#MadMenFinale: Bye-bye Don Draper. Have a good life
It's the fall of 1970, and Don Draper's road trip to perdition has finally taken him to a flower power retreat in California. Here, at a yoga session, a bearded man with beads around his neck asks the participants, including Don, to face a random person standing next to them. He tells them to look at that person and express what they're feeling without saying anything. Don is face-to-face with an old woman with frizzy white hair. Around him, two women are hugging, and a man and a woman are giggling as they touch each other's faces. Don, clearly not into it, is still wondering what to do when the woman gives him a violent, two-handed shove. Even in a room brimming with love, Don finds rejection, disgust, repulsion.
Having followed Don Draper's life as a top advertising executive with a tormented past and an unravelling present, the old woman's sentiment is perfectly understandable. Several times over the years, we've felt exactly the same way about him. But some part of us also wants to sit her down and tell her, since we know Don so well, that he's not really all that bad.
In a booming television industry at the peak of its creativity that keeps giving us such shades-of-grey characters as Walter White (Breaking Bad), Tyrion Lannister (Game of Thrones) and Francis Underwood (House of Cards), Don is the least evil of the lot but also somehow the least likeable. Though he's not a drug dealer, a whoring kinslayer, or a murderous politician, his frustrating lack of clarity makes him a pseudo-macho male figure that is difficult to celebrate. But this also makes him the most real of all these famous lead protagonists. He may not be the fairest, the darkest, or greatest of them all. But he's easily the most layered.
From the multicoloured office of Sterling Cooper to the oak-panelled boardrooms of McCann-Erickson, Mad Men took us on a seven-season journey at a time when America was losing its bearings even while it was gaining a conscience. So, as the series comes to a close, we say goodbye to more than just boozy afternoons, chauvinistic copywriters, and dolled-up secretaries. We bid farewell to a cast of characters who slowly come of age. Peggy Olsen finally lets someone into her life. Roger Sterling eventually settles in the arms of a woman of his own vintage. Pete Campbell and his wife Trudy get the Learjet life they always wanted. And Joan Harris discovers that she favours drive over comfort.
In the end, it's really all about Don. A few minutes before the show finishes forever, Don is sitting in a group where a man talks about feeling alone, insignificant, invisible in a home that seemingly has everything - a wife, children, family gatherings, laughter. As the man breaks down, Don gets up, walks over to him, and starts crying as well.
But in the last scene, when Don is doing yoga with companions of every creed and colour, chanting "Om", seemingly experiencing a real emotion for the first time since the series began, the image blends into the similarly styled 1971 Coca Cola "hilltop" commercial. Whether or not Don went back to make that advertisement for McCann is immaterial. Mad Men is telling us that for every real sentiment there is a contrived, manufactured United-Colors-of-Benetton-style emotion pushing us towards the 24x7 Ferris wheel of consumption. And Don may not have realised it until that moment, but Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, knew all along. So bye-bye Don Draper. Have a good life, and thanks for all the Luckies. "Lucky Strike: It's Toasted."