SEASON 7, EPISODE 14.

Is the ending a joke?

Actually, the whole thing is. Someone on Twitter said, as if surprised, that she was laughing more at the Mad Men finale than she had at any other episode. Part of that, I assume, was the petit finales for the other principals' stories, which came off fairly breathless, not to say rushed, like the wrap-up of a Sixties sex comedy. The Peggy and Stan resolution in particular seemed like fandering (THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR), but sure why not, especially with Elizabeth Moss and Jay R. Ferguson so game about the funny romantic stuff. (From her phone takes especially, it would appear Moss has been studying Ross Hunter.)

Surewhynot, too, with Joan bravely going it alone with her wimmyn-owned company and Roger and Mrs. Megan in Paris Quebec. As I've said before, these characters were never going to achieve enlightenment: They were just working out career and personal issues, and though the times a-changin' made their challenges and opportunities bigger than they might have been, in the end they're no more fraught with meaning than any other TV officemates, just better written than most. (Betty and Sally are a slightly bigger deal, but that set-up came last week. Nonetheless I appreciated their Don scenes as fine examples of that other type of TV staple, the emotionally purgative phone call.)

The real story has always been Don Draper, and after all that drama, all that identity crisis, and all those harbingers of bardo, it was a shock to find, first of all, people from Don's Old Life not only talking about him ("He's not dead! At least I don't think so") but also chatting with him on the phone, and secondly, after a few rounds of Don doing Don stuff -- fucking a stranger, barking life lessons -- to come to that cynical comedy ending. But the thing that saves it is Leonard. How this Joe Average got to Thinly Disguised Esalen I can't guess, but when he started talking about his dream of being in the refrigerator and Don went to embrace him, you could be forgiven for thinking Don had learned some new kind of empathy that would help make him whole. After all, he had just cut all ties with his Old Life people; he gave Peggy the same spiel on the phone that he'd given her, basically, in "The Suitcase" (she even responded the same way: "That's not true"), and then hung up; even Stephanie, his last link to Anna Draper, took off and left him with hippies. And here he was, not working out his angst with a sexual conquest but in the embrace of Leonard, another desk guy who can't quite believe in love even when it's at the table with him.

But surprise, it's not a new empathy for a new life, it's the same empathy that made Don great at selling cigarettes to potential cancer victims and plastic wheels to sentimental families. Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists. And that's why, despite all the historical signifiers that made the show look like the chronicle of a New Day Dawning, nothing much has really changed. Don has not rediscovered Dick Whitman -- he has, after a crisis of confidence, rediscovered Don Draper. And gone back at work.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 13.

First thought: Is Max Gail the new Brad Dourif?

I understand the necessity of the VFW scenes and even enjoyed the details, like the low-rent strip tease and the Hill's Coffee donation can (though Weiner made the room itself look Overlook Hotel bleak; if he weren't so eager to get cosmic, what would these scenes look like?). It's important for Don's journey that he tell somebody about what happened in Korea when he doesn't have to tell it (just as it was important that he spill his guts about his childhood to the guys from Hershey), and it's important for the cultural mirror people keep telling us Mad Men is that he express it, and the other vets receive it, as a fragging story of a sort that would become familiar after Vietnam. (But forgive me: I've known a few veterans; if one of them tells another vet he doesn't want to talk about the war, doesn't that normally end the conversation?)

Speaking of cosmic, Betty has revealed herself to be kind of Zen, albeit Westchester Zen: "Why was I ever doing it?" is a brilliant insight, and not accidental. (I bet she's a really good psych student.) Have I been mistaking her remoteness for severe emotional damage all along, when it was actually just a different kind of strength than what the Joans and Peggys have been trying to work their liberated selves up into? The matched shots of Betty bravely struggling up the stairs, even giving a gracious greeting through pain as she climbs, with Sally reading her letter seem to say so. I guess both things can be true. Remember all those times Joan gave Peggy frost for what she read as Peggy getting above or at least ahead of herself ("all you did was prove to them I'm a meaningless secretary and you're a humorless bitch")? Joan was insisting that, despite lacking the tools and opportunity Peggy had, she was also entitled to dignity. With these scenes the show does that on Betty's behalf. I wish there could be a Sally spin-off so I could see what she does with this knowledge.

