Mad Men – Season 5 Episode 13 – Recap and Review – The Phantom – Season Finale via Rickey.org
“Are you alone?”
This question closes the episode, but it more or less encapsulates this season of Mad Men, routinely among television’s finest hours. Don Draper has always been lonely. It’s the nature of the Don Draper persona. No one can ever truly know who he is, because that would involve bringing Dick Whitman out into the light, and Don would prefer to keep Dick Whitman dead and buried, even if Dick Whitman’s family members aren’t so keen to oblige.
The specter of Don’s late brother, Adam Whitman, haunts him throughout “The Phantom,” the red gashes of the noose still visible around his neck, harkening back to his suicide in season one’s “Indian Summer,” after being rejected by Don. Lane’s suicide has forced Don to confront the reality of Dick Whitman in a more direct manner than he has all season. One of the big revelations of the first half of season five was that Don actually told Megan about his life as Dick Whitman, showing that this was a woman Don trusted, at least at the capacity of a wife, far more than he ever trusted Betty. More than that, it showed Don as a man who might well have changed altogether, substituting open honesty for cloak-and-dagger secrecy. It’s somewhat jarring to see this Don Draper, the Don Draper who remains monogamous and relatively honest with his wife. But Don has played the faithful husband all season, and it’s hard to see if it was out of a genuine love for Megan or more out of an abstract sense of atonement, the desire to get marriage “right” this time. Or, simpler still, perhaps Don doesn’t want to die alone or, worse, unloved.
Of course, that closing question, and the accompanying reaction shot of Don, asks us to consider that Don is no less alone now than he was when the series started. Knowing about Dick Whitman doesn’t mean Megan knows Don any better than he knows her. When Megan asks Don to suggest her name for a part in a commercial for an ad campaign the agency is fronting, Don initially balks, but later reconsiders after holding a private viewing of Megan’s film reel in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices. On film, Megan is everything she no longer is around Don: vivacious, effusive, girlish, even enigmatic, with her dark hair thrown into relief against her translucent skin, made grainy on black-and-white film. Don’s face is aglow to see this side of her, but the smile diminishes as he comes to realize the hand he’s had in killing this Megan.
However, Megan’s mother also has a hand in doing her damndest to kill this Megan. Not unlike Lane Pryce’s widow, who chides Don for encouraging her late husband’s ambitions, Marie Calvet tells her daughter outright that not every girl can be what she wants to be. Megan’s mother seems far more interested in bumping unfortunates with Roger Sterling (whose ass I’m not entirely sure we needed to see) and switching over to her native French to call her daughter a stuck-up bitch than in actually providing emotional support. Earlier in the episode, a slip-up in translation shows her hand. When Megan discovers that the film reel she paid to have made was only part one of a scheme to get young ingenues to join an acting academy, Mrs. Calvet laments, in English, how the company takes advantage of “hopeless people,” to which Megan takes offense. Mrs. Calvet then switches immediately to her native French to elaborate that she thinks it’s a shame that the company takes advantage of “people’s hopes.”
This is a case where the use of English gets at Mrs. Calvet’s true meaning better than her use of French. She doesn’t think her daughter is talented, and it’s a strange conflict to offer the audience, in the sense that we haven’t seen enough of Megan the Actress to know if she’s really any good (if memory serves, we’ve basically had the Cool Whip pitch to base our perceptions of her talent on, and by that logic, Don should probably look up Lee Strasberg’s number because he was just as good). Yet Megan’s mother would likely have seen her daughter in any number of productions and would be a better judge of her talent than us. But we aren’t entirely sure which side to believe. Is Megan awful or is her mother just bitter? To what extent are parents supposed to lie to their talentless children? Do you believe in them at all costs, or do you try to brace them to accept the harsh realities of the world and grab for lower-hanging fruit?
In Megan’s mother’s case, the fruit she implores her daughter to reach for isn’t exactly hanging low (well, he might have been, but this isn’t HBO). Marie just doesn’t understand why Megan wouldn’t want to give Don a family. I’m sure there are many who would gladly take Megan’s place and bear Don a nation of Draper children, but it’s less about getting with child for want of grandchildren than it is about putting roots down. Marie is imploring her daughter to do what she can to keep Don, since men like Don Draper don’t tend to grow on trees, and Mrs. Calvet likely knows that such a man is given to infidelity. To that end, it could almost be considered a kindness that Mrs. Calvet is telling Megan to give up on her dream, if it means saving her marriage and assuring herself a safe, financially secure existence. But then, what is a marriage when it’s built on such flimsy foundations?
