I feel a little like Betty looks in the above picture. I have been staring at the post template for a full half hour, trying to figure out how to explain my problem with last night’s finale. It’s not what you might think.
To begin, let’s all agree that the most telling—and maybe even the saddest—scene of the episode was the one in the diner, with the milkshake. The chaos that erupts at the spill, the terror on Sally’s face and the tautness of Don’s, all are smoothly defused by Megan’s blithe “it’s just a milkshake,” and when the camera rests on Don again, it’s Dick Whitman we’re seeing. Yes, yes, it’s obvious that post-milkshake he and the kids were reacting to the ghost of Betty, to the fury she’d have unleashed in a similar circumstance, and yes, it’s obvious that in many ways Megan, to Don, is little more than an au pair with a willing vagina. An exceptional au pair, maybe even an exceptional vagina, but still: this is about much more than Betty. The look Don/Dick Whitman/Draper gives Megan is pitiful, and frightened, and right then, she is his mother—or, more accurately, the mother he never had. Anna was the closest he’d come to that sort of mothering presence, and now she was dead.
Megan gives him nothing but unconditional validation, love, and the assurance that everything is going to be all right. And she has enough of a brain that Don can convince himself that his impulses are not as simple as, say, those of the people he is so sure he understands well enough to sell products to, people he consistently views himself as separated from by the acuity of that understanding, despite the fact that this insight is only rarely applied to himself. This is the scenario with which we are presented, and looking at it, it SHOULD make sense that he proposes to Megan. So why doesn’t it ring true?
Let’s imagine another scenario, one that changes nothing about the milkshake scene except the expression on Don’s face. Let’s imagine that instead of scared, pitiable Dick Whitman, we saw Contemplative Don, wearing the quietly-observing-some-vital-truth expression we have seen hundreds of times over the past four seasons, shrewd without being acid. He’s regarding Megan with the children, contrasting her inevitably with Betty. He’s tired of everything being so complicated, he wants, as Betty said, a “fresh start,” youth and California, Megan’s straightforward French cleavage and adoring doe eyes. She’s even, as someone mentioned in last night’s thread, a Canadian citizen, so perhaps Mr. “I Don’t Want a Contract in Case I Have to Run” even nets himself a tidy escape hatch, should being Don Draper become untenable. Why not marry her?
I’d buy that. In fact, even leaving his scared-little-boy post-milkshake reaction intact, I buy Don making the decision to marry Megan. He doesn’t have to be aware of all of his motivations—the need for coddling, for instance—and he can studiously avoid examining his attraction to Megan too closely, allowing himself to be swept up in the rules-suspended atmosphere of vacation, the grief and confusion of divorce and death. I can believe he makes this rash decision, that he once again grasps at external escape as a means to internal clarity, convincing himself that there’s nothing wrong with wanting something easy and pure.
The problem, I suspect, is his supposed infatuation. First of all, let’s examine Don’s history with women. There was Betty, who represented the world he wanted for himself and vicariously for his children, a world as far removed from Dick Whitman’s childhood as humanly possible. For Don, she was as much a symbol as anything—I do believe he loved her, but I also believe that her rejection hurt him mostly because it stood for the rejection of his actual self by the world of “normalcy” he wanted acceptance from (acceptance he gained, ironically enough, partially because of the perspective granted him by his status as an outsider). But from the first episode of season one, we’ve seen that Betty failed to hold his attention. And while there have been many perfunctory fucks—dalliances of convenience, say, requiring little effort on his part, like Allison and the dozens of faceless one-night-stands—the women who have captivated Don and jolted him into pursuit and even vulnerability, have all demanded something of him and called him on at least a portion of his bullshit. Think of Rachel Mencken, Faye the LP, Bobbi Barrett, and Midge (who, pliable and pathetic just last episode, Don no longer felt anything for but pity). Don’t forget Sally’s teacher, who was very much like Megan in many ways, the chief difference being that she was less accommodating. For heaven’s sake, even THE HOOKER he hired was hired to slap and berate him during sex. I simply do not believe that Don was as compelled by Megan as we are apparently supposed to think he was. I’M not compelled or even convinced by Megan, are you? And every intimate scene of the two of them, beginning with the one in the office, has felt inexplicably flat and unbelievable, lacking in chemistry and seemingly reliant upon some underpinning of Megan’s nebulous character that has been insufficiently established.
If the milkshake scene was the most telling, the least believable has to have been the scene of the proposal. And now that I’ve pondered and ruminated and likely bored you all to death, I am certain that the fact of the proposal was not what I’ve had a hard time swallowing. It was Don. Or more specifically, Don and Megan.
To his credit, Jon Hamm sold Don as flushed and fevered with a manic, hopeful, self-deluding love. But all of the writing up to this point, in this episode and the ones before it, didn’t. The Don in the proposal scene reminded me a little of the Don we saw selling furs, and I wholeheartedly believe that when that Don proposed to Betty, his face looked very like the face we saw proposing to Megan last night. Of course he’s NOT that Don anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. That Don wanted simplicity, too, not yet realizing that no one throws themselves toward simplicity in such a desperate, concerted fashion unless they already are far too complicated to inhabit it. He has seemed to become all too aware of this, now, over the past few seasons, of the burden and impossibility of outrunning yourself, and the costs (his brother, for one) of trying to. Don may be one of the least self-aware savants of human nature I’ve ever encountered, but he isn’t Roger, and he knows that wanting a clean slate and being one are not the same thing. Just because he wants to be, because he is feeling pulled by the same forces he described as tugging at the teen set during his ACS pitch, yearning for another chance at the family life he thought he was getting the first time around…well, wishing doesn’t make it so.
People do crazy things for love, but what has there been to make Don’s love for Megan plausible? I’d have had an easier time believing in a rash proposal to some fascinating nanny he met and fell for in California, one who presumably gave us, the audience, reason to believe in her captivating powers. But as it stands, I could muster belief only for his decision to marry Megan being a wistful leap toward the suspension of disbelief (in which case we still ought to have seen some suggestion of awareness, of the distance inherent in nostalgia), or that it was a more calculated choice. Either way, a decision, and driven by something other than a passion for which we’ve seen no evidence. A decision would better fit with Don’s obvious guilt when calling Faye, a guilt that seemed more about a niggling, shamefaced knowledge that he had made a choice (and that she knew it) than it was about hurting her with news of his engagement. When he said “we fell in love, it happens,” did he seem like a man regretful and sorry for the hurt he had caused, but secure in the certainty that it had been out of his control? The heart, after all, wants what it wants! Do any of us believe that Don could so successfully fool himself as to believe his own words? I certainly don’t, and the last scene of the episode seems to back me up. Alas, most of the other scenes of Megan and Don in latter half of the hour give the impression that several pages of the script were lost. Not because of the events themselves, or even the abbreviated timeline, but because nothing in these scenes appears to realistically support or drive the characters’ precipitous flight toward action. This despite the fact that, as I’ve said, there were plenty of things that would have.
Henry Francis remarked in this episode that there are no fresh starts, but does it seem to anyone else like Matt Weiner wants us to believe otherwise?
{I’ll be back again next week for more end-of-season Mad Men talk. God knows there’s plenty more to discuss.}
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