As far as end-tying, this is by far the most elegant of the series, and what I'm guessing is the Pete Campbell resolution is the least. I'm not even a Campbell hater, but there's only one way his Trudy-in-Kansas fantasy makes sense to me: as a pale echo of Don's proposal to Megan -- an attempt to enforce normality and stave off the shadow of death. It may work out better for Pete than for Don because he has a smaller secret. Oh, yeah, that one: We have one more episode for that mantelpiece gun to go off.

I doubt that it will, though: Pete's drama can't be as big as Don's. The night this episode debuted I followed the stunned Twitter reactions to his Oklahoma adventure but when I finally watched the episode, it made perfect sense -- including Don's disposal of the Caddy. Keep in mind that so far Don hasn't really "lost it all" -- he's still very well-off and if he took a bus back to New York he could work his investments, maybe write a book, and wait out the McCann non-compete. All he's done so far is a bit of ritual self-mortification; the phonebook beatdown is a bit severe, but he seems to bounce back pretty good from it.  The weirdest part of this journey is that so far the America Don left behind so he could reinvent himself in New York still looks, upon his return, like a hell -- it's much richer than it was in Dick Whitman's childhood, but the people are still vicious and stupid. That's why Don blesses that Li'l-Abner punk. "You're lucky you feel guilty," he tells him, "that's the only difference between you and those animals right now." As far as he can see, that's the only difference between Don and the animals he grew up with, too. Giving the kid the car is a weird way to shine a light, but it was available and it cost him little. We'll see in the finale if he has to give up something that costs more.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 12.

The very best thing in the entire episode, and maybe in the series, was the scene at the Wisconsin house, and the dark daughter lurking in the shadows of the home of Di the Death Waitress' ex-husband: blandly resentful, shaggy, never giving a sign of being part of these waxy, pale Christians (and vice versa), she gave me real chills.

The ex-husband was pretty good too, not ostentatiously crazy, merely vicious -- a man with a good enough explanation for his ugliness that you might not at first consider how horrible a husband he must have been, and must still be (did he really say in front of his wife that she didn't know any better?). I begin to see not only why Diana left, but also why Don is so obsessed with her -- her horrible pre-life replicates his own, except she had no magic to escape it with. Don is retracing his own steps through her.

In the home stretch Mad Men is getting stranger, and it’s easier to see why it has to in Don’s scenes than in anyone else’s because he’s the haunted one — everyone else is trying to figure out the life they’re in, and Don is trying to figure out the life he never had. Several people have speculated that Don is already dead (“and he’s finally realizing it”), and that’s getting to be a good bet, but for the moment I’m looking at it as a simpler proposition: Don knows that the life he took up is not his, that it’s unsustainable, and he’s leaving it behind.

His departure from the Miller meeting signals this by being super-weird; no one makes anything of the newly-imported hotshot leaving in the middle of a presentation except Ted, and his reaction is absurdly inappropriate — it looks like, “Oh, that son of a gun.” (I thought people would beginning clearing their throats when Don spent all that time staring out the window at the crucifix in the sky.) And Don is super-weird through most of the episode; tightly-wound in his meeting with Boss Hobart, hallucinating Bert, unconvincingly lying and apologizing at the Wisconsin house, there’s nothing comfortable about him until he decides to make that detour.

Maybe after a while the heightened scenes with Peggy and Roger will seem as necessary, but like I said, Peggy has a more real-life problem to figure out, so the roller-skating and badass slo-mo strut are jarring. Peggy’s become such a knotted-up, suffering careerist that she’s earned a more genuine nervous breakdown. Joan’s fight with the arrayed forces of sexism is more realistic, and it’s interesting in a trad TV social-commentary way. But we came here, or at least stayed here, not to see the Sixties spin out, but to see what happens to Don. It won’t be long now.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 11.

