“This business doesn’t have feelings. You get bought, you get sold, you get fired. If the account moves, you move. Even if your name’s on the damn door, you should know better than to get attached to some walls.” – Roger
I would hope that anyone complaining about the alleged
aimlessness of the first few episodes of the “Mad Men” final run are eating their
words now.
Last week’s episode, “Time & Life,” was arguably the
best of the final season (last year’s installments included) and a game-changer,
but damned if they didn’t at least equal if not top it this week with “Lost
Horizon.”
There are so many great moments, so many great callbacks to
past moments and such great imagery to unpack, but perhaps the biggest takeaway
is the epic awesomeness, and yet sad fate, of Joan Harris.
It was clear last week when Joan was basically ignored by
Jim Hobart in his “Come to Jesus” meeting with the SC&P partners that she
wouldn’t enjoy the same status or respect at McCann, but that didn’t change how
painful it was to watch her demeaned first by Dennis, the sexist McCann moron
from “Severance”, and then only a little more subtlely, by his superior Ferg.
All of that then made it even more powerful when she finally met
with Hobart and Joan, and Christina Hendricks for that matter, got a moment
that was earned over the course of the entire series. Objectified by men, raped
by her husband, sleeping with a client to earn her partnership, it’s all paid
off when Joan threatens an unsympathetic Hobart with a massive shitstorm of
lawsuits and bad press if he doesn’t buy her out. I don’t know if “Mad Men”
will get any Emmy love at this late stage of its run, but Hendricks earned a
statue this week.
Of course, it’s all for naught when she has little choice but to listen to Roger and take Hobart’s offer to pay half her buyout for her to disappear. It’s also a more
realistic end result. Joan’s not going to be a vocal women’s lib trailblazer. She did what she did not for women's rights, but because she's a survivor who is trying to survive. But she’s also inadvertently set an example for
other women in the workplace and one of them is
Peggy Olsen.
In an episode full of great images, the best may be Peggy
strutting down the hallway of McCann Erickson wearing sunglasses, with a
cigarette dangling from her mouth and clutching Bert Cooper’s provocative Japanese Octopus
painting as a musical cue from David Carbonara’s score plays that I don’t think
we’ve heard since the third or fourth season, usually to announce the presence
of one of Peggy’s male counterparts, but now she's going to make sure she's their equal.
Peggy spends most of the episode in the hollowed out
recesses of SC&P as she waits for her McCann office to be ready. Seeing the
office dark and emptied out is both depressing and haunting, made even more so
by Roger’s creepy organ solo plays while Peggy walks signage from the now defunct agency (and just so no one thinks the organ came out of
nowhere to service the plot, it was also present last week in the play room
when Peggy and Stan were auditioning kids).
Peggy has no office yet and Roger is basically putting off
going to McCann, so the two spend the day (into night) getting drunk on
vermouth while lamenting SC&P’s demise, culminating in the absolutely
surreal and fantastic moment where Roger plays another tune on the organ as
Peggy roller skates through the empty office. It’s a moment that is both bizarre, sad and hilarious in a way that only “Mad Men” can achieve.
And for more haunting imagery, there is no need to look
further than Don stuck in a tedious research meeting at McCann looking out the
window and seeing an airplane appear as a tiny speck flying past the Empire State Building.
Up to that point in the episode, Don is pleasantly surprised
that it seems everything Hobart sold the SC&P partners on seems to be
coming true. He’s given numerous new accounts and even appears to be getting
back in to business with his “old friend” Conrad Hilton, but all it takes is a
room full of creative drones and a plane flying off to places unknown for Don
to go back to “The Hobo Code” and travel halfway across the country to Racine in search of a certain melancholy waitress.
Why does Don keep chasing after Diana? The best answer seems to be that in an office where he is basically superfluous and with a family that has moved on with out him, Don needs something to fix. And he sees in her a kindred spirit who, like him, has experienced pain
and runs when faced with adversity. He thinks he can help her (or they can help
each other), but as he’s told by Cooper in another hallucination and by Diana’s remarried husband, this woman won’t fix whatever it is that is ailing
Don. More than likely, no one can fix Don except for Don himself, and I would
guess Don’s journey to that point will be a big part of the series’ final two
episodes.
Some other notes:
-Betty makes another appearance and while it’s clear from
next week’s previews that she will be present, her scene in Sunday’s episode
certainly felt like the final one between her and Don. After years of
animosity, the pair still bicker like any divorced couple would but it seems
they’ve finally reached a point of mutual respect, capped with Don’s genuine, “Knock
‘em dead, Birdie.”
- Some good period music this week. Brian Hyland’s “Sealed
With a Kiss” plays over the car radio as Don drives west toward Racine and
after Don picks up the hitchhiker and heads to St. Paul, David Bowie’s “Space
Oddity” plays over the end credits.
- And in literary allusions, Don references Jack Kerouac’s “On
the Road,” a novel the living and Ayn Rand-loving Bert Cooper would most
definitely not have read, but since he’s dead, hallucination Bert can quote one
of the novel’s famous lines: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in
the night?”
-Finally, the episode’s title, “Lost Horizon” is a reference
to the 1937 classic film, which I haven’t seen but have heard of. It deals with
the seemingly idyllic haven of Shangri-La (echoes of McCann Erickson?) and it
was also the late-night film Don starts watching on the couch at Megan’s home in Los
Angeles all the way back in “Time Zones,” the first episode of the seventh
season last year.
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