Tomorrowland
Did you catch that ending?
That was as good as television gets. Understated brilliance. And loaded with wonderful symbolism that just seems so natural.
Betty asks Don if he likes her new house.
Don says, "I do."
She asks him if he remembers their old place when they first moved in.
Don says, "I do."
And then a bell rings.
Everything about the scene was contrived. It ought to feel artificial but it doesn't.
I have not read anybody else's commentary yet but I'm sure everyone has to have picked up on the wonderful parallel between the end of this season and the end of last season, both episodes ending with a final shot of Don with a key character for the last shot on what had been an iconic set. (And was there an extra touch of nostalgia this time because this isn't just the end of Don and Betty, it's also the end of Jon and January?)
As we leave the kitchen, it's empty except for a bottle of Canadian Club on the counter.
Megan, Megan, Megan
As I say, I haven't read anyone else on this yet but I will; the second I post this, I'm going to Vulture at New York Magazine and then to Slate and New Republic, Sepinwall and Wall Street Journal. I'm guessing the reviews will be mixed. Why? Because Don does the opposite of what everyone wants him to do. (I'll come back and update this with links to all those after I read them.)
Faye Miller gives him the "good" advice that he deal with his past. And then Don jumps on a plane with his kids and goes to Tomorrowland and, while he's there, he falls madly in love with Megan. I know without looking that people will say he's running away again.
And it doesn't help that Megan is so nakedly ambitious about it. She plays him like a fish on a line and she is a master angler. And it's so old fashioned isn't it? Except that it still happens. She wants a husband. She plays the part of mother to his kids. she is the anti-Betty and we see that perfectly inn the scene where the milkshake is spilled. It doesn't take much imagination to see how Betty would have responded.
Note the touch where Megan calmly asks Don to help her before the milkshake runs off the table onto her dress because she it is the last clean dress she has packed. You could not get further from Betty.
Okay, I'll come out of the closet on this, I think Don does absolutely the right thing in rejecting Faye Miller's option. The notion that we get better by facing our past and sorting out our issues is, as Peggy Olson would put it, bull.
Megan carries the day in this conversation:
Don: You don't know anything about me.Let me bore you with a digression into ethics. All modern, which is to say post-enlightenment, ideas about ethics are deontological. That is to say they are based on the idea of rules defining our duty. It's a simple thing in one sense: you either fulfill your duty or you don't. And because duty is defined in terms of rules, interpreting whether you have done your duty is straightforward because you either followed the rules or you didn't.
Megan: But I do. I knowthat you have a good heart. And I know that you're alwasy trying to be better.
Don; We all try, we don't always make it. I've don a lot of things.
Megan: I know who you are now.
The problem is that any set of rules worth looking up to is impossible to obey. That has been the recurring problem with all ethics since the enlightenment. You either have rules that are so incredibly lax that no one can take them seriously as ethics or you end up with rules that make everyone look like a hypocrite because we all have to make exceptions to them from time to time.
Virtue ethics includes some rules but it's really about trying to be better.
Megan cuts right through deontology in her conversation with Don and also in her behaviour with the kids, She speaks of virtue which is matter of developing character and she demonstrates virtue.
And you will no doubt remember the scene earlier this season when Don asks Faye if she will help with all and how that plays out.
How will it work out?
We all know, listening to Sony and Cher sing the outro, that Sonny and Cher didn't work out so well. We know that the age difference between Don and Megan is significant.
Most of all, we know that Don needs more than a wife.
All this comes out brilliantly in the scene between Peggy and Joan when Peggy goes to discuss the engagement. Joan nails it when she says that Don will no doubt want to make Megan a copywriter and Peggy knows instantly that it must be true. And, you know, she might just manage it. Megan is not stupid.
And she knows about Faye Miller. She and Pete are the only ones who know. In any case, she isn't going into this blind. You can argue that he is. Don is being played. Megan can spot his advertising for what it is instantly but he doesn't see her advertising for what it is.
One of the most delicious bits of acting in the episode is the way John Slattery plays Roger reacting to the news. Because, as we all remember, Don gave Roger major grief about doing more or less the same thing as Don is doing right now. Being Roger, he immediately smooths over the feathers he ruffles but he is not pleased with what he sees.
And Joan also has to see reflections of herself in what is going on here, only she has to notice now that, for all her cynicism, the only real difference between her and Jane and now Megan is that they successfully pulled off what she wanted to do.
Well, on to season 5. I said earlier that I was nervous about this episode. I got a lot more nervous when I heard Faye spouting psychobabble at the beginning. I was worried that the show would abandon all that woinderful virtue for a bunch of therapeutic crap. it didn't and I'm relieved and looking forward to next season.
BTW: Watch this space for some sort of Mad Men replacement to fill the gap between seasons. I'm not absolutely sure what it will be yet but I have some ideas.
I agree with you, I thought it was a brilliant episode. But I think that Megan is absolutely genuine, she's the real deal. I don't think she played him at all. As he says to her when he asked her to marry him, look at all the things that had to happen for us to be here at this moment? Megan didn't cause any of that: Anna's death and going to CA to settle the house, nut-job Betty firing Carla (she apparently was going with Don and the kids to CA until then). He would never have married Faye, a) she's too self-absorbed and b) she can't stand kids. No father with young children--not even Don Draper--would ever marry someone like that, it would be a recipe for disaster and he knew it, and that's when he lost interest in Faye. But, I do think he has taken her advice to get his head out the sand about his past. He's beginning to open up about it. He took the kids to Anna's house knowing Stephanie would be there and could concievably have called him "Dick". And he was honest with his children about who "Dick" was when they saw it written on the wall. He told them as much as they could handle or needed to know at their ages, and that's how it should be done. As they get older he will tell them more as the opportunities present themselves. I think he will tell Megan too, and I think she'll be able to handle it a lot better than Betty did and won't reject him.
ReplyDeleteDon surprised me this episode. He saw how Megan interacted with the kids (probably from that day in the office when she took Sally in her arms) and he reponded positively to that. And she doesn't have the pedigree that Betty has, so the fact that he would consider marrying her is even more encouraging. So I do believe he is beginning to integrate both his past and his present, and maybe beginning to realize and feel more secure that he can be who he really is whether he calls himself Dick Whitman or Don Draper.
I also think the exchange between Joan and Peggy was very telling. I agree that Jane and now Megan accomplished what Joan set out to do. I also think that Peggy's comment "Marriage trumps landing a new account--again" represents the emergence of the woman who chooses career over marriage and the perception at that time of being "less than." In another 10 yrs that would change in the complete opposite direction, until it leveled off in the late '80s and '90s when women who chose to stay at home or chose to have a career were given equal respect.
And you were right, Joan did not go through with the abortion. Someone on another site suggested a few weeks ago that Joan took the money that Roger had given her to have the abortion to pay a surprise visit to Greg at Fort Dix where they had sex.
I enjoyed reading the interview with Jessica Pare on Vulture. She is from Montreal and she does speak French, seems like a sweet girl.
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