The key moment was when Jim Hobart from McCann told the SCP partners they'd "died and gone to advertising heaven" and they all sat there looking miserable. Actually I take that back -- they looked like they didn't know how they should look. In fact I think even the actors didn't  know how they should look -- because the feeling was too ambiguous. The moment was clearly meant to show that, though advertising is what they do all day, are good at, and claim to care about, Pete, Roger, Joan, Ted and Don (well, maybe not Ted) are only now acknowledging that it's not really that important to them.

But what is, then? Joan's got the clearest gripe about the move -- McCann's a sexist shithole and she'll have trouble there. Roger -- well, his name was on the door, and so was Don's for a while. But neither of them ever showed any thirst for permanence before -- shit, they're both practically estranged from their children. And Pete's reaction looks like nothing but pique. Really, Jim's right -- this is like minor leaguers complaining they got sent up to The Show. The only reason to complain is if you're sick of baseball.

So what do they want? I fear Joan and Rich Cracker are going to be spun off into an entrepreneural love nest. Pete may devote some of his spare time to becoming a better human being, and I have to admit his tip-off to Peggy (coming after a mommy-baby flash that was very well handled) and his chivalry with Trudy make that look like an interesting project. (Question: Pete told Peggy about the McCann move but Don didn't?) Sterling can have a sitcom with Mme. Calvet, something like Green Acres in Québécois.

But what about Don? I think showing up at the Waitress of Death's apartment red- faced drunk in the wee hours was about the most human thing I've seen Don do, and the most pathetic. If it means anything, it means Don's going to have to bottom out before he can get anywhere else. But that's a big if.

I liked Peggy's truth-telling scene with Stan, and all honor to the undersung Jay R. Ferguson, who has a certain preening, thoughtless sort of art-monkey down cold, and who showed here that even a doofus can get institutional sexism if you give him absolutely no chance to evade the point -- like, have someone he loves make it. (At this point his relationship with Peggy seems more realistic to me than Don's.) I guess the only problem with it was the truth-telling; to me, it's a sign the show is ending and people are going to start spelling out what they want. And I fear it's going to be things like respect in the workplace, a financially comfortable family life, and a bunch of other dull shit that's perfectly fine in and of itself but hardly worth all that artistic effort. Shit, maybe Draper will go back to Pennsylvania and make that old whorehouse into a Hilton.

P.S. There's been a Campbell at Greenwich Country Day for generations, but suddently family history is an issue? What'd I miss? P.P.S. With Trudy's eloquent complaint, it's official: Women in 1970 are sick of this shit. Was it Virginia Slims?

SEASON 7, EPISODE 10.

Mathis is now my new favorite character, too bad he’s [SPOILER] fired. First of all, his inept use of Don’s line gave me my first belly laugh of the season. (His foul mouth, which Don also mentions when he fires him, is one of the tiny cracks starting the avalanche of obscenity that would be the 70s and ever after.) Second, Mathis got to something profoundly important about Don that no other male on the show has been willing to approach. (Which reminds me: Don’s supposed to be a genius but he’s nothing but glib; Ginsburg was supposed to be a genius but he was just nuts. Mathis the hack is the only “creative” on this show with any insight on actual human beings.)

