I liked this episode better than the last in part because the actors had a chance to shine and they seemed incredibly relaxed with each other. This may have been in part because Jared Harris, who played Layne Price, directed. The scene with Peggy and Stan was about as good as it gets. Elizabeth Moss brought out Peggy’s life choices and Jay Ferguson (Stan) was as perfect giving her exactly the right space to do that. None of the dialogue felt forced or cliché and the scene connected with their interactions with the actor kids earlier in the show.
The episode title made obvious something was going to happen: Time and Life. The offices are in the Time-Life Building. I liked the way the episode played with the making of the company back a few years and then how it was deflated but with exactly opposite meanings: they are ready to be absorbed by the big firm and the implication is they’ve so impressed the big firm that they’re too valuable to leave alone. Coca Cola. Buick. The big firm wants these people because they’re too good to keep in the minor league. And this group is now successful: they all have money and are at different places in their lives. Pete back then was struggling to make a place for himself in business. Don was in the closet about his actual life. Roger was a hard-drinking member of the lucky sperm club who, as Bert Cooper eventually said, wasn’t a leader. And Joan was office manager. Now Joan wears Oscar de la Renta, Pete has become head of accounts, Roger is President and the leader who saved the firm from a computer services future. And Don now tells stories about growing up poor and actually works at advertising - note we see him tying away when Roger walks in to tell him McCann is absorbing them.
One of the best scenes was Pete telling Joan as she voices her fears about her role that McCann doesn’t know her, don’t know what she’s capable of doing, with the clear implication that she’s strong enough to show them. Assuming they keep her to the 4 year contract, she’ll have time to do that.
I thought it was cool they showed Don as alone, as not even being able to connect with his latest obsession, the self-flagellating waitress Diana, while Roger has something going with Marie and Ted has connected with an old love. Don has no place to live and no one in his life. The conversations between Ted and Don in the office and then at the bar were those of people comfortable with each other and of actors relaxed in their characters.
And as a fan, I was very happy to see Trudy back and maybe back with Pete. They really seemed to fit as a couple and Pete seems to have grown up a lot, particularly in how he relates to women. He tells Peggy what’s going on with McCann. He is the one having a grown up conversation with Joan. (In an episode or two back he also says mature lines to Don about how starting over in a relationship works and how you never seem to get where you want to be.) He also has one of the most absurd conversations in the history of the show: the insane scene in which the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 comes to life in the obsessions of a current MacDonald! I contrast Pete and Trudy versus Don and Betty: when the latter pair met and slept together at camp it was to get closure but Trudy now sees her desire to move to suburbs was wrong and she realizes that she’s alone, that as she says in 10 years no one will want her. One of the last things Pete says in the episode is he needs to call Trudy because she had a bad day too. I thought it was a clever way to show that they’ve never acknowledged things between them, that the entire way their marriage went off the rails meant they carried hatred over without ever really getting down to why and that time has changed the way they view what happened.
BTW, I think what happened with the lease is that McCann sent notice of non-renewal or exercised an option to terminate. The show plays fast and loose with actualities of business but it wouldn’t be a failure to renew (because that letter would be signed by Roger and/or the firm’s lawyers) and it wouldn’t be non-payment (which Roger apparently thinks) because you’d get a default letter asking for the money.
Speaking of playing fast and loose with the actualities of business, the whole California solution proposed by Don & Co. made little sense. If McCann didn’t want to pay rent on a second NYC office, why would they want to pay rent on the California office, which could simply be sublet until the lease expired?
The CA concept was, to me, a way of revealing motives, that SC&P people mistrusted McCann and assumed they wanted to eliminate them and so the CA pitch was self-preservation arranged conveniently around conflicts. But the reality, as presented at least, was McCann views the people as the prize and that conflicts are inevitable casualties of acquiring these people. Yeah, it made no sense as rent and even the need to be in CA made no sense so I viewed it as a plot device.
I also thought the ending scene, which I failed to discuss, played off the prior 3 endings: Don alone in his empty living room, Don alone in the hallway leading away from his apartment, Don alone as the people of SC&P literally walk off to figure out what this means to them. A visual reminder this isn’t his company anymore along with so many other endings.
Cancelled leases aside, at that time McCann already had a substantial presence right on Wilshire Blvd in LA. I know, I worked there from '78 to '80.
However,because of that experience I do appreciate SC&P’s reticence.
About the ending – I liked the shot of the management group standing together, as the rest of the agency’s staff dispersed. They put up a fight. Don had his mojo back. Members acknowledged each others’ talents. They had been a good team, and the McCann absorption won’t change that.
