‘Tomorrowland’
Spoilers!
As I was hashing out on Twitter this afternoon (1, 2, 3, 4) I feel as though last night’s Mad Men was a fine ending to a truly superb season that challenged the best seasons of The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire. I think I may be bucking the Internet consensus on this; here’s a representative negative take from Amanda Marcotte:
The main problem with the episode is that it, frankly, sucked. Besides the abortion cop-out,* it wasn’t even really the plot or the ideas or the character development. At the end of the day, it was the pacing and the scripting, which were lazy and anvilicious. Matthew Weiner admits they just finished the episode on Wednesday, and I think that’s all you need to know about why it didn’t work. The editing was all off—the fact that they got home from California and were in his apartment in a quick cut was confusing, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how long they’d been back in New York. I realize they were trying to speed things up to capture the idea of a whirlwind courtship, but they failed. It’s not like the team behind “Mad Men” can’t do a swift and dirty episode. The end of last season was amazing. But this was just confusing.
Putting “the abortion cop-out” aside—which honestly didn’t bother me in the slightest—it seems to me that the actual point of the episode was precisely to capture the idea of a whirlwind courtship, as opposed to the actual thing. Don and Megan are plainly not a good match; she’s too young for him and he knows almost nothing about her except that (unlike poor Dr. Faye) she won’t ever challenge him to be more than he currently is. She’s pretty and good with the children, and he really is a person who likes “the beginnings of things,” so he went and proposed on a whim. (“The writing I most enjoy, is the writing where I can see myself in the man who is, with good reason, wrecking his life.” For the wrong take on this, see Ezra Klein.)
It’s obvious that Don’s fooling himself, and we’ve already seen from Roger how this story ends. But it’s next season that we see this self-delusion come undone; the point of this episode was to show the falseness of all this, how easy we can backslide and how hard it is to genuinely change, and how seductive lies can be when we want to believe them.
So I find it’s not a sloppy episode, or lazy, or anvilicious; it’s just that its narrative presentation is very closely linked to Don’s selfish, self-deluded perspective. But the writers leave more than enough (in Henry’s rant, in the Peggy and Joan scene, in the very idea of Roger Sterling, in the final shot) to puncture that balloon. Heather Havrilesky at Salon writes:
At the start of the episode, Don asks Faye, “Will you at least put me out of my misery before you go?” Don would choose death, or an absence of feeling, over the excruciating pain of seeing himself clearly, over the constant struggle of “trying to be a person like the rest of us.” Since Faye won’t allow him to shut off from his life, to power down and drift through the world like a handsome ghost, he chooses Megan instead. At the end, Don has found his new winning story, his new heroic role, his new, patently false proclamation of victory. The central identity parable of “Mad Men,” which seemed like a simple act of deception in the first few seasons, has deepened into something richer and more ominous. Don Draper reflects the American compulsion to sidestep the hard work of living a flawed but authentic life for the empty illusion of perfection, as shiny and skin-deep as an advertisement that promises the impossible.
I realized earlier this evening that the episode puts this together quite nicely using a visual metaphor of sleep. At the beginning of the episode—in its very first shot—Don claims to have a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach but he is able, quite literally, to sleep at night.
When Faye awakens him, he is self-effacing and charming, and they have an adult conversation, face-to-face as equals, about how he might do the tough work of making peace with his past so he can have a future.
At the end of the episode, he has Megan asleep on his chest. No conversation of equals is possible here—and for the second time in the episode, we find Don can no longer sleep.
As the “Theme from Groundhog Day” begins to play, a tracking shot towards the window makes it clear: bathed in darkness, he’s already turning away from Megan, already looking for the door.
Gerry Canavan 
Jaimee raised the question earlier of whether or not Don is really the hero of this show anymore. (The Salon review gets at this point too.) To the extent that there’s a character whose personal success tracks audience enjoyment, at this point it’s clearly Peggy, not Don…
gerrycanavan
October 19, 2010 at 12:24 am
I doubt you can argue in one breath both that it’s “anvilicious” and at the same time that most viewers will easily misunderstand the episode.