Mathis gets to Don partly because he talks back to him, which is something Don never has to take from subordinates. But the lack of respect for his talent and position is nothing compared to the slap about him being nothing but handsome, and Mathis’ relay of the story that Lucky Strike scion Garner was in love with Don and wanted to jack him off. That hits Don where he lives; earlier, when Cutler called him out for his hyper-masculinity (“a bully and drunk… a football player in a suit”) it was just ridiculous, but hearing about how Don’s sexuality affects men really pisses him off. It suddenly lights up all the gay stories in the show, and also Don’s much-discussed history as a victim of sexual abuse. For a moment we and Don have to face that his behavior is compulsive, that his fetish for objectification comes from being objectified, a reaction to the real story of his past…

…which Sally brings up, come to think of it, at dinner later as a way of peeling Don off her nubile classmate. Here too both Don and we get the benefit of the insight: Sally sees the desire to please “just comes oozing out” of Don. She’s hip enough to get that, but too young to know what it comes from. She knows about the poverty (the last time she showed any admiration for her dad was when he finally shared that with her) and she knows (or says she knows) something about sex, but she doesn’t know how deep and twisted it can get. Don’s send-off is as honest as it can be and as hopelessly square as it has to be: “You’re a very beautiful girl,” he tells her – how many other girls has he told that? – “It’s up to you to be more than that.” That’s a pretty open brief. Hey, maybe she’ll join Baader-Meinhof! Or The Runaways!

The Joan-Rich Cracker story was cute, and gives more room to Christina Hendricks’ great Season 7b performance, but it’s inconsequential except as a counterpoint to Don’s alleged big question – “What do you see for the future?” – to which everyone at SCP has transparently bad, short-sighted answers. That kind of cable-zen garbage gives me the itch, but so does the hoary story of monsters of ambition reaching beyond their busy schedules to find true love. If this season ends with Joan having a baby with Rich Cracker in his penthouse, may the shade of Douglas Sirk strangle Matt Weiner with his ectoplasm.

I have to say I approve of all the kids on Mad Men behaving sort of like they’re in a Bresson movie; it really makes them seem a different species from the grown-ups. The funny thing is, Betty has always acted a little like that too. (It’s one of the reasons why she was so fearless with the East Village hippies – she regarded them as less successful child-adults.) But Betty is not really a child, and her handling of Glenn when he spills about his enlistment looks very gentle and correct till you remember she’s been emotionally manipulating him since he was a little boy and she doesn’t even have a clue that it’s fucked up to do that to minors (though maybe the psych classes will help). “Don’t tell me that” was a great preface to “you did this for me” because the thing Betty really wants is not to be told.

Sally’s understanding of Vietnam is on a par with her understanding of her father: she doesn’t know much except it stinks. How I wish we could have a Sally spin-off and follow her through the days of Johnny Rotten and Ronald Reagan.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 9.

Because Mad Men has such a moody house style, it was hard to recognize at first that this episode is a farce -- bitter, a little sluggish, and with some dark shadows, but with appropriately outsized comic premises. (Funnily enough I was just reading something about Kafka reading early pages of The Trial to friends and how he had trouble getting through because everyone was laughing so much.) The sad story of Diana the waitress tugs the heartstrings, but look at it from Don's perspective: He basically gives away a million dollars because he thinks this mystery woman is going to take away his pain -- and it turns out pain is what she's after. Then he discovers his furniture is missing.

Okay, so it's not A Flea in Her Ear. Maybe it's because the principals are now sufficiently comfortable (financially and dramatically) that I can't worry about them, or maybe it's the dank smell of the approaching end that's encouraging me to detach, but whatever it is I'm not inclined to take the suffering in this episode very seriously. And there is suffering, copious suffering. Even Pretty Megan, usually associated more with insufferability than suffering, has her nerves convincingly flayed; she has moved past gentle, make-believe separation into the hard reality of divorce and, worse yet, it's shoved her right back into the maw of her family, and I may be dense but I only realized when Megan's sister was blubbering about having to fly back to *Paris all by herself that she and the old lady aren't charming gallic goofs, they're horrible, self-centered monsters and it's understandable Megan would be freaked out that Don won't be around anymore to rescue her from them.

