Mad Men Season 6 Review

Full spoilers for the entirety of Mad Men Season 6 ahead:

There has always been a nastiness underpinning Mad Men ever since it began. The series, like so many post-Sopranos cable hits, was at its core about the exploits of a commanding asshole who you couldn't help but like. And also like the Sopranos, Matthew Weiner's training ground, the show became increasingly obsessed with destroying the façade of its main character that had so allured people from the beginning. In Season 4 we saw a thorough deconstruction of everything Don Draper had built himself up to be but the clever twist was that his supposed reawakening was founded on the same bullshit his original persona was. So with a new wife in tow he slept walk through most of Season 5, repressing the competitive womaniser of the past while the rest of SCDP imploded with their own dramas, before he was finally given the question that closed out last year and set up this one: Are you alone? With that question and the dramatic emphasis it was given we all expected a return to the Don of old but what we didn't know was how brutally strong that return would be. Six years in and Don had upgraded from anti-hero to villain protagonist, an asshole several steps above all his previous distasteful exploits. As Don became more unlikeable, less relevant and the Dick Whitman flashbacks started coming back it seemed like the show was approaching its endgame in the most obvious way possible, with the 60s moving on and leaving the bitter old Draper behind. But in the last hour of the season Weiner through a saving throw that retroactively improved the entire 13 episode batch. As it turned out the thorough ugliness that Don Draper had begun to exude was all leading up to the most tantalizing and unthinkable prospect for a final season: what if Don Draper can get better?

 The season began with the criminally underrated The Doorway (Episode 1) that saw Don reading Dante, playing surrogate father to the bride of a new army buddy, throwing up at a funeral, drunkenly pestering his doorman for an insider's perspective on death and switching lighters with a soldier, the last identifying object of Dick Whitman. Suffice to say, death and identity were on the show and Don's mind. Don seems to be at a crossroads but he's been at one so many time that its hard to really see anything different, indeed much of my reservations during the early parts of the season were about the show retreading old ground, particularly with Don's new mistress. The only difference was that the show seemed to acknowledge how repetitive these rhythms had become, with Roger pointing it out in the titular 'doorway' speech:

 What are the events in life? It’s like you see a door. The first time you come to it, you say, Oh, what’s on the other side of the door? Then you open a few doors. Then you say, I think I want to go over that bridge this time, I’m tired of doors. Finally you go through one of these things, and you come out the other side, and you realize, that’s all there are, doors, and windows and bridges and gates and they all open the same way and they all close behind you. Look, life is supposed to be a path, and you go along and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change you, change your direction. But turns out that’s not true. Turns out the experiences are nothing, they’re just some pennies you pick up off the floor, you stick in your pocket, and you’re just going in a straight line to you know where. 

 So Don's standing in the doorway, between his worst excesses and a sew sense of self-acceptance but according to Roger it's an arbitrary turning point. But television lives on these arbitrary turning points, moments that are given extra weight through framing more than anything particularly extraordinary about the events. This goes for 1968 as well, another doorway that has been seen and an unmatched turning point between normalcy and progression but 1968 was no more than a year where some stuff happened, like every other year, just another doorway that doesn't really change the direction of America's onward trajectory. So as SCDP, 1968 and Don stand in a doorway between small player and major company, normalcy and change and drunk repressed womaniser and a changed man respectively, its hard to say whether this means anything. Will the characters use these 'moments of change' to truly do something different? Well SCDP takes the plunge and pulls a huge merger while America gets scared and elect Richard Nixon and as for Don, who knows?

 But lets start with 1968, the year that we couldn't wait for the show to get its teeth into when it began but in its predictable eschewing of predictability Mad Men relegated most of the year's tumultuous events to the background, drawing more attention to its characters' striking ivory tower point of view and underlining Roger's nonchalance view on life and its false moments of change. The Vietnam War is merely a spectre in the distance that most of the characters agree is bad but dammit if they'll do anything about it. The first big 'event' episode, in the vein of the show's coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the death of JFK, is The Flood (Episode 5) which shows what happens when a bunch of rich white people are confronted by the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Everyone is suitably upset but there's a stiffness to their performances and indeed they are performances. Joan awkwardly hugs the lone black employee of SCDP and Pete gives an impassioned speech about how devastating the events are that is laughed at by his colleagues and most likely the audience. By the time RFK dies Don, and the show, can barely be bothered giving it the time of day, just another so-called tragedy piling up on top of another. The relationship between Mad Men's world and the social revolution that has been falsely historicized by many was best encapsulated by the frequently hilarious collapse of Peggy and her more counter cultural boyfriend Abe's relationship. She likes the idea of him as subversive figure in her life but seems to have little affection for him as a person while he seems besotted with her but cannot live with her ideals, which eventually ends their relationship. Mad Men has come along way with how it depicts the past. When the show began it could often be gratuitous in how it winked at the audience about the dated behaviour on screen and didactically hammered home how out of touch Madison Ave. was with the incoming 'change'. Now a more subtle approach has been given as the politics of SCDP are no longer wrong just unsettlingly phony. The insulating effect of those New York skyscrapers has never been more apparent and when Don brings up the war amongst GM execs, now that it has finally effected him personally, the chilly reaction is as if someone has smashed a window.

