DAILY DRAPER:  

 

DON BUYS THE WORLD A COKE  

 

    

Entertainment Weekly
Posted May 17 2015 — 11:26 PM EDT
 

“You only like the beginnings of things,” someone once told Don. Well, Don isn’t the only one. As viewers, we love the beginnings of things: Remember the excitement of discovering this little 1960s drama eight years ago on some channel called AMC? The beginnings are always so full of possibility. Maybe that’s why, for all of our wild theories about what will happen, the endings never satisfy us. 

I I'd like to buy the world a home And furnish it with love

Grow apple trees and honey bees And snow white turtle doves

I'd like to teach the world to sing (Sing with me)

In perfect harmony (Perfect harmony)

I'd like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company (That's the real thing)
 

As I wrote last week, it’s often hard to tell the difference between endings and beginnings on Mad Men. Don Draper keeps starting over, only to find himself right back where he started. This show is a time machine, going backward and forward, always taking us back to the same place. “You can put this behind you,” Don tells Anna’s niece, Stephanie. “It’s easier if you move forward.” But moving forward is moving backward. Progress doesn’t exist. 




"It's Toasted.  The first pitch we saw from Don/Dick.  The first and last pitches were the only real-life ad campaigns used in the show.

 

When people talk about the 1960s, they often say that it was a time of great change. The irony is that Don is supposed to be this great symbol of that era, and yet his refusal to change has defined the show. That’s true right down to the end, as he heads back to California to return Anna’s ring and ends up joining Stephanie at an Esalen-style retreat in Big Sur. He’s just had an emotional breakthrough with some stranger named Leonard, who tells a metaphorical story about closing the refrigerator door that echoes the show’s larger themes about doorways. 

Though when Don hugs the guy, it’s a bad sign of what’s to come. (“Does hugging feel honest?” the guru asks the group earlier in the episode.) The next thing you know, Don is sitting cross-legged on a cliff, listening to the guru insist that “the new day brings new hope,” maybe even “a new you.” 

Betty made a Coke ad earlier in the series.

 

Watching this, you might think, Don Draper has finally traded the corporate world for something meaningful! But the second you hear those voices singing in that Coke jingle, it’s clear that he has taken this authentic experience and commodified it. He’s just made the most famous ad for one of the most famous companies in the world.

 

 

How fitting that a guy whose whole life has been a lie would invent a campaign called

“The Real Thing.”  

 

 

Is this a depressing ending? A happy one? Your answer probably comes down to whether you believe, as Stan does, that there’s more to life than work. 

 

“People come and go, no one says goodbye,” Don complains of the hippies at the retreat. But he’s really talking about himself.

 

As for Don, did he end up learning anything? I would’ve loved to believe that Don Draper could’ve reinvented himself as Jack Kerouac, just like Bert Cooper implied, hitchhiking out West, following America in his shiny car into the night. I’d love to believe that Don could’ve endlessly followed the same milk and honey route that Kerouac’s hero, Jack Dulouz, followed in Big Sur, leaving everything behind at the height of his career to be alone in the California wilderness. But in the end, Jack Dulouz ended up right back in New York, and I’ll bet Don Draper did, too. The end is just another new beginning. And even in the New Age, you’re still the old you.

 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• “Your baby is going to spend the rest of his life staring at the door, waiting for you to walk in,” a woman at the hippie retreat tells Stephanie. She pretty much just summed up Don’s mother issues. Before he gets to the retreat, we see him sleeping with yet another woman who takes his money before she has sex with him, just like Diana, just like many other women he has slept with as he tries to make peace with the prostitute mother he lost so long ago.

• “A lot has happened,” Don says. It’s an understatement that sums up the last eight years pretty well. I will really miss this show.