I believe also that the idea is that Don created the ad. There is specific imagery in the ad that was in the commune (the girl with the braided pig tails for example).
It fits the theme of the show that all of the ideas of self worth and self improvement would get turned into a way to sell soda. There is a line in an early episode (maybe even the pilot) where Don says, “What you call Love was created by guys like me to sell nylons.” This is a similar idea.
It even kind of fits the opening credits that people put so much stock in. Don falls and falls and falls but instead of hitting the ground, ends up back where he started on the sofa.
So I have no doubt, Don went back and created the ad, but what I do wonder is whether any of it stuck with him and made him a better person. I’d like to hope so.
The girl at the desk looked like the girl(s) in the commercial, not the other way around. Not surprising, since a lot of girls dressed like that back then.
What would an advertising man’s version of Nirvana be like? The Coke commercial, of course! It’s all … now … in Don’s … mind. Ommmmmm, ommmmmmm… :o
I think it’s pretty obvious that Don is supposed to have worked on the Coke commercial. The show referred to the possibility of Don working on Coke several times including Peggy’s last phone call. However I don’t think the ending worked despite being a supporter of the Coke theory. The retreat and final group therapy scene felt very forced. I have felt that Mad Men has been going downhill for a while and I have been mainly watching out of inertia;certainly this last episode hasn’t changed my mind about that.
As someone posted up thread, this ending had grown on me as well since last night. Certainly on an intellectual level this works. He certainly gave us the crumbs (in in some cases the entire slice) to see that Don goes back to New York to write the jingle. On the emotional level, it does seem to be a bit empty. Perhaps that’s because I wanted some Don/Peggy, Don/Rodger or Don/Sally interaction that I didn’t get. Not sure why.
I’m really trying to convince myself that the finale is really the last 2-4 episodes. I’ll see if that gets me through the night.
(And a slightly catty observation. that is totally unnecessary. As a 100% hetro male, I find Don to be one smooth and stud-ly guy - until he takes his shirt off. Talk about false advertising.)
I think the sign of a great ending is that some people interpret it in a profoundly sentimental way (Don finds his inner peace) and others in a profoundly cynical way (Don’s always “On” in selling to the masses) and there are arguments to be made for each.
I think it’s obvious that Don wrote the Coke ad and it’s that moment of epiphany that we see, mid-meditation. Old habits die hard, and how much of what self-awareness he finds at the retreat remains to be seen (but not by us). It would be clean and convenient to be told exactly his fate, but what fun would that be? He’s always been a man of mystery, and so now is his future.
Speaking as a 100% hetero female, I think that Don Draper is delicious. Is he built like Rafa Nadal?* Nope. But when he takes off his shirt, I want to attack him. In a good way.
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if Weiner tacked it on in the last few weeks just to troll so many of the fans. It just seems way too literal. I’m with Exapno in not thinking that Don went back to advertising; that would invalidate too much of what we saw of his development at the end.
I thought that the last shot of Sally and Betty was meant to be a positive one. They’re together.
I suppose I’m glad that Roger will remember Joan’s son in his will, but the boy’s still growing up without a father. I would have preferred to see Joan and Roger bringing Roger into the boy’s life while he’s still around.
Stan and Peggy discovering that they have loved each other all along felt flat-out ridiculous to me. Dropping this development and the dying-of-cancer news into the show right at the very end just seems like a very soap-operatic way of tidying up. Also, Peggy has always been so independent and career-focused; for her wrap-up to amount to “what she really needed to be happy was the man who was in front of her all this time” shortchanges her character a bit, in my view.
Isn’t that what we saw? Roger was bringing Kevin back from an outing. I think he’s going to just be “fun uncle Roger” until the boy’s old enough.
I thought it was the obvious end for both characters since Stan was introduced and on that level it seemed trite. I don’t think we’re supposed to see Stan as filling this huge aching hole in Peggy’s life. His motto is always “there’s more to life than just work” which is a lesson that Peggy never learned (partly because of Don’s “move forward” advice). I see him as a partner who will understand her more than anyone else could and that’s really what love is.
I don’t think Wiener is ambiguous at all. He just doesn’t spell everything out. He has said before that if you follow the show and the development of the characters that everything makes sense and happens as you would expect it would with the information we already have as viewers.
There were a lot of fans that wanted/expected Don to just drop out of society and/or “become Dick” as a hippie or blue collar guy or whatever. That just wasn’t plausible to me. To the extent he opened himself to that experience, it still wasn’t “him.”
EVERYTHING that happened was reasonable and nothing was out of the blue or rushed to me. Every development to some extent had the groundwork laid in previous episodes even going back several seasons.
You can look at it two ways. Don goes back to New York and all he got our of his epiphany was his next big idea. Since making the same mistakes over and over has been a theme of the series, it could very well be this.
Another possibility is he did return to New York and did come up with the ad but also he is a better and more whole person than he was before. I like this idea as well: Basically Dick Whitman looked deep inside himself and found he was Don Draper after all.
I’m a hetero male, and it seems obvious to me that Don is in much better shape than any of his peers. It would be completely ridiculous if the guy took off his shirt and looked like some professional bodybuilder. I don’t know what people are expecting. Is he supposed to look like Steve Reeves? He’s a professional who doesn’t work out and drinks heavily and I’m sure doesn’t give a fuck about his macros.
That’s what I think. For all the people who wanted him to “become Dick,” it’s not like “Dick” was a real, fully developed person either. Don/Dick/whoever is who he is regardless of the name he goes by. He’s been “Don” most of his life at this point and his experiences weren’t any less real just because he was using a false name. He became Don Draper and kept growing. And he was able to shed a lot of the issues that followed Dick Whitman due to the fucked up childhood and everything else.
He absolutely found himself at that retreat, and what he found is that his true self is Don Draper, Ad Man.
This series has been a chronicle of a man falling. He was absolutely at the top of his game in the pre-counterculture early '60s. As the world changed around him, he stayed the same, and he fell out of touch and fell apart.
At the retreat, he finally caught up with the times. He finally “got” what the counterculture was all about.
And he marketed the fuck out of it.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
I think he did find his inner peace. My interpretation is that he realized that Dick and Don aren’t mutually exclusive either. He doesn’t have to choose. He can be fully Don Draper while still embracing his inner Dick Whitman. I don’t know how to articulate how the hug with refrigerator guy played into that, but it did.
I don’t think that it’s cynical to think that he’s still selling to the masses. It’s what he does. And the ad he created was both marketing genius AND truly beautiful and uplifting.
I’m pretty sure that everybody realizes that Don Draper is a fictional person and that the credit belongs to the real-life person who actually wrote the ad.
Roger seemed to be in pretty good shape as well, especially for a sedentary, four-packs-a-day, red-meat-eating borderline alcoholic with a heart condition.
How long do you think it’ll be before that kid gets his inheritance? :dubious: Marie is going to ride Roger to death!
Don didn’t discover anything new about himself IMO. He just went back to the job he was good at. One of the themes of the series all along has been “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” And another theme is “wherever you go, there you are.” Don is the same guy he has always been. He’s a guy who’s talented at developing advertising campaigns. He came up with an insipid TV commercial for Coke. He could have done that with his eyes closed years ago (though it wouldn’t have been the same ad in 1960 or 1965, of course, but it would have caught the spirit of those times just as well).
So to reiterate, I don’t think Don has reached a new understanding of himself or his place in the world. He just took a step backwards and slotted back into the place he has always been comfortable. Plus ca change.
You know, I don’t usually like too much ambiguity in stories, but I’m really enjoying the way the finale is being interpreted in so many different ways.