Or from scumbags like Harry Crane. It's perfect that the one thing ringing in her ears after that humiliating encounter is "I can't believe Don threw you away... you don't think he could have helped you?" -- as is made obvious by her bitterness at the lawyer's meeting (with no lawyer), and by the writers making the implicit callback to Campbell's and Sterling's bitter speeches about bitter divorced wives. It begins to seem that the writers share my feeling that no one on this show is going to learn anything.

But hey, comedy! We have Mimi Rogers as a boss dyke artiste who can also approach a problem from, as it were, the other direction, leading to some beautiful one-upgirlship between Peggy and Stan ("She tried the same thing with me -- but she didn't get as far"). That was good enough by itself, but then showing Stan at home with Elaine, showing only the tiniest glimmer of awareness that losing a power struggle wasn't the worst thing he did, was even better. Warm fandom may be a bad perspective from which to watch this show; the picture's clearer from farther away.

*UPDATE. Commenter shortstop points out that the Calvets are from Montreal. In fairness to myself, that is an easy thing to miss. sundaystyle makes a good point:

 I don't care about Diana, Waitress of Death, or Pima swanning around out-butching the guys... if Weiner's going out on a note of existential despair, I hope the remaining episodes focus more on Peggy, Don, Pete, Joan, Sally, Betty and Roger. They're the characters we've been watching since the beginning.

Yeah, the more comfortable I get with this being Just a TV Show rather than a deathless work of art, the more I want to see character payoffs, too. If you share my tedious preoccupation with Mad Men, you might enjoy Matt Zoller Seitz's recap; good catch, Jeff Strabone! (But isn't it weird that Don's record library still has Martin Denny in it?)

SEASON 7, EPISODE 8.

(Yes, we're back to Mad Men recaps. Patience, we don't have many to go.) Don Draper's arc is beginning to look like Tony Soprano's, and I don't expect a better end for him. Tony had some glimpses of a better way that he turned out unable to benefit from (I still recall him contemplating nature and being grateful for life while Paulie was breaking some guy's leg); Don gets so many messages from the great beyond that I expect William Burroughs to start talking to him, yet he doesn't seem to get anywhere either.

The flashbacks to Rachel Katz and (implicitly) Midge Daniels make sense in the same way that Don's season-6-ending whorehouse monologue made sense: Don is too intelligent not to contemplate the past (his past, anyway), but not enlightened enough to react to it in a constructive way. But that Hershey meeting flash-bang is really beginning to look like a misdirection, not to say a con. Is Don really just a charming zilch? So far in the interrupted season 7 we've seen him act slightly nicer than previously to the people he loves, but everyone else he seems puzzled by. (He reacts to Cosgrove's monologue with the same bewildered expression he gave Cosgrove's tap-dance in "The Crash.") It's getting so the sordid sequelae of his sexcapades are just another of Mad Men's guilty pleasures -- fun to see the coupling, fun also to see the regret and/or horror afterwards. As regret/horror go, Rachel's sister at shiva and the waitress really delivered. But what's any of this ever going to make Don feel except sad, and do except drink? For a guy who reads Dante at the beach, Don's not really a heavy thinker.

I realize season premieres, or half-season premieres, are mostly set-up, so there's no reason to be disappointed by the lack of significant action in this episode. The most interesting thing to me about Cosgrove is that, delicious as his vengeance is ("Shit" -- Pete Campbell), it also means he's not going to write that novel. And Peggy's drunk date is charming because she's charming, and it's nice to see this poor messed-up Draperstein's Monster relax a little, and her date isn't (or hasn't yet been revealed as) a programmatic Mad Men sexist scumbag -- unlike the McCann creeps in the Peggy-Joan meeting whose hair-raising misogyny is dialed up so high I thought it might be a dream sequence, or that Allen Funt would jump in to pull the plug. Joan's reaction to that scene -- bitterness toward Peggy, and highly unsatisfying retail therapy -- is, given what we've learned about Joan, no less depressingly expected than the Don reactions I've been complaining about. But thanks in large part to the brilliant Christina Hendricks, whose elevator scene bears watching without dialogue, I now find Joan more interesting.