The future is coming, but Don’s still worried about the past.

“What are the events in life? It’s like you see a door. The first time you come to it, you say, ‘What’s on the other side of the door?’ Then you open a few doors. Then you say, ‘I think I want to go over that bridge this time, I’m tired of doors.’ Finally, you go through one of these things and you come out the other side and you realize that’s all there is – doors and windows and bridges and gates. And they all open the same way and they all close behind you.” –Roger Sterling

Mad Men began with a status quo. The Draper family and Sterling Cooper were beacons of an ordered, perfect existence that the consumerist early 1960s were supposed to provide – Camelot, or, as the show put it, Babylon. It then spent the next five seasons eroding that order, dissolving the Draper marriage and the old ad agency and setting its characters adrift in the anarchy of the 60s.

Now, it feels like we’re on the edge of a precipice. Showrunner Matthew Weiner and company have established a new status quo for Don Draper, both at home with Megan and professionally with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, but it feels especially fragile. Sixth season premiere “The Doorway” is set just before New Year’s, 1968, and although a newspaper Don picks up promises that the city is bidding adieu to 1967’s violence, the future isn’t going to be any brighter.

1968 was an especially berserk year, bringing with it the Tet Offensive, the Civil Rights Act, the Columbia protests, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and, finally, the election of Nixon – who hasn’t been heard from since season one – as president. Even the pop culture landscape was more progressive and avant-garde, featuring the releases of The White Album and 2001: A Space Odyssey and the first televised interracial kiss on Star Trek. (As far as I know, Paul Kinsey did not write the episode.)

Everything is changing, and fast, but it seems like one of this season’s major themes is that the more things change, the more things stay the same. America is hurdling towards modernity. Even the aesthetics of the era have changed. While Sterling Cooper was defined by its conservative, suit-and-tie elegance, SCDP seems populated by characters who escaped from the Sgt. Pepper’s album art. Beards and pot smoke abound; even Pete Campbell is sporting some trendy sideburns.

Yet Don Draper looks as he always did – crisp, reserved, cool, not a hair out of place. He looks the same in season six as he did in season one, plus or minus a few wrinkles. The context has changed, but Don hasn’t. Don Draper takes a vacation and cheats on his wife — that’s an episode description that could fit season six or season two. On most shows, that kind of repetition would be a sign of narrative weakness. On Mad Men, it’s a sign that the characters are stuck — always opening new doors that bring them to the same old place.

The episode begins with Don and Megan taking a working vacation. In retrospect, the opening seems almost like a prologue, a calm before the storm, with Don and Megan attempting to recapture the marital bliss of their Season 4 trip to California (and Don, perhaps, trying to recapture the bliss of his Season 3 trip to Greece with Betty – there are lots of echoes with the past in this episode) by having lots of poi and stoned sex in Hawaii.

Even in paradise, however, there are harbingers of the change that’s coming. Megan flirtatiously dances with the director of festivities and – seemingly for the first time – gets asked for an autograph by a fan of her work on a soap opera, suggesting that this is a season in which Megan is going to find herself increasingly distracted by work. And, as she’s scribbling her signature, Don’s gaze is caught by a beautiful dancer. He spent all of last season battling his wandering eye; now, it seems that he’s finally given in.

That’s confirmed when, shortly thereafter, Don runs into a younger version of himself – Private Dinkins, a soldier getting married while on shore leave from Vietnam. Mad Men is nothing if not confident, and it can occasionally be somewhat neat and obvious in its symbolism. Dinkins is very clearly a symbol of Don’s past as Dick Whitman – like Whitman, Dinkins is a yokel who’s trying to make the best of a bad wartime situation, getting drunk and offering to get into some trouble with Don. It’s like Don is having a conversation with a physical manifestation of his troubled past.

Mad Men has always been about the growing conflict between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Wiener is a veteran of The Sopranos, and Don Draper is a figure with many similarities to Tony Soprano – both are deeply flawed men struggling to change and find some kind of redemption, but both Don and Tony find themselves overmatched by their own weaker impulses. Don might want to change, but he’s incapable of ever letting go of his past and the bad behavior that goes with it. He’s the immovable object. At the same time, historical forces are conspiring against him – the world is changing, with or without Don Draper. And the tension between those two forces is starting to get unbearable.

So, Don is stuck in a moment, equally terrified of his past and his future. If Private Dinkins is Don’s past, Roger Sterling is his future – irrelevant, passed over by history, drinking and moping about mortality to a therapist to dull his pain. Roger Sterling was vital and talented once, just like Don – and he was a confused kid in a Pacific war, too, just like Don and Dinkins both. One day Dinkins will be Don, Don will be Roger, and Roger will be dead.

“The Doorway” is an especially morbid episode, with death hanging around every corner. It opens with Jonesy the doorman’s near-death experience, the moment when he’s resurrected by Don’s new Jewish friend, Dr. Arnold Rosen, and the second hour’s centerpiece is a funeral for Roger Sterling’s mother. Hell, even Roger’s shoeshine guy kicks the bucket – and it’s that last insult that finally causes Roger to break down and cry.