Another possible title for this episode could have been “what’s in a name” – a theme touched on in different ways throughout the episode.
This episode made me really appreciate Pete as well as Victor Kartheiser who plays him. Favorite scenes last night were the ones with Pete and Trudy, esp when she said, “Oh Pete, you don’t have to go around punching EVERYONE” (while not looking at all upset that he had done so).
Best line: “THE KING ORDERED IT!”
The last scene, with the 5 of them standing there, Don and Roger trying to rally the troops as all the younger employees talked and milled about and basically ignored them–to me it seemed like right there, their time had officially passed. Not passed as in: obviously they are still in charge, they are still powerful in the company, and making tons of money. But more like, when they were a small upstart company there was a feeling of “we are all in this together fighting the big guys” and now it is more “us (the younger people) vs them (the man)”.
I don’t think I am explaining very well, but I was just so surprised to see all the employees ignoring a speech by the great Don Draper, formerly known for his ability to inspire!
I was a little surprised they dumped them all into McCann; I half expected the rest of the episodes would be more a winding down of SC&P.
Bye Joan. We may see her again but … I liked the way the episode drew out the lines she wouldn’t cross, meaning her sexual and personal integrity. Not pretty scenes. I think she might have done a bit better than 50 cents on a dollar, maybe as much as 70, but it’s a TV show. I think if she went in there intending to threaten a big public stink she should have been prepared for a negotiation.
The scene of Peggy roller skating was like a Chaplin movie where he skates around a deserted department store. She gets dumped on yet again. But she brings the octopus picture to McCann.
I saw Ted was happy with his box lunch sitting at a table listening to inane prattle. And that great shot of Don’s attention going to the window, with the Empire State and a plane’s contrail crossing its top.
And then Don goes Major Tom and won’t go back into his space capsule. So it turns out the thing with Diana was a device to lead him away from the office. Yes, it’s a stupid quest but then he’s heading off to St. Paul or wherever and we have to wonder what the heck happens in the next 2 episodes. And imagined Bert says he never read On The Road. I half expected Anna Draper to appear.
Love Roger’s line: “You should see the floor I’m on; it’s a nursing home.” I felt like he was giving the valedictorian speech to what was. “This was a helluva boat” means more than the office, more than SC&P but the show itself. “Is that really how you’ll remember this place?”
I did not care for the episode. I wish they had not gone the McCann route. I don’t want to see any new characters at this point, whether in NY or in Wisconsin. I did like the scene between Don and Betty though.
I’m hoping Joan accepts the offer by the female copy writers to join them at rhe oyster Bar, where Joan will find support for her lawsuit.
Seemed to be lots of literary, and movie references,which this article mentions. Lost Horizon, Moby Dick, On the Road, Maybe The Stranger, when Bert’s ghost accuses Don of always being The Stranger.
I don’t understand Diana’s character and relationship with Don? Is she a love interest? Is she someone he knew before? Confused.
I think it’s clear that the obnoxious head of McCann bought Sterling Cooper only to get Don, just as he bought some agency in the midwest to get a single product.
Could Don “save” Joan and Peggy if he supported them? Or is he done?
@SouthJerseyChessMom, when Don first saw Diana, I had the strong feeling that she was someone from his past that we had seen before. I realized after a while that the actress was familiar from Grey’s Anatomy and other shows, yet he seemed to recognize her. I guess the open question is why. As a fellow wounded, drifting soul? As a woman who reminded him of his mother and the other lost women of his childhood?
What’s funny is that I am currently reading On the Road for the first time.
Loved Peggy coming in with shades, the smokes and the erotic art…Peggy as bad***…what a change from the early episodes.
I am an attorney at a fairly large law firm…merger mania is rampant. Good view of what it is like to be swallowed up. Love the narrow hallways at McCann in contrast to the open feel of Sterling Cooper.
I am trying hard not to think about what it would be like to have Betty as a counselor/therapist.
My reaction is that Diana represented the escape door Don has always kept in his relationships: Midge as contrast to his suburban life with Betty along with all those other affairs while they were married and then the ultimate “out”, his morally conflicted neighbor Sylvia. He offered to run away with Rachel and at least a few others. I thought that when he showed up at Diana’s house, it was like when Betty chased into the Bowery for the lost girl who had stayed at her house. Betty realizes the effort is futile and Don clearly sees that and, in fact, the hallucination with Bert Cooper showed he already knew it. He says he was worried about Diana but now he sees he can’t do anything for her.
I felt Don went out to Wisconsin just because it was an escape door, an exit off the freeway and thus something to do before he’s actually out. The implication is that Don is now taking his escape, though he is clearly wandering lost instead of pursuing something. Maybe that lack of pursuit is important too: remember his speech to Dow about how happiness is just something you get before you need more happiness and success is just something you get before you need … But wandering? I have no idea where they take this.