Dan
October 19, 2010 at 1:22 am
I know you loved this season, but my interest is fast flagging. I realized that it may be me more than the show when I was watching the “intense” scene between Joan and Roger, where it seems alluded that Roger is suffering a major personal crisis of confidence and may even end up killing himself (if he does kill himself, don’t tell me; I’m only on ep. 11) and Joan doesn’t want to deal with his crap anymore. Julie was totally emotionally invested at this point. For me, all I saw was two people standing in a studio office, saying things that don’t really matter.
Alex
October 19, 2010 at 2:03 am
subject a, whose job it is to be alert and yearning, is pictured dyspeptic and unconscious.
subject b, whose job it is to be alert and yearning, is pictured alert and yearning.
each, being human, is incompletely happy.
on what grounds do we adjudge the first tableau more valid?
subject a affiances himself to a nurturer who shares some but not all of his professional interests and dispositions; regards his children warily; and encourages him to risk going to jail for a victimless crime.
subject b affiances himself to a nurturer who shares some but not all of his professional interests and dispositions; embraces his children warmly; and doesn’t encourage him to risk going to jail for a victimless crime.
each relationship, being human, is bound to mix in miseries with its rewards. and given our subjects’ humors, each commitment is bound to entail sleepless, pensive nights.
on what grounds do so many loud voices so loudly adjudge the first choice more valid?
i sense geronto-normative dooku.
and so once upon a time there was this haunted, costive, alcoholic man whose entelechy was all nostalgia and impulsivity. as the story’s told, he became a more grounded, more expressive recovering alcoholic whose entelechy was all nostalgia and impulsivity.
and this was called backsliding because a cad in the same office took a superficially similar turn?
called fraudulent because he didn’t prefer combative determinism to mystery? because he held onto the better parts of himself when he overcame the invidious?
“You do know it’s not that simple. Right?”
selfish, self-deluded, self-delusion, falseness, lies.
that’s quite a lot of judgment to apply.
what is going on here? granted the nostalgic, impulsive todayland bequeathed us by the action of the time is sinny enough to behoove a crucifixion. and to be sure the proposal is framed and acted in the barfiest way possible.
but the high horse scolding and “team aniston” binarism driving the commentary all presupposes there’s a higher maturity to fayeshtupping. that’s bullshit.
ltc
October 19, 2010 at 2:27 am
subject a, whose job it is to be alert and yearning, is pictured dyspeptic and unconscious.
subject b, whose job it is to be alert and yearning, is pictured alert and yearning.
I don’t think Don’s drop is to be alert and yearning so much as it is to sell people pretty lies. And even if you don’t agree with that, you have to agree that in that moment his job is to be sleeping, which (for the second time in the episode) he can’t do. People need sleep to live, just like sometimes they need to take medicine that tastes bad and sometimes they make choices that can’t be taken back. What we see in the episode is someone who has deliberately retreated from a breakthrough that has terrified them and gone instead to something that seems easier and less threatening. He describes Megan in fairy tale terms — she’s Maria von Trapp, which is to say she’s a character in a children’s movie. I promise you that Mary Sue facade is not going to hold up for the next 24 episodes; something’s got to give.
We know Don made the wrong choice because Peggy, who understands him best, is aghast. We know Don made the wrong choice because Henry is right that “There is no fresh start. Lives carry on.” Being an adult means living with the consequences of your choices and the continuity of your relationships. Don’s self-destructive impulse to completely reboot his life every time things get difficult, or anytime he risks being exposed (in any sense), is playing out again before our eyes, and you can be certain it’s not going to turn out well.
…called fraudulent because he didn’t prefer combative determinism to mystery? because he held onto the better parts of himself when he overcame the invidious?
There’s two more seasons.
gerrycanavan
October 19, 2010 at 9:07 am
victimless crime
Sorry, didn’t mean to let this slip by. It’s not a victimless crime; we know many of its victims. Anna lost out on the military death benefit she was entitled to (which is why Don bought her a house). Don’s brother lost his brother, who ultimately killed himself over his sense of rejection. Don and Betty lost their marriage; Don’s kids lost their father. This season SCDP lost a ton of business. Not to mention all that Don himself loses in his efforts to keep up appearances; this is a man divided against himself and haunted by ghosts, desperate to find someone he can be himself with but terrified of what actually being honest with someone would entail.
gerrycanavan
October 19, 2010 at 9:23 am
Our cherished dream of bringing Nanny State Socialism to America is embattled enough without liberal bloggers telling fictional characters when to sleep, but I agree that Don’s wakefulness connotes a sugary level of infatuation. The larger points that cola is a kid’s drink and that it loses its fizz are cheerfully seconded. Whatever relationship Don might possibly choose was going offroad next season. Gotta give viewers a reason to sit through Harry Crane’s commercials. I’m not aware that anyone is on the other side of that argument.
