It belatedly occurs to me that Sterling and Cutler are in Accounts even if we never see them doing anything these days.
Also a wry smile at how the company went for months without a name to plastering that ugly orange late-60s logo on every surface. Suppose the AMC store will start selling ugly SC&P coffee mugs?
I thought it was a great episode. Don’s shenanigans used to be tolerated because he brought the work in, but no more and it finally caught up with him. I find it fascinating that everyone hates Megan, yet she has been extremely patient and even headed and tried to make it work, while Don has lied and cheated on her. I thought her finial scene was very good. Yet folks hate Megan.
Sally drinking and using a fake name…sounds familiar.
I loved the final cutaway of Peggy, staying late, her back to us, silhouetted against the window, a callback to the opening credits. With Ted leaving and Don on suspension, she should really shine. I wouldn’t be surprised if the start of next season she is already a partner.
There were many good lines, but Stan’s was the best, “I’m going to eat the sandwich I brought before you eat that too”
Megan is just boring. There’s no there there, so to speak. Don is a jerk, Roger is a cad, Pete is an idiot – but they’re interesting.
And all portrayed by really good actors. Megan’s actress, not so much. You can watch Don’t or Roger’s or Pete’s internal turmoils. With Megan, I’m not sure if her actress just can’t portray that turmoil, or if the character actually has no internal turmoil. And since all she really does is react to whatever circumstances she finds herself in, I don’t really care whether it is the actress or the character: they’re both boring me.
edit: Same reason most people find Betty boring. Although Betty at least has some character going on.
I don’t hate her- as a character/person I like her better than Don- but there’s no way that marriage is viable, even without her finding out about his infidelities.
I kept expecting and hoping we’d find out that Megan was being unfaithful as well. In addition to her creepy swinger bosses, being on a soap she’s going to be around lots of good looking actors.
Sounds like 85% of kids away at school to me 
One of the first scenes of the episode was Stan asking Don to be the one to go to Cali to work on Sunkist and then a later scene where Stan finds out Don is going and reacts… negatively to say the least.
I don’t understand why Pete is going though… It seems Ted as a major partner would handle creative and accounts… what does he need Pete for?
I see it as this. Ted thought he and Peggy were a big secret, until Don showed him how obvious he was being. I at least thought that Ted’s secret at the meeting was going to be about Peggy, not the brilliant thing Don came up with.
Don, on the other hand, has been far more skilled about hiding his secrets and his feelings. Ted is kind of an anti-Don - more concerned with work, and in this case willing and able to step away from the precipice to keep his family intact, something Don is unable to do.
Ted thought Don’s actions were an attack on him, never realizing that they mostly came from drink and not giving a shit any more.
But notice how Ted encouraged Don to drink before the Hershey’s meeting. Maybe he helped push Don over the edge.
This show was Don hitting bottom. Will he sink deeper next season, or ascend?
If Weiner was trying to portray Don as being at the height of his abilities, he failed. Until this last episode, we never really saw any of those brilliant ‘Don moments’ that made you realize he was an advertising genius. Instead, we saw him blowing off client meetings, presiding over failed pitches, and in general acting like he was completely disconnected from his work.
Remember when we used to see Don obsessed over an advertising campaign? He’d bring home work and sit on the bed and study. He’d be out with Betty and have an epiphany or a flash of creative inspiration that saved the day. We haven’t seen anything like that this season.
Anyway, my take on the last episode is that it’s setting us up for a final season that brings Don full-circle back to who he really is. The series started with the Don Draper character being fully in control. THAT was the height of Don’s creative power. Then we learned about Don’s past, and the narrative changed to the struggle inside of Don’s head between his two selves. That’s what drove him to all the self-destructive behaviors.
This season was about his ‘real’ life re-asserting itself. He’s having dreams and flashbacks of living in the whorehouse. His affair with Sylvia was driven by his need for control and power over a woman, stemming from his treatment by women as a child.
What we saw in the last episode was Don finally reconciling his two lives. He’s fully in the open now. The little speech he gave Hershey was his confessional. He followed up by confessing to his children, and especially Sally.
He didn’t go to California because what he saw in Ted was exactly what he was doing - running away from poor decisions and character flaws. He saw how broken down and defeated Ted looked, and realized he didn’t want to be that guy - but he’s been that guy his entire life. So he gave Ted California, and chose instead to man up, face his demons, and reclaim his life. Unfortunately, he’s a little late and both Megan and SCDP have lost faith in him and given up.
This sets us up for the final season, in which Don finally resolves who he is and the arc of his story closes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he leaves SCDP and starts his own agency - maybe even in California.
Sally, a child of privilege, always assumed that Don came from the same background. Seeing that house in the slums clearly has totally changed her opinion of him. How I’m not sure.
As for rehab, I bet we see AA next season. He at least knows he is an alcoholic at last. During the scene in the bar, my wife said “if he gets religion, I’m so turning this off.”
Luckily, Don did the right thing. 
I don’t think Ted needs Pete, but Pete needs somewhere to go.
