#don draper
“When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him.”
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‘Mad Men’ Series Finale Recap: Does Don Draper Find Happiness?
The series finale of Mad Men, “Person to Person,” is everything you would expect from this show after watching for seven seasons: inspiring, romantic, depressing, strange, uplifting and, ultimately, kind of cynical. Don Draper finds enlightenment … and uses it to sell the world a Coke
Read the full recap on BuddyTV Here!!
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Mad Men Season in Review: Have We Seen This Before?
In part one of the final season of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano tries to turn over a new leaf and become a better person, only to revert back to his prior terrible ways by the show’s conclusion.
In season four of The Wire, Jimmy McNulty tries to shy away from his obsessive, self-destructive path and settle down a bit. But as he steps back into his regular routine in season five, the old McNulty returns.
Now season five of Mad Men ends with Don Draper sitting at a bar, facing the temptation of two beautiful strangers as a seemingly inevitable “yes” to their proposition sits behind his lips, right next to his newly repaired rotten tooth. After a season of Don avoiding the sexual allure of high class escorts, Rolling Stones fans and Joan in an attempt at pious reinvention, I ask: Haven’t we seen this routine play out before?
In this golden age of television that kicked off at the turn of the century, there are four dramas that are largely cemented in their status as the top tier: The Sopranos,The Wire,Mad MenandBreaking Bad. There are shows like The ShieldorHomeland that have tried to breach the pack, but so far those shows stand solidly ahead of anything else.
But other than quality, one notable aspect that groups these shows together is that they all center themselves on the same concept: The American Dream. They all deal with an amoral anti-hero (or in the case of The Wire, a whole mess of amoral anti-heroes) trying to rise or having risen from meager circumstances to get what they feel society has to offer them, and how they corrupted themselves in the process of achieving that dream.
It’s rather shocking that what are coming to be considered the greatest efforts of American television have such narrative uniformity. And it seems that with that uniformity, this recurring aspect of “anti-hero seeks redemption but then reverts back to his old ways” has become a trope that sees endless repetition.
After last week’s episode, I wrote that Don was now and forever would be a different character. And I still think that’s true. His visions of his dead brother Adam only lend credence to that theory, particularly the unfortunately heavy-handed final appearance at the dentist’s office. But the fact that he is now a different character doesn’t mean his actions will necessarily change. It appears Mad Men is going to go down a road of echoes as it enters its last seasons. New Don will likely go through all the motions we saw in seasons one through three, if the napalm-fueled fire from his meeting with Dow is any indication. But it’s going to be a much more self-aware version of Don, a more nihilistic Don. It will be a Don that knows he is a hollow, empty shell without substance.
If Tony Soprano and Jimmy McNulty are any indication (or for that matter, Avon Barksdale, Omar Little, Tommy Carcetti and others), embracing the worst aspects of himself seems to be the only way for a high-class drama lead to go. But on the bright side, it could be worse for Don. Just ask the gaping wound that will be working directly above him next season, Peter Campbell.
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The Old Don Draper Is Officially Gone
**Massive spoilers follow for last night’s episode of Mad Men**
In psychology there is a concept called the locus of control. The idea refers to one’s perception over their ability to influence their own fate. A person’s locus can lean toward the internal, meaning the person feels they have control over their own life, or external, meaning the person feels largely controlled by the world around them. Generally, it’s better to have an internal locus of control than an external one. But there are certain situations where that isn’t the case.
Chief among those situations is when somebody does something terrible in reaction to your words. It doesn’t matter if those words were completely justified. It doesn’t matter if the person brought the repercussions upon themselves. It doesn’t even matter if the incident would have happened even without intervention. Just knowing that you were involved, knowing that somewhere in that web of awful, fucked up misery there is a string with your name on it is enough to generate the kind of guilt that irreparably degrades your soul.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that the Don Draper we see from now on will not be the Don Draper we have seen for the last five years. The suicide of Lane Pryce, and the fact that it directly followed his dismissal by Don, isn’t something that will be fixed by Don’s normal strategy of forgetting it ever happened. This is Don’s most defining moment since he pulled those dog tags off the real Don Draper’s corpse, and considerably more impactful than the death of his half-brother, who he had long since cut out of his life.
It has nothing to do with whether Don deserves this. By any reasonable evaluation, he doesn’t deserve any blame at all. He was entirely in the right in asking for Lane’s dismissal. And Lane had been in a downward spiral for quite some time without any interference from Don. But going forward that’s irrelevant, because the character of Don Draper is all about control. The ability to control his image, control his life trajectory, to gain as much control over his domain as he possibly can. And now he either needs to admit that he has no control over the world or that his actions, however inocuous, led to the death of a genuinely decent human being.
All that matters is that Don will now forever be haunted by the ghost of a sad, pitiable Englishman. And every episode of Mad Men will be haunted along with him.
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