I’d caution against staking too much on the von Trapp comparison. To me it says more about the show’s compulsive periodizing than about Don’s surrender to Nazi fairy tales. Like Morticia, the hills were alive that year. (It was a shaky episode in many respects, including the geekiest: Lane appeared to be reading post-op coverage on the morning before LBJ went in for his Vietnam incision, and Megan seemed too versed with a show that had been on the air only three weeks.)
The equation of Megan with Jane Siegel seems premature if not glibly ageist. Roger ripped his family apart and Don is trying to put a family together. Roger’s move precipitated the disastrous sale of the firm. The only work consequence of Don’s decision to date is that he’s a haler fellow, well met. (Unless you count forgoing scuttlebutt from Faye, but that was suborned and unethical.) Jane is a proper trophy wife. Megan is already much more. Her performance in Faye’s focus group not only compares favorably to Peggy’s first season breakthrough with Belle Jolie, but eloquently echoed the estimable and promoted Peggy’s most sophisticated thinking about beauty rituals. “No conversation between equals is possible.” Not when one of them is asleep, granted. While the show hasn’t engineered empathy for Megan as it did for Peggy, it’s given us no indication of the finitude of her capacities. Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful and her moxie is classically gendered!
ltc
October 19, 2010 at 11:21 am
Curious that more discussion hasn’t swirled around Don’s knotty comparison of Megan to Peggy. Insensitive surely. Wrong? Not that I’ve seen. What we know is that both nailed a focus group, both understood the thinking behind the cancer ad, and both angled to be more than secretaries. Major difference at this stage of their careers is that Peggy boinked Pete instead of Don, and Megan has a way with kids. Peggy is a poor plenipotentiary for your verdict, I think. By rejecting Joan’s compartmentalization, Peggy affirms her support of the idea of office incest. And it’s hard not to see a touch of envy in her ghasted flabber. What of that? Myself, I don’t prefer to cede my concludin’ to any fictional characters, but Henry’s apothegm cuts both ways. “Coming clean” is as illusory a fresh start as a younger wife. Lives do carry on, with mess, and nothing about Don’s engagement, notwithstanding its precipitousness, and notwithstanding his track record, belies that. What you say about self-destruction, I have a hard time relating to the episode’s events. If Don stayed in Cali and holed up with the niece, maybe. In the event, he chose a partner for the SCDP foxhole, and the inevitable disappointments won’t ipso facto prove next season that the inevitable disappointments of a different foxhole partner would have been superior, morally or otherwise.
At bottom, on what does this vehement disapproval of Megan rest, except Faye’s ability to deliver some Old Testament retribution in the form of suffering? You can’t seriously be arguing that Anna should be viewed as a victim here, or that the Betty marriage would have worked out great for everyone if only Don had come clean to her long ago. The consequentialist in me has a hard time bemoaning that he won’t get to tell pretty lies for defense contractors. The utilitarian has a hard time building the case that federal prosecution of her father is what Sally Draper needs, not a cheerful governess stepmother. The soft beat with Sally in Anna’s house makes it pretty clear that there’s a path to integrating Don’s identities that doesn’t involve desertion charges.
Now, there’s as little reason to say Faye is maxed out as a parent as there is to say Megan is maxed out as a professional woman. But at this point, kids and their needs simply don’t seem to factor into her thinking. Her pitch to Don is You and Me Against the World. That’s her fantasy, and it’s its own kind of childish.
If the principle at stake is Don’s happiness/efficacy, I’d think some deference to his own evaluation of it is due. If the principle is fairness, it seems quite old-fashioned to me to insist on public bloodletting at the expense of Don’s children. Wasn’t it back in ’65 that the Highway Patrolman took Maria von Trapp for his wife? A man turns his back on his family, he just ain’t no good. A man does it twice, well, there just ain’t a word for a man like that sort of man.
