If WALKING DEAD takes a lesson from MAD MEN, the last episode will be Michonne knitting an afghan and Carl playing solitaire. Didn’t satisfy me.
There will never know what happened, I do hope they took Sally’s suggestion and let the boys stay with Henry. He and Megan were always their best parents.
Buddhism was the in hip thing around 1970, with the books by Alan Watts everywhere on campuses.
IIRanything at all from those books, it’s that the individual has to completely empty oneself and move away from worldly things before commencing on the path to enlightenment.
Don may be on that path. What’s most important for the show is that he is now empty. He’s been empty throughout the show (T. S. Eliot’s Hollow Man) without fully realizing what that meant. (Although understanding enough to keep running away in pursuit of it/flight from the emptiness.) This episode opened on the emptiness of the desert, with Don metaphorically running through it at top speed and all alone. It ends in the lushness of northern California with Don sitting in peace in the company of others. That’s the show’s arc in two clever camera setups.
We’ll never know if Don has a happy ending. Or any ending. He is an addict and they relapse. This may be his moment, or not. Notably, Sally is not having a happy ending and neither is Betty, the two that shared most with him in the family he broke apart. Sally is growing up before our eyes. Don is becoming a full human adult before our eyes. Process, no ending. Process/progress was the inevitable ending however Weiner finagled the details. They are not flying. But perhaps they are no longer falling without purpose.
That’s not how it ended. Did you switch it off right then? It ended on another shot.
I am thrilled with the idea that he heads back to New York and picks up his career again – I like the slight against the enlightenment community, and his true passion is advertising. I just wanted to see it. I just want to see Don one more time in a suit looking crisp and taking control.
I also wanted more resolution with the Betty situation – not necessarily a big deathbed scene, but something more than what we saw. I thought the phone call was very well handled – I believe they truly loved each other. And I’m happy with the resolution of everyone else’s stories. On one hand, I’d love to see Peggy joining Joan, but I think we all know that that would probably end badly.
The girls in the garage at the beginning were drinking Coke.
Sally clearly wants to be the “woman” in the boys’ lives; whether that’s enough to override Betty’s wish that they live with their uncle and his wife is unclear.
“Person to person”—Don has finally managed to connect with another human being on a purely compassionate level. The look on his face as they closed was pure bliss. However improbable it may be, he seems to have found peace.
It was already Halloween; would there have been enough time for him to return to New York and helm the Coke campaign, which began in February 1971? His epiphany merely coincided with it as it helped open the new decade.
I wonder if the boys will be waiting for him to come home and “walk through the door.”
I wonder where they dug up all those old hippies. Must have really been filmed “on location.”
[QUOTE=unwashed brain]
Enlightening Meditation wins User Name of the Thread for 2015.
[/QUOTE]
<cheers> Don’s last word on the show was ‘om’. That’s cool. I seek no reward nor attention for this possible honor assuming that it even exists. I always hope to inspire more people to meditate regardless of the medium of communication.
JOAN and PEGGY DIDNT START THEIR OWN BUSINESS! Joan started HER OWN business, not not not with Peggy.
[/QUOTE]
I stand corrected if I missed this detail. Possibly, I was not looking and listening at the right moment or the show was ambiguous about it. Either way, it’s fitting that the opportunity was there.
While the cause of it was not happy, there was a lot of expectation that Sally would end up knocked up and on the street. Instead she ended up taking over when her mother couldn’t, and taking care of her siblings. (No, Henry, notice.)
I think the theme of this one was finding love. Pete finds love again. So does Peggy, finally. Joan loves working, and she finds a way to do it with the respect she was denied before. Sally now loves her family - which was not clear before. Even Roger finds love with someone his own age.
And Don finally learns to love himself.
I was watching it again just now, and I was struck by how both Sally and Betty said the same thing to Don that every woman says when she doesn’t want to talk to a man ever again: “I have to go now.”
Sally wants to stay with Henry just as much as she wants the boys to; not because of him, I think (he doesn’t seem to be of much use in a crisis), but because she considers the house “hers” now.
I didn’t feel like Don would write the Coke commercial. I don’t have a real argument for it but, watching it, I just appreciated it for the irony of melding advertising and Don’s new age mindset. I see Don as staying retired (he has the money for it), hopefully being more of a presence in his kids’ lives and spending time finding himself. He already knows that he’s not Don Draper, ad man, so he’ll find out who he really is no matter his name.
That said, I get the arguments for him having wrote the commercial. It just didn’t hit me that way.
Interesting that Don gave Stephanie the same “put it all behind you” advice he gave to Peggy after she gave her baby away. Didn’t work this time, though. 
Didn’t work the first time either.
Really? I think Peggy made out pretty well for herself, regardless of what lingering regrets she may have had. Stephanie, on the other hand, didn’t seem to appreciate it much at all.
So this image basically seals the deal on the ending–Don created the Coke ad:
This post elsewhere further elaborates:
I felt like someone was trying to buy me off.
But why? I had no idea why. So very strange and so very sad.
I thought it was obvious that Don wrote the Coke commercial. The little smirk in the end was one of his strokes of brilliance. However, this time it was preceded by a breakthrough in his personal life, where Don Draper the Stoic actually connected with another human being.
So what was up with that breakthrough? Don hugging the wretched weeping middle manager, was supposed to be a watershed moment, but I’m still a little confused what it was that resonated with Don so much.
Was it because Don/Dick also felt like just another face in the crowd, another bottle of ketchup in the fridge that could be overlooked? Or was it because he felt like the opposite? I mean, he was such a dichotomy. On the one hand, he was the golden boy of advertising, and everyone wanted him on their team, for his brilliance and presence. Even after he ran off time and time again (and apparently was welcomed back at McCann), he was still a hot commodity. Unlike the weeping guy. Just prior, Peggy had practically begged him to return.
On the other hand, pretty much everyone in his personal life had rejected him, from Betty to Sally to Stephanie.
So I’m not sure what to make of the watershed moment.
Beyond the watershed moment, I was most disappointed in Sally’s fate. Her washing dishes while her emotionally closed mother sat and smoked, made me sad for her. Yes, she was there for her brothers, which I appreciate because it made the boys’ future less bleak, but I wanted a bit more hope for her in the end.
I also wanted some sort of confirmation that Don would return and help raise his family, which would make his transformation complete. Maybe that was supposed to have been made clear through the Coke commercial, but if it was, it was too subtle for me. I’d love to see what scenes were deleted.
Peggy saying “I’m staying” to Stan is what precipitated the whole monologue from Stan about how he loves her, if that helps. Plus, Joan said “Holloway and Harris”, so we know Peggy Olson didn’t go.
I think he warmly hugged the guy because, well, that’s what he would’ve wanted if he’d expressed that same I-Don’t-Feel-Loved-But-I-Crave-It sentiment first. I think Don genuinely wanted to not merely hold the guy’s hand and keep him company, but to furnish the guy’s home with love – and I think that’s what he wanted for himself, and, he realized, what the whole world wants today. And I think the full significance hit him when they were melodiously chanting in perfect harmony.
“Don always does this, and he always comes back.” - Person To Person
Excellent, exactly how I read it.