'Mad Men's' Weiner: Finale Looks at Life You Want to Live

"Tomorrowland is about who you want to be," that's what Mad Men creator/writer Matthew Weiner said about the season four finale. The episode, Weiner said, was about "what are you going to make of your life."

In the case of Don, that would be the same mistake Roger Sterling made, at least in my opinion.

Jon Hamm offered some insightful commentary in the AMC video above, about the fact that Don is starting a relationship with someone who doesn't really know much about him smacks of Don and Betty 2.0.

Of all the interviews in the video, I agree with Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson) the most.

What did you think of Weiner's assertion that the finale was about what you want to make of your life?

'Mad Men' Finale -- Tomorrowland

Image credit: AMC

*Warning: Spoilers ahead from the season finale of Mad Men.*

I’m very annoyed with Matthew Weiner right about now. And after the jump I'll tell you why. (I'm putting the jump in to avoid spoiling the episode for the late-watchers.)

'Mad Men' -- Blowing Smoke

Image credit: AMC

*Warning – Spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Mad Men.*

Addiction. Addiction to tobacco. Addiction to heroin. Addiction to lies, to false facades, to impulsive actions, to getting involved with the wrong people. Mad Men was awash in bad-for-you addiction in its second-to-last season four episode and not just Don “I’m falling off the wagon” Draper.

First of all, seeing Midge return was a surprise and kind of refreshing, until of course we saw the sorry state into which her life has fallen, courtesy of her addiction to heroin as she and her husband offered to prostitute herself for the sake of more money for the next score.

While he himself had hired prostitutes in the last year to feed his addiction to his self-loathing, Don surveyed the wreckage that is Midge’s life and was stunned. It was impossible not to think of his life. During the last episode he slept with his secretary, jeopardizing his budding, healthy relationship with Faye. He’s started drinking again and his company’s on the brink.

But Don attempted to redeem himself for some of his bad behavior, paid Pete’s portion of the mandated partner contributions in order to keep the company afloat, a nod to Pete’s discretion when it came to the Dick Whitman matter.

Don also sought to cleanse himself of his company’s “addiction” to Lucky Strike -- the loss of which could wind up destroying Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce -- by unilaterally composing and then purchasing a full-page ad in the New York Times telling the world, “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco” and vowed that the agency wouldn’t accept tobacco companies as clients any longer. (Don was shown swimming as you heard his voice-over reading his open letter. Water and cleansing . . . which led to a scene where Don come face to face with Megan.)

Don experienced a Jerry Maguire moment of sorts, although Don’s open letter wasn’t a heartfelt opus, ‘twas but a mere marketing ploy to save his sinking agency. (Loved Peggy’s wry smile when she called Don out on the fact that this was a stunt as much as Peggy’s staged mall over the ham in the market was.)



Bert’s response to Don’s stunningly narcissist act – “We’ve created a monster” – was an equally stunning one, quitting. Certainly Bert isn’t really gone, he can’t be, can he?

Maybe he really can be, given what Robert Morse, who plays Bert Cooper, told AMC’s Mad Men blogger that:

"You never know with Matt [Weiner] what is going to happen, and you never know what the future will bring, whether I'll be going to the unemployment line looking for another job or whether I'll be coming back or anything. So all I do is pick up my shoes and say good-bye to everybody and I'm out of the office. What happens next year I don't know. I hope I get a phone call. I think it's the best show in the world. . . Maybe we'll have to get a thing going: bring Robert Morse back.”

Meanwhile, back in the awkward, uncomfortable and emotionally withholding Francis home, Sally had been sneaking around and hanging out with creepy Glen – the one who ransacked the house for Sally earlier in the season -- though it should be noted that Sally took a pass on his offer of cigarettes, unlike in season two when Sally stole Betty’s cigarettes and, when Betty found her smoking, shoved her in a closet. Sally’s truly the product of the duplicitous Betty and Don, telling her therapist that Betty doesn’t really care how Sally feels because Betty just wants compliance.

About Betty . . . the fact that once she realized Sally was hanging out with Glen – a haunted kind of boy who’d previously show an interest in Betty in season two, when Betty dressed him in one of Don's T-shirts and watched cartoons with him – was what prompted Betty to announce that they’d be moving out of the house, when her own husband’s pleas fell on deaf ears, is disturbing. On so many levels.

All of this, plus laying off Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce employees, made me wonder: How will this play in the season finale next week, called, “Tomorrowland?” The AMC Mad Men web site only says this of the season finale: “Opportunity arises for Don and Peggy.”