Death is invading everyday life at every corner. There’s more talk of Vietnam in “The Doorway” than in any past episode of Mad Men, and there’s a sense that grotesque violence is becoming commonplace. Dinkins playfully tells Don about the horrible things a machine gun can do to a water buffalo; a comic on Johnny Carson tells a joke about GIs using Vietcong ears as jewelry; Peggy and former Sterling Cooper account man Burt Peterson banter about DEFCON levels. The horrible has become mundane.

Even Betty, the most sheltered of Mad Men characters, gets a taste of this. She takes a liking to Sandy, one of Sally’s friends – shades of Glen Bishop – and goes searching for her in Greenwhich Village when she appears to go missing. Sandy sees the hippie lifestyle as the only alternative to Betty’s bored domesticity, and Betty sees something of her own stunted dreams in Sandy, who is on the verge of giving up her dreams of becoming a violinist.

Greenwhich Village doesn’t live up to Sandy’s dreams, however – the tenement where Betty searches for her is a rat-infested hellhole with couples screwing on dirty mattresses and strange men peeing in buckets in corners. There’s some appeal to the lifestyle of the hippies, who are stand-offish but ultimately friendly and spend their afternoons smoking joints, eating homemade goulash and ranting against “the establishment,” but it’s also clearly impractical. Still, their earnestness rubs off on Betty, who goes brunette after a particularly mean hippie calls her out for dyeing her hair.

Betty may be growing, but Don is just growing older. He shows up drunk to Roger’s mother’s funeral, pukes in a corner, and then berates Jonesy about his near-experience, asking if he saw a light like the tropical sun. Something about Hawaii deeply affected Don; he seems keenly aware of his own mortality, even pitching an ad with clear overtones of suicide (“The Jumping Off Point”) because he finds a kind of grace in the idea of walking off into the ocean and being overwhelmed by it.

The world doesn’t make sense to him anymore. He’s being left behind – what does a man like Don Draper hang on to in the midst of a midlife crisis? Not his wife, to be sure, especially when she’s often away. (“Anything matrimonial feels Paleolithic,” Don says in a startling moment of candor.) He takes up with another man’s wife (if anyone is surprised that Don is cheating again, all I have to ask is – what show do you think you’re watching?), but that doesn’t seem to soothe his confusion, either. Even his office gets rearranged without his permission. If the world doesn’t make sense to Don, a man who’s paid to make sense of the world, how much is there left for him to do before he dies? The end result of change is your own erasure and replacement. How do you deal with that?

As Roger Sterling says, “We sold actual death for 25 years with Lucky Strike. You know how we did it? We ignored it.” All there is to do is have a drink, take a look out the window, and think of the ocean.

Tidbits:

–It should be noted that this episode contains sincere use of the phrase “the regular rap.”

–It still stings a little bit to notice the absence of Jared Harris’ name in the credits.

–If you watched “The Doorway” live, you may have caught Jon Hamm’s voice in an American Airlines ad and Christina Hendricks pitching for Johnnie Walker.

–I like that every so often, the director (in this case, series regular Scott Hornbacher, who’s also responsible for “Far Away Places,” possibly the show’s finest hour) will throw Burt Cooper reading a paper into the background of a shot. It’s a nice reminder that he’s still around and still completely irrelevant, if mostly charming.

–The episode has a very cinematic feel, much of which comes from the use of music, including both David Carbonara’s typically lush original soundtrack and diegetic music – such as Sandy’s violin performance, which scores Jonesy the doorman’s near-death experience.

–The episode is full of great comedic moments – Mad Men can be the funniest drama on TV when it wants to be – but the standout is the increasingly personal phone conversation Peggy has with a pastor while trying to reach Ted Chaough. “He was cremated.”

–It’s nice to see that Abe and Peggy are getting along nicely, but – for reasons I can’t entirely explain – it made me even happier to see Peggy having a friendly late-night chat with Stan Rizzo. (And Stan Rizzo’s beard.) Few shows can make you care about peripheral characters like Mad Men does – and that’s despite the fact that nearly all are massive jerks.

–“People are naturally democratic if you give them the chance.” –Sandy. “Are you on dope?” –Betty.

–“I don’t like vegetarian food. It reminds me of lent.” –Peggy Olson, role model.

–“He was just saying what everyone else was thinking.” Even in the pits of despair, Roger Sterling has the sharpest tongue on the show.

–“I hate it. You’re ugly.” –Bobby Draper’s response to Betty’s change in hair color. He also likes Sandy’s violin case because it “looks like a coffin.” Maybe he’s going to start developing a personality soon? There’s no way the show could find another child actor as great as Kiernan Shipka, right?

–ON THE NEXT MAD MEN: Pete has trouble with his TV remote!

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