If the season premiere of the seventh and final season of Mad Men is anything to go on, it’s going to require a strong stomach to make it through these final fourteen episodes (divided into two sets of seven episodes due to weird contractual reasons)
Mad Men has increasingly become a haunted series. Last
season drew flack for sticking us in the impenetrable cloud of self-loathing of
Don. Stripped bare of the all the glamour that his stunningly good looks
initially suggested, and seemingly incapable of changing in any meaningful or
necessary way, Don was rarely a likable or pleasant presence.
“Time Zones” does little to try to change that; and very little
of that beautiful moment of small but powerful connection with his daughter Sally
in last season’s finale can be read throughout the premiere. If anything the
show continues to suggest things will get much, much worse before, or even if,
they get better.
On a thematic and narrative level this fits with what has
always been the show’s modus operandi. Beneath the intoxicating surfaces of
nostalgia and period piece allure lies something rotten. There always has been and
there likely always will be. Mad Men is a show about people stuck in holding
patterns, striving to fight back against change rather than accepting it as inevitable.
The show simply refuses to give Don a reprieve, and by
extension us. And “Time Zones” returns us to this world with almost everyone,
especially our dual protagonists, in mirrored throes of misery, at all-time lows.
Don has all but been fired from SC&P. He tries to sell
copy through Freddy Rumsen (who somehow is better off than Don, especially when
it comes to handling his drinking problem). His marriage with Megan is
essentially dead with both of them going through the motions of being married,
but only when Don visits her trying to get her acting career off the ground in
California. Don can hardly muster up any of his false charisma or charm, turning
down an affair with a stranger on the flight back home, seemingly because he doesn’t feel like putting any effort in
anymore.
Meanwhile Peggy keeps hitting creative roadblocks due to a
dull, narrow-minded new head of creative who appears to disdain Peggy for being
both a woman and for refusing to take the path of least resistance. Living in a
lousy neighborhood with insufferable neighbors, and constantly being reminded
of the romantic failures -- by Ted’s appearance in the office -- that have
driven her to this awful circumstance, Peggy, in a devastating moment, breaks
down crying in her apartment.
The premiere suggests the old adage that the more things
change, the more they stay the same. Joan is still not taken seriously for her
clear and brilliant business acumen because she’s a woman. Roger has fallen
into a life of hedonism, but it still leaves him empty because this boozing and
womanizing has always been a distraction at best. And Don Draper still can’t find
reason to change and better himself, and perhaps even find satisfaction and peace.
Or perhaps there’s not any chance for this? Perhaps, like
this show’s spiritual predecessor The Sopranos, these characters are doomed to
never change, and repeat themselves over and over. They’ll never reach a true
breakthrough, just a manufactured one like all those great ad campaigns.
I’d like to believe otherwise, but, boy, was this ever a
despairing way to enter 1969. Despairing in all the right, immaculately mounted
ways, but still despairing.
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