MAD MEN: “TOMORROWLAND”
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST

Mad Men wraps up a fourth season of secrecy

The play-out music for the season finale of Mad Men was Sonny and Cher's glutinous 1965 hit “I Got You Babe”. That tied in very nicely with what Don Draper said, early in the episode, about teenagers being sentimental: "Have you heard their music?" He was talking to the bigwigs of the American Cancer Society, pitching about a possible campaign to keep teenagers from smoking. Which, on Don's return to the office, allowed Roger to get off a casual one-liner awesome even by his standards: "Did you get cancer?"

And with everyone at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce smoking as much as ever, Roger's joke could be blackly funnier than he meant it to be.

Like any long-running drama with depth to it, Mad Men is an echo chamber. That's true over the series as a whole, and within individual episodes. A few weeks ago, Roger told Joan, carrying his baby, that if she wanted to go ahead and have it, her husband, Greg, stationed in Vietnam, would never know; plenty of GIs in the Second World War had consented to be fooled the same way. This season damn near concluded with Joan telling Greg over the phone how nicely her pregnancy was progressing and him lapping it up. That she hadn't in fact had an abortion was one of the most satisfying revelations of the season. Not morally satisfying, necessarily, but dramatically: it was both surprising and believable. It also means that Joan, generally one of the more honest characters, is going to sail into the next season living a lie. Chances are that Roger's urbanity will take a hit as well.

A closer internal rhyme: Don is bequeathed the engagement ring of the real Don Draper, the dead man whose identity he stole and whose wife he came to love, with the injunction "you shouldn't play around with this." And he uses it to propose to Megan, the secretary he hardly knows, which is playing around on a grand scale. Judging from the traffic online, this last narrative development has made the episode the most hated thing on television since the ending of The Sopranos. It's been denounced as soap opera.

There probably is something of soap opera in Mad Men, in the sense that we get involved with the characters as if they were real people, and start handicapping their futures. Real soap, though, depends on shock and predictability, as opposed to logic and surprise; it also wants you to love or hate everybody. Mad Men is being condemned for not being soap-opera enough: for Don not behaving as people would like him to behave. He has continually taken one step forward and then the same step back, and now he's done it again. Having told his previous lover some of the truth about himself, he's retreated into renewed cover-up. If Jon Hamm's performance in the proposal scene seemed, for once, less than convincing, it's because Don was hardly convincing himself; he was behaving, in fact, like a sentimental teenager. The season's closing image found him waking up next to his fiancee and looking longingly through a window. That engagement may not even make it to the altar.

Don's a fitting leader for a cast of characters who cheat - themselves mainly - and suffer and survive. (Some viewers were betting on whether Roger would commit suicide by the end of the season. He's still there.) The actual business of advertising has mostly faded into the background, along with the '60s historical bulletins, and the show is the better for it. This season, the best ever, was at its weakest in a caper episode, in which plot displaced character. Its best scenes have been the brief one of Joan at the abortion clinic, a miracle of economy and subtext; and, longer but equally suggestive, the long alcohol-fuelled rapprochement of Don and Peggy, the heroine and the anti-hero, the professional equals who, in a better world or perhaps an alternate universe, would be made for one another. Even in this one, they both know it, and that unacknowledged ache, breaking surface at long, judiciously spaced intervals, is the show's secret motor, the prime example of what makes it good. Soap wouldn't know from subtext.