The answer is that it isn’t much of a marriage at all, as we see with Pete Campbell, whose dalliance with Beth, the wife of a commuter buddy, reaches its apex and conclusion. When Beth calls Pete at his office, it’s the realization of his fantasy from “Dark Shadows” several weeks back, and yet he doesn’t jump at the opportunity to indulge it. He’s been wounded by Beth’s rejections, and he doesn’t want to be hurt any more than he was by his brief flirtations with the girl in his driver’s ed course earlier this season. But Pete gives in, regardless, after Beth suggests that it might possibly be their last chance to be together. Though we don’t understand why it would necessarily be their last chance to see one another, it’s something that Pete sets aside in the moment, driven by the prospect of finally having something he truly wants. It’s rare to ever see Pete Campbell as rapturously happy as he is with Beth, and even rarer to want to see him happy, given that he’s more or less the Joffrey Baratheon of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices.
But he’s happy in that moment, in spite of the knowledge that when Beth departs, it’s not to go back to her husband, but instead to go to a psychiatric treatment facility to endure yet another round of electroshock therapy, among other treatments, to deal with her depression. Pete, being Pete, assumes that the rules don’t apply to him, and that he’ll simply think of a clever lie to get him into the treatment facility to visit Beth. The truth of what awaits him there is that Beth, as a result of her treatment, no longer remembers him. Though the resulting conversation between the two is a bit on the nose, it goes to the heart of what makes Pete Campbell who he is – a man who utilizes compromise as a method of consolation. When he can’t get what he wants, he compromises so as not to go home empty-handed. He didn’t really want Trudy, but married her anyway out of some nebulous sense of married life being something he was supposed to want. Pete Campbell wants something to show for his life, so he compromises in order to have something to show, even if it’s not really what he wanted. These compromises are now coming back to haunt him, since he now recognizes just how little he wants to be with Trudy in their quaint suburban house, with an in-ground pool and a fancy car he barely knows how to drive.
The sting of all this comes when Pete returns home after being thrown off a train after fighting with Beth’s husband. Pete allays Trudy’s concerns by claiming his injuries are the result of falling asleep at the wheel. This leads to Trudy insisting that she and Pete go hunting for an apartment in the city just for Pete, which is exactly what he wanted. However, Pete only wanted the apartment to carry on with Beth, and Beth is gone, leaving nothing but the compromise of an apartment in Manhattan and the possibility of using it for some other affair that won’t fulfill his needs, because he’s Pete Campbell, and he’s married to his own lack of fulfillment.
Which brings us back to the Prime Minister of the Unfulfilled, Don Draper. He suffers through the episode with a “hot tooth,” a localized infection that threatens to abscess. The pain prevents him from doing even the most menial actions, such as kissing Megan. It’s an ache that prevents him from showing his wife any intimate affection, which upsets Megan later in the episode when, in a depressed and drunken state, she feels she really needs the intimacy. Don’s solution to this ache is to wait it out. It’ll just go away on its own, he argues. It always does. But as the episode comes to a close and Don gets Megan the commercial after all, he feels no sense of gratification, no sense that he can have the Megan he saw in the film reel. Fixing a problem didn’t do him any more good than what waiting it out would have. He feels empty regardless.
It’s a moment in which Don’s despair seems to seize hold of him. A gorgeous tracking shot follows Don as he walks away from the set of the commercial, the darkness consuming him as the square of light on which his wife stands recedes in the background. And then we’re in a bar, and it’s like old times, Don ordering an Old Fashioned, a cigarette on his lips. Don is ignoring the dentist’s instructions not to smoke for twenty-four hours, but if an abscess threatens to impinge upon intimacy with his wife, he doesn’t seem that concerned at the prospect of its return. The tracking shot charts Don’s movement as he passes from one phase of his life back into another, more familiar phase, crossing the threshold back to a lonely spot at the bar, to the Don Draper of old. “You Only Live Twice” plays in the background as a beautiful woman comes over to proposition Don on behalf of her even more stunning friend across the bar.
“Are you alone?”
Hell, aren’t we all at one time or another?
Odds and Ends:
-I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the return, after a one-episode absence, of Peggy Olson. She doesn’t get to do much outside of being ordered by her boss to take up smoking, but she does share a poignant scene with Don in a movie theater (though I did have lingering concerns that they might have Peggy give him a “professional” like she did the stoner in “Far Away Places.” Then I remembered this show is too good to ever have those two hook up). It’s a brief scene, but further touches on the episode’s thesis about Don’s concerns over people leaving him.
-The offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce are expanding, and though discussion of expansion plans are not necessarily exciting television, it was all worth it for that shot of the partners on the empty office floor, looking out the windows (see below).
-Embeth Davidtz is quite excellent as Lane Pryce’s widow Rebecca. It’s a brief scene, but it’s great stuff, with Rebecca going toe to toe with Don and denying him his absolution-by-payment (although $50,000 in 1967 dollars is nothing to scoff at).
-I will say this: if John Slattery doesn’t utilize a stunt ass, color me impressed. Must be on that One-A-Day regiment.
-An excellent season of Mad Men, serving as Homeland‘s starkest competition for the Best Drama Series Emmy. We’ll see if Mad Men can keep its undefeated streak in tact. And, hopefully, we won’t have to wait a year and a half for season 6.
Courtesy of AMC
