DAILY DRAPER:
DON ON THE MEANING OF LIFE
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| Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Season 1, Episode 1
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'Mad Men' recap, season 7 episode 13: 'The Milk and Honey Route' feels like the end
AMC
Wow. That may have been the most penultimate-y penultimate episode of a series I’ve ever seen. There’s a bleak finality to Sunday night’s Mad Men, “The Milk and Honey Route,” that’s at once suffocating and liberating.
This is a Don-centric episode, with barely a minute spent in an advertising office, as he continues his vagabonding he began last episode. It’s the episode in which we really get to know Oklahoma Don, who gets stopped for a few days during his cross-country roadtrip due to car troubles. I like Oklahoma Don. Plaid shirt-wearing, hair-flopping Don. Barefoot, typewriter-fixing Don. The Don who says he "was" in the advertising business, who has decided he's now retired. BATHING SUIT DON.
And I think Don likes him, too. Why else would he admit to a bunch of strangers (and fellow war veterans) his deepest, darkest secret? Well, half of his deepest darkest secret. ("I killed my CO." I also stole his identity.) The scenes at the Legion hall party were so good, so filled with tension (what’s he going to blurt out? Is someone going to recognize him as Dick Whitman?!), that the middle-of-the-night phone book beatdown Don’s new vet friends later give him rang real false and hokey. Not into that.
But bravo to Matthew Weiner and his team for slowly stripping Don of everything that makes him “Don” and getting him and us to that final shot: The erstwhile Dick Whitman, all alone in the middle of nowhere, sitting on a bus bench. It’s fitting, that Mad Men should end with an anticlimactic road trip toward middle-aged contentment, with Don’s slow journey to truth, to freedom from himself. I never did think Don would go out with a bang. Or a death. Or a jump from a plane. (Then again, who knows: There's still one episode to go.)
Pete’s the one with the plane connection in this episode, and a Midwest one, too, all in the form of a potential client good ol’ Duck Phillips is trying to get him to land. It marks Pete's big final season moment after spending lots of episodes lurking and smirking in the background. He gets what is arguably the most romantic speech ever delivered on Mad Men (“Say yes with your words, not just with your eyes”) when he persuades Trudy to take him back. Sure, it’s kind of sad that Trudy couldn’t find anyone better than Pete, and their reconciliation reeks of the second-time's-a-charm excitement Mad Men is so often dubious about. But the moment is perfect, because Trudy and Pete are actually a great match, neither one innocent or naive anymore. Who knows if they’re going to be happy in Kansas, but at least they’ll be miserable together. And isn’t that one of Mad Men’s biggest themes?
At this point, I feel at peace with where Mad Men is headed, like Don feels at peace on that park bench, and Betty feels at peace with her terribly unexpected diagnosis. At this point, can the show really top itself? Can it get better than "The Suitcase," or Don's carousel pitch, or Peggy's series/career-defining moment? Probably not. Best to go out the way it came in: Calm, cool, collected. Fade out on the back of Don Draper's head, perhaps. Though we'll be looking at a very different Don than the one we first met all those years ago.
This is a Don-centric episode, with barely a minute spent in an advertising office, as he continues his vagabonding he began last episode. It’s the episode in which we really get to know Oklahoma Don, who gets stopped for a few days during his cross-country roadtrip due to car troubles. I like Oklahoma Don. Plaid shirt-wearing, hair-flopping Don. Barefoot, typewriter-fixing Don. The Don who says he "was" in the advertising business, who has decided he's now retired. BATHING SUIT DON.
And I think Don likes him, too. Why else would he admit to a bunch of strangers (and fellow war veterans) his deepest, darkest secret? Well, half of his deepest darkest secret. ("I killed my CO." I also stole his identity.) The scenes at the Legion hall party were so good, so filled with tension (what’s he going to blurt out? Is someone going to recognize him as Dick Whitman?!), that the middle-of-the-night phone book beatdown Don’s new vet friends later give him rang real false and hokey. Not into that.
But bravo to Matthew Weiner and his team for slowly stripping Don of everything that makes him “Don” and getting him and us to that final shot: The erstwhile Dick Whitman, all alone in the middle of nowhere, sitting on a bus bench. It’s fitting, that Mad Men should end with an anticlimactic road trip toward middle-aged contentment, with Don’s slow journey to truth, to freedom from himself. I never did think Don would go out with a bang. Or a death. Or a jump from a plane. (Then again, who knows: There's still one episode to go.)
Pete’s the one with the plane connection in this episode, and a Midwest one, too, all in the form of a potential client good ol’ Duck Phillips is trying to get him to land. It marks Pete's big final season moment after spending lots of episodes lurking and smirking in the background. He gets what is arguably the most romantic speech ever delivered on Mad Men (“Say yes with your words, not just with your eyes”) when he persuades Trudy to take him back. Sure, it’s kind of sad that Trudy couldn’t find anyone better than Pete, and their reconciliation reeks of the second-time's-a-charm excitement Mad Men is so often dubious about. But the moment is perfect, because Trudy and Pete are actually a great match, neither one innocent or naive anymore. Who knows if they’re going to be happy in Kansas, but at least they’ll be miserable together. And isn’t that one of Mad Men’s biggest themes?
At this point, I feel at peace with where Mad Men is headed, like Don feels at peace on that park bench, and Betty feels at peace with her terribly unexpected diagnosis. At this point, can the show really top itself? Can it get better than "The Suitcase," or Don's carousel pitch, or Peggy's series/career-defining moment? Probably not. Best to go out the way it came in: Calm, cool, collected. Fade out on the back of Don Draper's head, perhaps. Though we'll be looking at a very different Don than the one we first met all those years ago.
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