The 'Mad Men' Series Finale: A Sweet, Self-Conscious Kiss-Off

Mad Men concluded its run on Sunday night with a warm hug of an ending, an episode written and directed by show creator Matthew Weiner that was in keeping with this final half-season’s emphasis on slow pacing and fast inner growth for many of its key characters. The extra-long edition was simultaneously very much in keeping with its 1960s time-period, but also jarringly 21st-century in its sensibility. What Mad Men did decisively was tell its audience that the entire initial premise for this series — the glamorous but soul-depleting depiction of big-time advertising — was something to be rejected.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE SERIES FINALE OF MAD MEN.

Don’s daytripper perambulations around the country included a little high-speed car-riding in Utah, where his series of chameleon changes: Here, tinkering on a Bonneville, he’d transformed into a beefcake mechanic whose magical ever-replenishing bankroll mesmerized the local yokels.

He learned of Betty’s cancer via Sally over the phone, talked to Betty on the phone for a halting, emotional conversation that left them both in tears.

It was hammered home to the viewer — Weiner never made any point this season that wasn’t nailed into our skull with repeated pounding — that children (Don and Betty’s children, at least) must often act more like adults than their parents, who are prone to fall apart, mentally or physically.

Peggy and Joan continued their Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves exchanges early on in the episode, briefly considering the formation of their own small production firm, to be called “Harris Olson.” But Peggy decided, ultimately, to stay at McCann-Erickson and found herself — like Don, like Betty — speaking from the heart over the telephone, to her office-buddy Stan. In a scene that was at once heartwarming and rom-com corny, Stan and Peggy professed their love to each other.

Joan, by contrast, was failed in the romance department by Richard and in the business department by Peggy, and was shown striking out on her own. Her final moment was meant to be Joan’s Happy Ending — a female-led small business — but it rang ludicrously false: Why should we think Joan will have a successful time of it, based on all the pernicious sexism she’s been subjected to in the other 99 percent of the series? 

Related: ‘Mad Men’ Series Finale Recap: There’s No Place Like ‘Om’

The finale operated like a greatest-hits collection. Roger and Julia Ormand’s Marie: happy as deux palourdes in a French café. Pete and Trudy and the kids: grinning jet-setters in their own private plane. Even Don’s abandoned secretary, given the heave-ho at McCann, said cheerfully that she’d land on her feet, but not before uttering one of those characteristically uncharacteristic Big Meaning Of Life lines that Weiner shoves into the mouth of anyone he randomly chooses: “There are a lot better places than here.”

Which is what Don discovered — or we were forced to swallow that he discovered — when, in the show’s final destination-point for him, he ended up at a fictionalized version of the Esalen Institute, the Big Sur, California, hotbed of meditation, yoga, Gestalt therapy, and nerve-soothing serenity.

Weiner teased us throughout the episode with suggestions that Don might do what many Mad Men fans had predicted he’d do since they first saw the show’s opening credits of a man falling from the sky — that is, die a suicidal death. This night, Don had a panic attack after hearing the news about Betty that led to a phone call (what a night this was for phone-chat!) with Peggy so alarming in its recitation of his past sins and litany of unworthiness that it left Peggy shaken and stirred — a martini of concern, worried that Don was about to off himself. (That concern soon melted away, forgotten like the dirty-slush snows of wintery Manhattan, once Stan put his bear-hug on her.)

And there was a last-minute shot of Don standing on the edge of a small cliff overlooking West Coast water — would he throw himself onto unforgiving rocks below?

Nah. Instead, he joined a group-therapy circle that, among other things, was serving to protect the secret identity of Supergirl (Helen Slater in a nice cameo). There, the usually-skeptical Don suddenly laser-focused (did they have lasers back then?) on the testimony of Leonard, a nebbish in a powder-blue sweater who was a refugee from life as an invisible suburban drone: “It’s like no one cares that I’m gone.” Something in Leonard’s tone, at this point in Don’s increasingly fragile existence, made him suddenly open to revelation and change. Arising to hug and cry it out with Leonard, Don also embraced the new counterculture he’d been despising, and Mad Men ended not with a bang but an ommmmm — a meditative hum delivered in the lotus position, a crinkly movement of Don’s mouth in the closing seconds suggesting the smile of contentment.

Believable? Not for a second. Why would we ever think that this will be Don’s eternal bliss? This is a mad man whom we’ve watched spend years seeing through/getting tired of/scorning absolutely every answer to unhappiness. Don has always been doomed to be a clear-eyed realist. If this Esalen episode had been slotted in to, say, the third or fourth season of Mad Men, it would have been followed by a scene in which Don shakes off the mystical cobwebs in his brain, maybe punches out the smug therapist, and returns to Manhattan to drink himself that much closer to the gritty gutter.

Instead, the series closed out with the actual McCann-Erickson commercial for Coke, a mass peace-’n’-love singalong “Buy the World a Coke,” aka, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony),” a sweet send-off that could also be interpreted (and what was the entire decade run of Mad Men, if not a playground for multiple interpretations?) as  Weiner’s kiss-off to viewers as suckers, sheep who would (and did) follow him anywhere: In this case, with a Don who would probably go on to create that Coke ad.

In the beginning, Weiner’s achievement on Mad Men was his reproduction of not only the look and sound of the ‘60s, but its mind-frame as well, without regard to contemporary dissonance — or rather, taking pleasure in that dissonance. Thus all those early reviews cooing variations on, “Oooh, look — they’re smoking/drinking at noon/eating pastries any time they want!” The last episodes, by contrast, are all too aware of current sensibilities — they played to them, pandered to them in some cases. No moment is more emblematic of this than the shot of Peggy, in the episode “Lost Horizon,” making her entrance into McCann-Erickson wearing shades, a cig dangling from her lips, her mouth curled into an f-you smirk. Twitter went nuts the night that aired; you-go-girl GIFs abounded. Peggy was asserting her agency in the agency!

Except for one thing: That posture of Peggy’s had nothing to do with her character development (it was totally out of character, even if you buy the idea that she was emboldened by having a few drinks with Roger). That shot was a sop to the audience, a feel-good moment lest the natives get too restless during Don Draper’s endless car ride to oblivion or syndication. Weiner knew all this on some level, which helps explain the highly conventional happy-ending he gave Peggy (enfolded in the arms of a big lug she suddenly adores) and most of the rest of the core characters.

One thing I’ll be glad never to experience again is Mad Men-mania, that aura Weiner instilled in much of his audience that he’d created something so carefully thought-through, that every syllable, every gesture, every ashtray had a larger metaphorical meaning. Mad Men led to a little cottage industry of explication among its fans, too often taking the form of freshman-college lit-class satisfaction in identifying symbols (ah, the windows! The doors!) and themes (existential despair! Alienation in the age of Aquarius!).

In the end, all the doors and windows opened out into merely sunny days for nearly everyone. Weiner seems to have concluded: All that striving, all that angst — for what? He did what he set out to accomplish: He created the show he wanted with complete artistic control and enshrined spoiler-phobia as a salient characteristic of the New Golden Age of Television.

How these achievements will ultimately be judged is not for a humble recipient of Weiner’s iron-fisted largesse to predict. Me, I’m dusting off my hippie beads, dabbing my ear lobes with patchouli oil, and joining Don in a blissed-out, Allen Ginsberg-style meditation of satisfaction that this is the end.