There's No Way Megan Draper Is Already Dead, but Don Draper Might Be
Earlier this week we clued you in to some of the Mad Men conspiracy theories out there—and why they may or may not lead to a big surprise in the last three episodes of season six. Now there's a new myth circulating and, boy, is it totally insane and only slightly plausible.
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The idea—get this—is that Megan Draper is already dead. And soon, all will be revealed. The complex theory comes via Vulture from Uproxx's Dustin Rowles, who also happened to be the conspiracy theorist who clued us into his slightly more believable theory that Megan is in some way connected to Manson murder victim Sharon Tate.
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So what makes Rowles think that Megan's dead? (As in, like, she's been some sort of ghost.) Well, there's last Sunday's episode, in which Don hallucinated an image of his wife while under the influence of hashish at a party in California, thousands of miles away from her. Rowles writes:
First, some context: Don has a history of hallucinating the dead. As you recall, when Don was suffering from a hot tooth, he hallucinated his dead brother, Adam. He’s had other hallucinations of his dead family members. But, you’re saying: It’s one thing to hallucinate, but it’s another to have foresight in your hallucinations. How could he possibly know if Megan is dead?
It’s not without precedent. Recall in another even more memorable instance, Don hallucinated a dead person before he even knew she was dead. The night Anna Draper died, he saw an apparition of her with a suitcase (he was informed the next morning of her death of cancer), so his hallucinations do have prescience.
Rowles goes onto theorize that Don could have hallucinated Megan when he was temporarily drowned in the pool, meaning that he was seeing a kind of afterlife of which he would be a part. Rowles then looks for evidence inside the ever-vague "on the next episode of Mad Men" preview clip that ran after Sunday's episode. Now, we have never, even placed much faith on these brief, confusing, much lampooned scenes—Mad Men's scenes-from-the-next tease is perhaps the least informative on television. But Rowles finds a lot to work with. For instance, Megan is wearing red and black, the same colors which Lane Pryce wore before his suicide.
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The question then becomes when exactly would Megan have died. Sure, Megan hasn't really been interacting with a lot of people on the show as of late. On Sunday's episode, she only spoke to Don. In the one before that, she interacted with Don and her cast mate, in the privacy of her home and then on the set of their soap opera, in that funny wig. So did she die after she discussed, on the phone in this past Sunday's episode, the riots at the Democratic National Convention with Don, only for them to wish each other a very dramatic goodbye? Or was it after he gets home from his trip to California and goes straight to the office? It couldn't have happened in the prior episode when she had that dreamy, almost lesbian encounter with her fellow actress. Right? Right?
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Still, we're not sure. It seems awfully gutsy, even for Mad Men. The other possibility, you know, is that Don is dead or will die. Maybe this is more likely. You know, Megan did tell Don to take a swim. And then he did, sort of, and nearly drowned.
Speculate morbidly.