I do sort of wish Weiner had eschewed the ludicrous identity switcheroo at the get-go.
Four seasons in, it really muddles what would have been a sufficiently interesting examination of pretty lies and infantile impulses as a purely professional imperative.
ltc
October 19, 2010 at 11:22 am
Curious that more discussion hasn’t swirled around Don’s knotty comparison of Megan to Peggy. Insensitive surely. Wrong? Not that I’ve seen.
Well, we know that when Megan got a chance to get a lesson in the business from Don, she seduced him instead. I think it’s reasonable to follow Peggy’s lead on how to understand that comparison…
I meant to say this earlier, but I don’t think that the only way for him to come to terms with his past is *necessarily* turning himself into the FBI. Faye seems to suggest that, but it’s not the only thing and certainly not what I’d advise him to do. The note with Sally suggests some progress, as does his bungled attempt to tell Megan at least a half-truth about where the ring came from.
In any event, Team Aniston forever.
gerrycanavan
October 19, 2010 at 2:17 pm
both very good points.
still, i’m not sure megan’s sexistentialism cost her all that much in the way of edification. don has more to teach about the business than roger sterling, but it’s more his example that instructs, and what you really need, as with danny, as with don the fur pusher, is a foot in the door.
brad pitt has been living a lie far longer than angelina’s been dressing him. he can save new orleans til the cows come home. if he wants to propitiate the demons he’ll man up and make juliette lewis a whole woman at last.
ltc
October 19, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Totally agree with the substance of what you’ve said, but not sure the “Internet consensus” is as negative on the finale as you say. Most if not all of the reviews linked here seem to be quite positive, for many of the reasons you discuss:
http://cultural-learnings.com/2010/10/18/mad-men-the-morning-after-critics-visit-tomorrowland/
Also, the Marcotte review was so wrong!
drbluman
October 19, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Amanda’s “abortion cop-out” criticism seemed especially unfair in the case of Joan, who not only has strong reasons to keep the child (she and her husband want to have children and are having trouble conceiving; she has genuine affection for Roger) but further, is a character known to have already had two abortions.
It’s true that the show has twice now told stories of characters (Peggy and Joan) deciding to carry accidental pregnancies forward, and placed the abortions outside of the narrative. But it’s hardly done so with a fraction of the ideological baggage of something like Juno or Knocked Up.
k-sky
October 19, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Peggy didn’t decide anything. She was unaware that she was pregnant until she was in labor, basically. And Peggy’s story dramatizes how a woman in her position would not want the child, would prefer to focus on her career. Pro-choice! Amanda’s criticism of the Joan episode was mostly that it was out of character for a show so focused on authenticity and honesty that a woman would, like in 99% of other TV dramatizations of abortion, get all the way to the clinic lobby before dramatically deciding she can’t go through with it. You can justify Joan’s actions on an individual basis, but for a show so committed to truth and to feminism it is a strange, cowardly sort of move to go with a bad-TV trope in that way and on that subject. I think a Joan-keeps-a-baby-without-telling-Roger subplot could’ve been handled much more deftly.
—-
The Megan vs. Peggy thing is interesting. Don doesn’t think of himself as a monster and Megan doesn’t think of herself as a trophy wife. Those nuances are what makes this show a good show and not a venn diagram. So Megan undoubtedly is interested in the business in some sense, and Don does think he’s paying Peggy a compliment by saying that Megan reminds him of her. But Peggy worked long and hard for her recognition, and Megan’s is incidental, but by marrying the boss, a la Jane (see! they both married their boss! there’s a similarity they have! not exactly an “ageist” comparison???), Megan is bounced on an equal plane with Peggy, to whom such a move must seem insulting. Re: Megan’s admiration of Peggy, she really does. We see that in the ep where it’s Peggy’s birthday and Megan congratulates her in the bathroom on her career. But there’s a sinister tinge to that since as Peggy says, everyone thinks Peggy’s success is partly due to her (falsely) sleeping with Don and not entirely to her own talent and hard work.
Dan
October 19, 2010 at 7:49 pm