted at McCann, demanding to keep a client (and winning). In a nice scene, the departing Pete (leaving for a job at Lear Jet) tells Peggy she will be a creative director by 1980 – a long time, she moans – but one Pete says will happen eventually as people get used to the idea. She gets a rather abrupt bit of personal happiness when Stan tells her he’s in love with her, and she reciprocates. Stan has always seemed like a decent enough guy, and I liked their professional relationship, but that ending felt a little sudden and neat. (My guess is that the relationship doesn’t last, but that’s because Stan and Peggy are more interesting as work spouses than as actual love interests.) Peggy remains at McCann; Joan starts her own business. Roger marries Megan’s mother after he decides to leave a fair amount of his estate to his and Joan’s child.

Meanwhile, Don gets the drippy final scene, in which he is coaxed to another group therapy session and a sad sack guy talks about being ignored and compares himself to unwanted food in the refrigerator. This moves Don, who probably connects with the idea that nobody really wants him around, and he gives the guy a hug. And then he’s meditating, gets a smile on his face, and we get the famous “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coke ad, which was made around that time. It’s left unclear whether Don came back to McCann to create it, or if it’s all just imagination. If it’s the former, it’s actually a pretty funny ending, as it captures the cynicism at the heart of the advertising business. It’s a “peace and love” ad, a reach-back to the Summer of Love, but packaged to sell a product. Either way, it’s rather cynical, because every emotion – even Don’s apparently authentic sympathy for the guy – is just a way to sell cola. And aside from that, even if Don is the conquering advertising genius who created one of the most famous commercials ever, he’s still a failure beyond that. Sally may love him, and former colleagues miss him, but his lacerating self-assessment is not far off.

I may be giving Weiner a little more credit than he deserves here, as Don’s whole last-episode saga – which mostly involved interactions with characters we have never seen before and don’t care about – was rather stupid much of the time. Jon Hamm acted his heart out, doing better than he usually does when called upon to convey inner anguish, but that didn’t make me like the plot much better. That said, Mad Men was not the sort of show that was logicially leading to a dramatic conclusion. When Weiner tried for a wrapup, as with Peggy’s love life, it seemed like he was trying a little too hard. The heart of Don’s story, for me, was in the phone calls with his daughter, ex-wife, and longtime colleague. That’s what made it work better than it probably deserved.

I have never enjoyed the show quite as much in the late ’60s (and early ’70s). It always felt like Weiner had a story to tell about the early ’60s, just before and in the beginning of the changes that swept the nation, from the perspective of a New York City advertising agency and the people in it. That was its achievement. Mad Men was never an uninteresting show, especially without the violence and typical dramatic crutches on which other quality shows could rely. It just felt less compelling, at least to me, as the years passed. But even to the end, the show could pull out excellent episodes, as it did in several of its final batch. So good for Weiner and everyone involved.