#lane pryce

Who will you need when you’ve finally come undone?

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.