If you had the ear of the Mad Men writers, what would you hope to see in the season four finale?

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

'Mad Men' -- The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

*Warning – Spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Mad Men.*

After this episode concluded, the first thing I asked my husband, with whom I was watching it, was, “What would we do if we walked in on that?” That, of course, was the most shocking scene of the episode (other than Betty’s face-slapping of Sally after the 10-year-old had impulsively cut her hair), the one where Sally acted like a normal, curious kid, except that she picked the wrong venue in which she should've, shall we say, explored.

What happened next was an unfortunate overreaction on the part of Sally’s friend’s mother: Bringing Sally home and shaming her, but I suppose that’s probably what would’ve happened in 1965. (Betty then storming into Sally's room and threatening to cut Sally’s fingers off as the penalty for lying and for her "transgression" . . . Mother. Of. The. Freakin'. Year.)

Betty is becoming so harsh in her treatment of Sally that it's growing more difficult to sit through these mother-daughter scenes, particularly when Betty thinks that everything Sally does is in some way directed at her, as opposed to Sally's way of crying out for help. Sally’s humanity, her imperfections, seem to gall Betty, like they're an affront to Betty's vision of the perfect suburban family and must be eliminated, or ignored, no matter the cost. So cold is Betty toward Sally that she didn’t even accompany Sally to the psychiatrist’s office; she had Carla bring her instead. (As Dr. Edna said, I think it’s Betty who needs the therapy more than Sally.)

Sally has been practically invisible to Betty for so long. Sure, Betty was able to tell the child psychologist that Sally took the death of her grandfather especially hard, but Betty never really helped Sally get through all of that grief. Weeks later, when Sally's little brother was born and there was that whole naming-the-baby-Gene-and-sleeping-in-dead-Grandpa Gene’s-room which thoroughly freaked Sally out, Betty was largely oblivious to her daughter’s pain.

To lighten up the mood last night, I enjoyed the delightfully caper-ish storyline where the folks from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce completely played the rival advertising agency that’s been snapping up some of SCDP’s accounts, making the competition think that SCDP was cutting a high-priced TV ad for the Honda pitch. Notwithstanding Roger’s attempts to fatally sabotage the Honda account – because he fought the Japanese in World War II and still considered them the enemy – SCDP’s subterfuge and appeal to the Honda people’s code of honor won out in the end. Though SCDP didn't get the account, at least Don got the competition to shell out major bucks to try to win it, hobbling their future ability to make pitches for other clients.

Over the course of the past two episodes, is it possible that Don’s confrontation with Allison in “The Rejected” -- where Allison quit and called Don a mean person – was a catalyst of sorts to get him to right his ship and (hopefully) put an end to the sad, mean, drunken divorce guy who pays for sex routine? He hasn't seemed his old charming, dapper self in quite some time. (In last night's episode, he was, once again, seeing Bethany, who’s potentially a mate, not just a bed partner, though I still think she’s a younger version of Betty.)Throw in the surprisingly open chat Don had with Faye in the break room, where he uttered a massive understatement (“It is not going well.”) and confessed that his daughter was going to start seeing a psychiatrist and that he misses his children when they’re not around and yet when he drops them off at his old house he's relieved, and I'm wondering if we're seeing Don gradually turn the corner.

A moment of levity from last week: Seeing Peggy’s head appear in the glass part of the wall between her office and Don's, peering into the room to see what was going on after Allison heaved a paperweight at Don and broke some glass made me laugh out loud.

Another observation from last week: The way in which the news of Trudy’s pregnancy played out between Pete and Peggy was delicate and awkward and real as they silently acknowledged that this won’t be Pete’s first child. That look they exchanged at the end of the episode . . . priceless.

Speaking of Peggy, that Life Magazine gal who invited Peggy to the party, Joyce . . . that situation didn’t go the way that I expected. I was greatly impressed that Peggy didn’t flip out over Joyce’s sexual overture like the way Joan did with her roommate in season one. But then again, most of these episodes have been surprising me lately. I never know what to expect, anything from Lane Pryce wearing a steak belt buckle and heckling a movie, to Roger Sterling playing Santa Claus and Betty's house getting trashed in a home invasion.

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

'Mad Men' -- Christmas Comes But Once a Year

*Warning, spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Mad Men.*

After watching last night’s episode of Mad Men, I had to wonder whether or not the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd had screened an advance copy, what with her column comparing Don Draper to Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s that ran in yesterday's paper. Dowd wrote:

“Even though many of us grew up not realizing it, Holly’s a hooker. And in the new season of AMC’s Mad Men, which started last Sunday, Don hires a hooker and wants to be slapped . . . In Mad Men, the single Richard Whitman from Pennsylvania coal country morphs into the married Don Draper after an accident in the Korean War. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the married Lulamae Barnes morphs into the single Holly Golightly to get out of the backwater Tulip, Tex.”

