Don hits bottom but finds freedom.
Can Don Draper ever change? Not change on some surface level – that’s easy. That’s what Don does. He sheds an old name and the troubles it represents as easily as a chameleon changes color. He lies for a living, telling people that Chevy is the future, that owning a Jaguar will fill the hole relationships should fill, that Lucky Strikes aren’t cancerous – they’re toasted. Lying’s easy. He does it every day, building untruth on top of untruth until the house of cards collapses – and then he packs his life up, remakes himself and starts all over again.
Changing the superficial things – and to Don Draper, a name, a family, a history are all superficial – is second nature to this master of reinvention. But can he change the essential things, the things that he carries with him between names no matter how hard he tries to escape them? Can he change the part of himself that makes him need to run, need to lie?
That’s the question that has motivated so much of this fitful, brilliant season – and so much of Mad Men as a whole. Most of the great TV dramas have been about change in one way or another. Breaking Bad comes down firmly on the side that change is possible, that we can choose to embrace our worst (or best) impulses and rush headlong into whatever doom they lead us to. The Sopranos, the closest spiritual ancestor of Mad Men, held the opposite view: that there are certain truths about ourselves too monumental to ever truly grapple with; that we are, essentially, fated to repeat certain patterns of behavior.
It seemed as if showrunner Matthew Weiner and company were setting Don up for failure, dooming him to a Tony Soprano-esque fate of limited self-awareness and increasing marginalization. This season has pushed Don to his lowest depths, stripping him of his charisma, his confidence, his ability to perform at work, of whatever little heroism there was to his antihero routine and turning him into an outright villain. This has been a season of cycles repeating themselves to ever-diminishing returns, not just for Don but for the country and even the show itself. The most frequent, and understandable, complaint about this season is that we’ve simply been here before, that we’ve seen Don cheat on his wife and drink too much and refuse to take responsibility for his failures.
But we haven’t seen it to this degree. Don has never been a role model, but he’s always been in control. He commands his work environment most effectively, but he’s had some degree of self-control as well – an ability to keep his affairs hidden and his drinking just limited enough to function. But he hasn’t had that control this season. He can’t nail pitches the way he used to. He can’t avoid having just one more drink. He can’t stop himself from getting caught with the neighbor’s wife. The series has courageously plunged into the chaos of Don’s life, and the apocalyptic dread of episodes like “The Flood” and “The Crash” left a bitter taste in many a viewer’s mouth. The whole season has felt like the buildup to a disaster, so it wouldn’t have been surprising if “In Care Of” had ended with Bob burning the office down or, as many speculated, Megan getting murdered.
Instead, what we get is a wonderful, profound sense of catharsis. Don’s astounding confession to the Hershey executives – a moment that cements Jon Hamm’s place with Brian Cranston, Ian McShane and the late James Gandolfini in the pantheon of great televised performances – is one of the best moments the show has ever produced. You have to hit bottom before you can look up and see the sky.
Bottom, for Don, is a night spent in jail after punching a minister who had the gall to preach temperance after Don skips work to drink away the memory of his estranged daughter telling him off. It takes him a while to figure out a way to start climbing back toward the light; his first impulse, as always, is to run. Stealing Stan Rizzo’s idea, he decides to start over in California, where Megan can pursue her acting career and he can build a new firm from the ground up. Reinvention in the West is an idea as old as America. The frontier was a perpetual source of renewal, a blank space with no sense of the past and plenty of room for new beginnings. And, like so many before him, Don hopes for rebirth there – note just how often Don and Megan refer to themselves as “homesteaders” on the “frontier.”
But, before the Drapers can ride off into the sunset, forgetting their troubles and forging a new set of lies, as Drapers do, for the sake of a new beginning, Don is faced with one more moral test. Ted Chaough is drowning, pulled apart at the seams by his opposing devotions to Peggy and to his family. The Ted and Peggy affair has been far from perfect, suffering from an overdose of melodrama, but, as with so many of this season’s subplots, it pays off beautifully here, with Ted begging for Don to do one selfless thing and throw him the life preserver he needs to save his family – the chance to start over in California.
And, for the first time this year, Don passes the test. He does more than that, even. He’s so moved by something – Ted’s distress, his own failing marriage, the lie he’s just told about his father – that, halfway through the Hershey pitch, he breaks down and unburdens himself. He bares his soul, exposing the secret of his shameful origins and telling an achingly sad but beautiful and true story about what Hershey bars meant to him as an orphan in a whorehouse. “You shouldn’t have someone like me telling that boy what a Hershey bar is. He already knows,” Don says, and for the first time, truth wins out over falsehood in an advertising pitch meeting.
While there’s been no shortage of classic Mad Men moments – Pete and Harry’s clash over MLK, a drugged Don watching Ken tap-dance, Don and Betty’s summer camp tryst – it’s hard to deny this has been a rough season of, in ways both intentional (the show deserves immense credit for not shying from the painful details of 1968 and the chaos of Don’s life) and unintentional. Certain characters and arcs – including the melodrama of Ted and Peggy, the woefully misused Linda Cardellini, and the increasing irrelevance of Jessica Paré’s Megan – simply never clicked.
As the Emmys approach, it’s clear that this was a banner year for TV. Breaking Bad continued its unparalleled run of white-knuckle high tragedy; The Americans had one of the best debut seasons ever; Justified and Game of Thrones both turned in their best seasons yet, cementing their places among TV’s elite. Even the overlooked Enlightened quietly earned its place among the greats. And while Mad Men couldn’t quite match the highs of last (and probably best) season, it could hardly be accused of coasting on its legacy. It remains one of the best shows ever produced, capable of taking you to unexpected places that could be as punishingly bleak as often as they were transcendent.
“In Care Of” confirms that there was method to Weiner’s madness, that all of this pain built to something. This season sent Don to his knees, stripping him of his protégé, his job and his second marriage. (Or third, depending on how you count Anna.) But at the very bottom, Don finds the hope of redemption. The truth costs him dearly – although it’s just the latest in a long line of screw-ups, it’s the Hershey pitch that gets Don fired and, subsequently, sends Megan packing – but it also sets him free. He’s finally free of the encumbrances of his dying marriage, his immoral job and his guilty conscience. Truth hurts, but it’s a cleansing pain. Even Don’s overcooked whorehouse flashbacks, my least favorite part of the season, become the setup to a perfect grace note, as he brings his children to the dilapidated brothel and tells them, “This is where I grew up.” And Don Draper stands naked in the light of the truth.
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