See You on the Dark Side of the Moon

MAD MEN: “WATERLOO”
AMC
THE NATIONAL POST

An unreal half-season finale has things looking up for Don Draper, but this is Mad Men, and nothing good can last

I always looked forward to seeing Robert Morse in Mad Men. Right from the beginning, there was something piquant about having Bert Cooper, founder and senior partner of the ad agency, played by an actor whose career-defining role had been in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In that musical, staged on Broadway in 1960 and later fairly faithfully filmed, Morse played J. Pierpont Finch, the window-washer who rises, through cunning and sneakiness and inspired opportunism, to the heights of tycoonery. It was pleasant to speculate that Bert's patrician present might have been preceded by just so shameless a past. And even if it hadn't, it seemed fitting that a featured role in a TV show that chronicles the '60s should be played by the star of that decade's first big theatrical hit: a hit that cartooned the Manhattan office culture that Mad Men has devoted itself to dismantling.

In Mad Men's later seasons Morse's role has diminished; whole episodes have gone by without him, and when he has appeared it has usually only been for a few moments. But they have been memorable moments. In the second episode (my favourite) of this past half-season, he stopped the world in its tracks when Dawn, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's first black secretary, was re-assigned to the reception desk as the result of a complicated, and discreditable, series of office machinations. Seeing her there, Bert complained that, though he was all in favour of the advancement of coloured people, he didn't think they should be advanced to where everyone could see them. And he'd seemed such a nice old codger.

Anyway, on Sunday, in the last episode of the first part of the bisected final season (I'm sorry this is so confusing; I don't do the scheduling) they killed Bert off, rather abruptly. One minute he, like all the other characters in their various locations, was sitting on the couch watching the 1969 moon landing; next moment Roger Sterling's phone rang with the sad news (though, in an artful touch we had to wait till the next scene to find out what it was). And then, equally abruptly, they brought him back. Don Draper walked away from Bert's eulogy, on the pretext of going to do some work, and then heard a familiar voice addressing him as "Don, my boy." The camera moved to show us a dapper Bert admonishing Don, in keeping with the episode's historical window-dressing, that "The moon belongs to everyone." That's the first line of "The Best Things in Life Are Free," a hit song from Bert's youth, and he proceeded to sing it; and then, with the aid of a bevy of chorus girls who had materialized from nowhere, to dance it. It was delightful, if only for showing that Bobby Morse, musical star, still has the stuff; and that, whatever the reason for which he's been written out of the show, it isn't failing powers.

Now, obviously, this scene was not realistic, and not just because recently deceased CEOs don't generally pop up from the beyond and do a number. Of course it was a fantasy; but it didn't seem the kind of fantasy that Don, who's never even seemed particularly close to Bert, would have. Now, if it were Roger having it... and indeed, if you're looking for a psychological crutch, Roger had confessed to Don that his last words to the living Bert had been a rather bitter quotation from a song of slightly later vintage (Depression, that is, rather than pre-): Irving Berlin's "Let's Have Another Cup o' Coffee." But then, the whole episode had been a stylistic departure; a show that had previously, like every other highflying TV drama since The Sopranos, scorned the use of extraneous music, was suddenly loaded with it. Tense or sorrowful scenes were underscored as in a soap-opera. Meredith, Don's new secretary, threw herself at him as if they were in a soap opera, or maybe a 1930s movie. It seems unlikely that Matthew Weiner (the show's creator and, on this occasion, co-writer and director) had lost his nerve or his marbles. We were being tipped off that the episode was not to be believed. Or at least, that its happy ending was not to be trusted.

About that happy ending. When we left him Don was back on top. At the beginning of the season he had been at the lowest of ebbs, on indefinite leave from the agency that had he had helped form and that had born his name. The start of that great second episode found Don dragging himself out of bed and into a suit in order to receive his former secretary whose devoted conveyance of news from the office provided him with his only purchase on his former identity. By the end of the episode he'd began to clamber back, a process signalled by his reconciliation with his daughter Sally, who kissed him, wished him a happy Valentine's Day, and said she loved him.

He gained re-admission to the firm, on terms that were meant to be humiliating and that he spiked his opponents' guns by accepting. The agency has now undergone what, by my count, is its fourth restructuring, with Don's restoration an essential part of the deal. Admittedly, his marriage to Megan finally fell apart, by telephone, in a finely conceived scene in which she told him it was over by not telling him anything. But it'll be nice for him, and for us, to be spared all those trips to California.

Personally, I've been rooting for him all along. People keep saying, or writing, that he represents the dinosaur male of the '50s and '60s, and that we should be disgusted by his drinking and his womanizing, not to mention his having stolen another man's identity, thus rendering his whole life a lie. I don't buy it. Don remains in many ways unknowable, and one of the strengths of Jon Hamm's performance is that he doesn't try to indicate or explain; one is never aware of the actor behind the character. But he has a better moral record than most people on the show. His treatment of his brother was indeed appalling, and if it's still haunting him, we haven't seen it.. But his non-sexual friendship with his alter ego's widow was the most loving relationship we've seen on the show, and he seems considerate of people generally. Compare him to his enemies - the cold-fish Jim and loathsome Lou, both of them charmless and, even worse, humourless - and you can see why Dawn would stay loyal. He was the only member of the team to be shocked by the prostitution of Joan, though he didn't find out in time to do anything about it. Not that her behaviour to him this season has suggested that she's grateful - a disappointment to those of us who've always loved her - but then she was, by her own account, aggrieved that he was costing the company money, and she's always been the efficiency expert. Her ascent upstairs (literally and metaphorically) has been a major feature of one of the show's main subjects: the advancement of female people.

The most complex carrier of this theme is of course Peggy, so good at her job, so steady in her rise, and yet so insecure: far more so, it seems, than Dawn and her fellow person of colour, Shirley, who came on the scene later and are far less inhibited about telling the bosses, male and female, what they think of them. Don and Peggy have typically had one unguarded scene together per season (this season there have been two) but the reticence is what makes their relationship so sympathetic, even passionate; it's expressed in the demands he makes on her and in the encouragement he gives her, and this season she's had the chance to reciprocate both, culminating in her triumphant presentation to Burger Chef. Though the way in which she got to announce that they'd landed the contract also seemed strangely unreal, naive even. Like something out of a film.

Of course it can't last. Not with another six episodes to be filled when the show returns next year for its final spurt. Don's demons are still there. (And Peggy's. And Roger's. And ... everybody's really, except those too dull to have any.) I doubt that the show would be crass enough to have Don and Peggy actually pair off; theirs has to remain one of the great unrealized romances. Nor do I see any real necessity for it to end with Don's death, and certainly not by his throwing himself from a great height, as supposedly foreshadowed in the opening credits. (That really would count as spelling things out in black and white. And for a very long time too.) I don't see him as a tragic hero. Neither do I see him as the hollow man on whom his critics insist, but if he is - well, hollow men have a habit of surviving.