While last season felt like an ensemble piece more than ever before, this year actually featured the most substantial changes for the agency then we have seen. The tawdry price that the agency, or Joan to be specific, had to pay for the Jaguar account seems to be for nothing as SCDP finds itself caught in a void between niche agency and major player. In the major turning point of the season, For Immediate Release (Episode 6), Don hacks through the status quo with reckless swagger as he cuts Jaguar off and merges with rivals, and Peggy's new agency, Cutler, Gleason and Chaough. Alan Sepinwall pointed out how this episode mirrored last season's controversial The Other Woman but with Don playing meddling villain instead of protesting innocent bystander. In the course of the episode he undoes everything that has happened in that episode, he makes Joan's humiliating decision meaningless and drags Peggy back into the fold. Joan, usually an ally of Don's whose spared his nastier side, gives him a deserved verbal thrashing but it is obviously Peggy who sees the extent of his destruction in its fullest. She is caught between her new mentor, a more noble inversion of Don, and her old one, the obstacle she had to strike down to move forward. As she sees the warm, caring Ted, who she is falling in love with, be warped and dragged down by his competition with Don, she is more attune then ever to the full destructiveness of Don Draper. By the end of the season she has usurped Don as the head creative of the newly named SC & P but on the terms of others. In SCDP, reckless men like Don Draper and Roger Sterling get to make the decisions that shape the company while someone as smart and perceptive as Peggy is pulled along by their current.

 But this season was at its core about Don, which is hardly a new angle for the show but this year was a character study that was more focused than anything we have had in a while. The spirit of Dick Whitman was played up more than ever and like many I was weary of what seemed like one of the shows more superfluous and overplayed motifs. We got another brunette mistress in Sylvia who was there largely to illustrate how utterly ruthless and selfish Don could be in his womanising and by the time he descends into actual sado-masochist role playing it became clear that things were even worse than they seemed. We always knew that Don had intimacy issues, that he was raised by a fundamentalist in a whorehouse but this season we got a direct exploration of how damaging this experience was. Don is a damaged, even sick, man and while it seemed obvious he needs to confront this to 'get better', this year's arc made it clear how incapable he was of continuing with the Don Draper façade. When Sally sees him have sex with Sylvia it’s the last straw, he's passed on his destructive repressed sexuality to his child and he needs to confront it or do the same damage that was dealt to him in the whorehouse. At first he makes up some of the worst lies he ever has but its clear that the father persona he has constructed, one persona of many, is crumbling quickly. As the falsehood that defines him continues to corrode his functionality and destroys his one positive outlet, advertising, he is forced to make a choice: confront the past or become a bitter old relic. The final moment of the season is the most hopeful and poignant the series has ever given us, Don finally exposing himself to those who were once the most shielded from his true self, his children. Like The Sopranos, Mad Men's final episodes seem to hinge on whether its protagonist can take advantage of the epiphany given to them and perhaps find redemption. Does Don have a shot? For the first time since the series began I suspect he might.

 Its been a strong year for Mad Men, though not the strongest, and there's so much I haven't even touched upon (the magnificent Bob Benson arc is the most glaring omission). The show continues to use unconventional narrative and unique directorial flourishes as its main selling point against its peers. Episodes like the The Doorway (Episode 1-2) and The Crash (Episode 8) are some of the most visually distinct hours of television since The Sopranos. While their were more forgettable moments this year than last season (the stretch between the premier and the merger seemed aimless and frustrating on first watch) it all added up to a more cohesive whole. We've got high stakes going into the finale and I'm more interested in seeing how the series ends than ever before and this is precisely what a penultimate season of such an accomplished long-running series should aim for.