Think about it: he stopped by to take Sally to school and has a conversation with Betty in which he is told and realizes that he as a parent can’t criticize his girl for being independent. The boys have their activities. He’s paid Megan a huge sum. Who is left to worry about? Diana. So he knocks that off his list and now he’s …
I think McCann’s motives are absolutely unclear. Maybe they just wanted to save some money. The conflict was set up so well: they all (but Joan, which was foreshadowing) fell for the speech about how they were so valued - though they had no choice anyway since McCann was absorbing them - and then having that moment when he’s asked to say “I’m Don Draper of McCann Erickson” and then the references to the executive dining room and meeting Miller Beer and is roast beef ok for lunch and then realizing it’s a box lunch in a room full of creative directors who all will be taking notes in their little binders during a truly stupid briefing about beer.
Miller Lite, btw, if you don’t remember, was the first successful low calorie beer. It was actually bought when the company that developed it fell apart. McCann - a few years after the show’s date, as I remember - started the great campaign “Tastes great! Less Filling” with guys arguing each side and then expanding that over and over to famous athletes arguing. It was so much part of the culture that at Michigan football games, the student section would divide into “Tastes great” versus “Less filling”. That campaign is about a 1000 light years from the garbage about beer drinkers in the heartland being spouted at the meeting.
So there was this idea of “these are your clients” but instead what happened was more a meeting with Nabisco was a bunch of guys taking notes in a room. And there were repeated references to putting things in for approval with one copy writer saying they’d “leave it to the Soviets”, meaning the corporate bureaucracy. That is the opposite of Don and really of the show itself. And I think it speaks to why they had Peggy come in with her octopus picture and sunglasses. The episode also had this beautiful sequence with Don talking to Joan and offering her help because he clearly doesn’t realize he doesn’t have that kind of power … and then he walks into a room and is handed a box lunch because he’s now a cog in the McCann machine. Sure, he can work on Miller or Coca Cola but he’s a cog in the machine.
Loved this episode…the only I have this final season. You know, as much as I love Joan Harris and enjoy when she’s on the screen…I really think she got what was coming to her. Let’s remember, the only reason she is partner is because all of the guys wanted her to sleep with a client for an account and she DID! She flounces around in her too tight dresses showing off her assets, then acts defensive when comments are made. Now…I’m not saying they are right By Any Means…those McCann men are jerks (and others along the way)…but Joan can’t have it both ways and she’s been called on it by Peggy a few times. Her rise to partner wasn’t because of her brains. I think it’s only fitting that in the end…the one who has worked her ass of because of her brains (Peggy) is the one that is going to make it…and what a badass she is/has become…I ADORED that scene with her walking into McCann! I think there is a lesson to be learned here…use your brains in a man’s world, not your body, for respect. Again, I like Joan…I really do…but I think that what happened to her was a teachable moment for her and many. Peggy will end up with men reporting to her…the way Joan never could. And as silly as it was…loved Roger and her at the office skating around to the organ music.
boy, I felt Don’s pain being there having that guy mock him by doing and imitation. I’m so glad he got up and left…just hated him going to Diana’s…I never want to see her or hear that storyline again. I hope it’s been put to rest.
I’m really looking forward to how it ends…and glad it’s ended with SC&P ending…makes it really truly a Final for the show in many ways.
Wow @conmama. I couldn’t disagree more. Joan has always been one of the most competent managers at SCDP. If you compare her behavior to pretty much any of the men, she’s a saint. She had to hide her ambition from her loser husband while she did great work for the odious Harry Crane, until he could find a man for the job. I don’t feel at all that she ‘got was was coming to her.’ What was coming to her, and she worked hard for it not just in doing what they ALL wanted her to do so they could land Jaguar, was her full partnership stake, and she surrendered for 50 cents on the dollar.
I know I probably should have said I was Ducking and Running after my post. I’m not saying she’s not competent…but there is no way she would have made partner if she hadn’t slept with the client. Peggy is much more valuable as an employee in my opinion, and she didn’t climb the ladder to partner, and there is a reason. I think that they all have their hands dirty in what they did to escalate Joan to partner. But on another note, like I mentioned and so has Peggy…don’t go around advertising all your assets, then getting made when they are noticed. I"m not saying that it’s right that anyone said anything to her at meetings…but come on. She’s been advertising her wares for year.
consolation…I’m pretty sure the chief guy told him to do his imitation of Don. That look on Don’s face of disgust was priceless.