Dowd's column was fresh in my mind as I watched Don Draper – now openly, widely pitied in his office (called "pathetic") for going home drunk and alone to his dark apartment alone every night (so drunk that his neighbor Phoebe often hears him drop his keys and one night helped pour him into his bed and remove his shoes) – have sex with his stunned secretary Allison on his sofa after she left the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Christmas party to bring his apartment keys to him because he’d accidentally left them behind.

It was a painful scene, watching Don looking (*gasp*) ugly as he slobbered all over the wide-eyed Allison, taking advantage of her, similar to the way he tried to pull Phoebe down on top of him, only Phoebe is not employed by Don and she's not as naive as Allison. Even worse was the scene the following day in the office, when Don didn’t actually acknowledge the reason why Allison was smiling so broadly and instead handed her an envelope – her Christmas bonus – with two $50 bills, cash, inside the card which felt, at least surficially, as though Allison had been paid for services rendered . . . complete services, everything from buying Don’s kids’ Christmas gifts (and wrapping them), fetching him ice and aspirin, to satisfying his drunken sexual needs. Don became THAT guy in this episode, the one who sleeps with his secretary and then acts like it never happened.

It seemed as though a number of people in the episode were, in some ways, prostituting themselves, or trying to bend others to their will by giving them favors and expecting a return on their investment.

There was Peggy’s baby-faced boyfriend Mark who handed her a pathetic plate of cookies -- that he didn’t even make, just stole from work – and expected that the presence of ill-gotten confections would somehow make Peggy fall onto the ground and let him have his way with her. Mark – “We’re not doing anything I can’t do myself” -- actually said, “I brought you cookies!” He tried all these high-pressure tactics to try to persuade Peggy to sleep with him, including bogusly claiming that Swedish folks “make love the minute they feel attracted.” (“You’re never going to get me to do anything Swedish people do,” Peggy replied humorously.)

“If Lee Garner Jr. wants three wise men flown in from Jerusalem, he gets it,” Roger Sterling said.

Lee Garner Jr. knows that he’s one of SCDP’s biggest clients, therefore everyone, particularly Roger, has to do what he wants (including firing Sal Romano) lest, as Don said last season, Lee would shut out the company’s lights. After a drunken Roger made of mess of things during a telephone call with Lee, Roger wound up telling Lane that they had to have a big Christmas party – despite the fact that they don’t have the money to do so – because that’s what Lee wanted. That’s why Lee can and does order Roger around. That's why Roger donned a Santa suit and let Lee take photos of him as Lee ordered various employees to sit on Roger’s lap. That's why Roger allowed Lee to taunt him, by telling him to be careful with Santa’s sack. “Don’t want you to have a third heart attack,” Lee said as he put his arm around the sparkly Jane.

Meanwhile, Glen “Stanley” Bishop was trying to send a signal to Sally – who told him she hates where she’s living, what with always half expecting her father to be around every corner – that he’ll do . . . whatever, to get into Sally's good graces, including risking getting caught trashing the house that she hates by chucking food everywhere and making a general mess (raw eggs in Bobby’s bed!) all except for Sally’s bed, where he left a tell-tale calling card to let her know that he was looking out for her. And given this creepy walk-in-on-you-in-the-bathroom-ask-for-a-lock-of-Betty’s-hair kid’s history – particularly in season two when he told Betty, during her first separation from Don, that he’d protect her – you just know that this unbalanced boy is going to come around looking for payment from Sally at some point.

Top it all off with Don, literally fleeing the room when a survey is being conducted by consumer research professionals who want SCDP to use their services because of the “level of intimacy” required in order to participate (questions about one’s feelings about one’s father, for example), Don seems as though he’s trying to distance himself from true emotional contact with anyone to try to make sure no one gets inside of him because he’s already in pretty crappy shape, self-medicating with booze. Things like receiving that letter from Sally saying what she’d really like for Christmas is for Don to be there on Christmas morning to give her her gift in person, though she knows that’s not possible, are like scratching at a still-bleeding internal wound about which he’s doing nothing to staunch the blood. When you throw in the scene from last week, where Don hired a call girl and asked her to slap him around while they were having relations, Don is in a very, very bad place right now.

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.