Like Don needed encouragement/help. No one can make the alcoholic drink or not drink.
I think he did see himself in Ted, but that his decision to let Ted go instead of him was for a different reason (and I’m probably parroting Sepinwall here). Ted needed to get distance between him and Peggy because he knew that if he stayed, his feelings for Peggy were too strong and he’d lose his wife and his children will end up in a broken home.
Don had just had the (literal) wake-up call from Betty about Sally’s problems at school, where she made the comment about Sally being from a broken home.
I believe Don was actually doing a purely good thing by letting Ted go to California, giving him the chance to save his family to keep his kids from ending up in a broken home.
Not at all. Ted noticed that Don was suffering from alcohol withdrawal from going cold turkey and told him he should have a drink to keep his symptoms at bay in front of clients.
No, I think Ted was honestly trying to help. He said “I watched my father…You can’t just stop.” We know his dad was an alcoholic; the implication is that he watched his father go through the DTs at least once. He doesn’t want that happening to Don, and he most especially doesn’t want that happening to Don during a meeting with Hershey’s. They made a big point of showing Don’s hands under the table–his shaking hands. You could make the argument that they were shaking because of emotional stress, but it seems more likely the intention was to show that Don is so much farther gone than we realized that one drink isn’t enough to keep him out of withdrawal.
That’s being awfully charitable to Don. And the way he told Ted was very cold and matter-of-fact. But I suppose that could have been part of his motivation.
I saw it a little differently - the call from Betty indeed changed his mind, but not because it made him think at all about Ted’s kids or doing the right thing for Ted. Rather, it made him realize that he couldn’t run away from his problems without abandoning his kids. Perhaps Ted’s little lecture about how he wanted Peggy but simply would not allow his kids to lose their father caused Don to realize that he’d be doing exactly that and sparked a little guilt in him.
In any event, I think the decision Don made was ultimately about Don and what Don needs to do to set things right in his own life and in his own mind. I don’t think Ted’s situation had much to do with it other than to act as a mirror into Don’s own problems, unless Don saw part of his ‘redemption’ in helping Ted save his family. But ultimately, it’s always about Don. He’s a narcissist, and has never been bothered much by the collateral damage he left in his wake.
The only thing I liked about this episode is that after an entire season of Don making unilateral decisions and screwing up everybody else’s life, we end with others making a unilateral decision affecting him.
Otherwise, the handling of the characters was obscene. They didn’t come up to the level of chess pieces. They were strings being batted at a bored cat. Weiner is up on high going “You - in. You - out.” This whole season felt like nothing more than a teaser for next year, when maybe something interesting might happen.
And that is part of why that Weiner quote is so weird. So Don is pitching ads that are ahead of his time so even though everything else he does is a disaster we should think of him being at the height of his abilities? That’s Weiner patting himself on his own back for living in 2013. He’s not conveying that truth through his characters. We’ve known from the beginning that the show was meta, with the characters pretending to live lives in their time bubble while we get to watch knowingly from the future, but it doesn’t work if the characters become self-aware. Don was a creature from the past, not a harbinger of the future.
If we never had this season at all, we wouldn’t miss it.
Don’s stepmother clearly knew the place she was going was a brothel, but was she one of the girls there or just a poor relation to the owners? Obviously at some point she caught Uncle Matt’s eye (in spite of him already being married [or at least involved with] her sister and having younger/prettier women around).
Since Don’s mother was a prostitute, I’ve even wondered if his stepmother was also and that’s how she met his father, and then she went ‘home’ when he died.
I don’t think that was withdrawal. After all, he DID follow Ted’s advice and had a drink, so his hands wouldn’t be shaking from withdrawal.
I think the shaking was from the inner conflict between Don’s two selves. He just finished telling a big lie about his own childhood to the Hershey executives, and that caused the shaking - and it also caused him to suddenly fess up and tell the truth. The inner conflict finally just burst and he couldn’t keep living the lie. It was a critical character development moment in the series.
He encouraged him to drink because he saw that Don was getting the shakes. Ted’s father was an alcoholic and Ted recognized the signs. He told Don to have a drink because where Don is, quitting cold turkey could kill him.
Don has always acted without thinking too much. Much of his decision making is very much spur of the moment: asking Megan to marry him, merging the companies, frequently enters meeting with clients without much prep, deciding to move to California, most if not all of his affairs, sabotaging Jaguar. Don acts with his gut quite a bit. He is a beg forgiveness after, instead get permission first, kind of guy. And he just acts form his gut sometimes. Giving California to Ted is probably not one reason, but several, he needs to stay behind for his own personal reasons, he also sees that Ted is trying to save his family, plus he probably thinks it is good for the firm to get Peggy and Ted as far apart as possible. It is funny as Sam Stone said that too often Don acts without consulting others and then he gets spit out after a meeting that didn’t include him.
I really loved this episode. I laughed at Pete and his brother: ‘well, she’s down there with Dad’. And I was surprised to find myself tearing up as the credits rolled.