I’m happy for those who were satisfied by the finale. But for me, it was just sad.
I think this episode is an excellent example of writing that could, most kindly, be described as ‘seat of the pants’:
*** “Okay, Peggy, Pete, Joan, and Roger: three of you will find True Love and happiness!—sorry if the partners you’ll get are fairly arbitrary and/or unlikely and/or picked out of a hat. But one of you will be alone, juggling childcare and business-startup-demands, without any compensations of True Love. Everybody gather round to draw straws!” (Side note: when have we ever seen Roger desiring to have a relationship with a woman of 50?)
*** Don is driven to near-suicidal (saying goodbye to Peggy, etc.) paralysis, helpless on the ground, by the news that his heavy-smoker ex-wife has terminal cancer, and by her remark that since he hasn’t been around to see his sons in several weeks, that means he’s not going to be raising them. Oh, and also: the niece of the real Don’s wife, a girl he barely knows, left without saying goodbye. That would break anyone!
So of course our Don is sitting on the ground, bereft of the power of movement through the depth of his depression. Because that’s something we’ve seen a lot from Don, over the years: he’s a guy who is prone to sliding to the ground with a complete loss of all functions, all will to live. Happens all the time. Luckily, all it takes to cure him is a long hug with a stranger who says he feels unseen and unloved. Wow!
*** Clearly Weiner had to get Don to a place that has a lot of hippy-types and also a hill. Gotta have the hill. A woman who is unhappy in her personal life would be the ideal person to get Don there. How about a woman who feels guilt because she left her own child? Perfect! So, Weiner creates Diana—a woman tormented by guilt for leaving her daughter (who duly hates and resents her for it).
Apparently there were some sort of production scheduling problems, because we ended up with Stephanie (the niece of the real Don’s wife) shoehorned into the role that was pretty clearly intended for Diana.
Don’s only real connection with Stephanie was that he was fond of the real Don’s wife and had had some brief interactions with the niece over the years, and then offered help to her while she was pregnant in 1969. The father of Stephanie’s baby was in jail, wasn’t he? So the plot element of having The Woman, Deeply Important to Don, agonizing over the child she abandoned…was awkward when foisted onto Stephanie. Don didn’t have any deep emotional involvement with Stephanie.
And the “abandoned her child” storyline didn’t make a lot of sense for Stephanie. She’d been a Berkeley student in 1964 so had to have been at least, what, 24 or so in 1970? She’d had this baby and then for some reason had given it to, who, the parents of the in-jail father? I don’t recall the dialog here. Why did she do that, again? Since the finale takes place in October 1970, the baby couldn’t have been very old when given up. It’s a sad thing when a mother gives up a baby–but it’s not particularly uncommon.
A woman leaving a child who’s old enough to know what’s happening is something much less common. And that’s the situation that the Stephanie character seemed to be talking about in the group sessions. This was pretty clearly originally a Diana plotline.
*** I’m surprised that so many seem to be pleased with the development of Don making very little effort to get to the home of his children after learning that their mother is dying. Nice he could sit up on that hill and find his bliss. He could have hired a car to come get him, but, why bother?
Yes, it’s nice that Sally is a loving sister—but she’s only sixteen. If she’s to be the primary caregiver during her mother’s last months and after her death, then of course she (Sally) won’t be graduating from her prestigious boarding school and is unlikely to be able to attend college. Why is this okay?
Keeping the fate of Bobby and Gene so vague and unsettled seems less like “deliberate ambiguity” and more like “couldn’t be bothered to work it out.”
In sum: I don’t buy the idea that Don cured his own ills by giving that guy a hug. It just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t buy that Peggy and Stan are made for each other, or that Roger would happily be seen with a 50-year-old (even if she is Julia Ormond), or that Pete and Trudy decided, after all this, that they are deeply in love, or that Pete would willingly leave the part of the world in which he gets automatic respect from nearly everyone he meets as a Knickerbocker, or that Joan would plunge into industrial-film production on her own with so little experience in that field. All seem contrived and deeply improbable.
And the Coke ad, postulated as the culmination of seven seasons of storytelling—as the crowning emotional moment, meant to round off and satisfy: how sad, how very sad a miscalculation that was.
I wonder if Mad Style will address naked hippie guy.