This season was amazing, so I thought I would share some of
my thoughts about it. For such a quiet, nuanced show, it has the ability to
throw you for a loop. It is a rare episode that I don’t gasp at least once.
Each season has its own theme and this year was the dark side of the American
dream. Working in advertising is appealing to our baser instincts, we always
tire of what we have and crave the new, the bigger, the more exciting. As Don so brilliantly said when he approached
Dow Chemical to try and get their business, “Because
even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary. You’re happy for
now because you’re successful for now. But what is happiness? It’s the moment
before you need more happiness.” It basically compares the illusory happiness
that STUFF gives us with a drug, you always need more of it just to maintain. This
was illustrated most beautifully by the Jaguar campaign that was so integral to
this season around which evolved so many key incidents and the way the car was
compared to a mistress. The whole season was about everyone wanting what they
don’t have and not wanting what they do. I will delve in depth into a few of
the journeys.
The
Ballad of Don and Megan-
Don has been through the ringer this season. At the beginning of the season his marriage to Megan seemed to transform him in a deep way and he was truly happy. He wasn’t interested in cheating on her, she knew all about Dick Whitman, was good with his kids, and was mature and engaged with her feelings. She would not tolerate how Don had been with Betty and he seemed to want nothing more than to rectify the mistakes he had made and be a better husband. But as good as this may seem, it made his work suffer, the one area of his life that he was always KING. Marriage to Don meant that Megan moved from secretary to copywriter, a move which Peggy greeted with not unjustifiable anger. Her struggles to get where she was seemed to just be handed to Don’s chippy and worse, Megan was really good at it. In the end, the life of an ad man was not what she wanted and she quit to pursue her dream of becoming an actor. Don was supportive, if initially unhappy about this as he liked having Megan around the office. Theirs is a relationship that blows hot and cold, and privately they seemed to have a layer of kink thrown in but they seemed perfectly content with it. After Megan left, things started to come unraveled for Don. He purposely sabotaged Ginsberg to make sure his own idea was chosen for an ad campaign instead of letting his idea win on its own merit. His amazing pitch to Jaguar was sullied by Joan’s sacrifice to the company (more on that later), going after the big fish so that the employees wouldn’t have to forge his signature and could have Christmas bonuses, his finding out about Lane then firing him and having the consequences of that on his conscience (again, more on that later). But in the end, after all he had been through the final blow was that the bloom was off the Megan rose and it turned out she had some thorns. When she doesn’t get what she wants, she grows depressed and whiny and is not above stabbing her friends in the back to get it. Her acting career is not coming along as quickly as she likes. As Megan’s visiting mother Marie says to Don when he come home to find his wife drunk and spiteful , “I know it’s hard to watch, but this is what happens when you have an artistic temperament but you are not an artist.” And in her petulant need to get what she wants, she approaches Don to get her a commercial that one of their clients is shooting, a commercial she only knew about from a friend who wanted her to ask Don for her. Don is reluctant as he tells her, “you want to be somebody’s discovery, not somebody’s wife.” In the end, to her it doesn’t matter and Don starts to see her in a new way in that she was just someone’s wife and it didn’t matter to her and he believed it should. I think in a lot of ways, Megan represented for Don something purer than the path that he chose and that drove his love for her and imbued him with a deep admiration for who she was not only as his wife but as a person. Megan's begging Don for the part in the commercial (something that certainly isn’t art and didn’t she consider herself an artist?) shattered that illusion and lowered his opinion of her. Now she was no better than anyone else; no better than Lane or Pete or Don himself. On the commercial set in the final scene, we see Megan in her ridiculous "Beauty" costume so excited for this meaningless gig and that completed the destruction of this false picture he has constructed about who Megan actually was. This, I believe, allowed him to walk away from the fairy tale, quite literally, and into a bar. We don’t know yet it he will succumb and return to his old ways but the signs are there and that smoldering look he used on the beautiful blond who asked for a light is classic Don Draper, philanderer. If Megan is no better than Don, Don no longer has to attempt to live up to her in any way, he is off the hook. When the strains of You Only Live Twice filled the scene, and the montage started it was truly sublime.
