Last night, the final episode of Mad Men aired and one last hour of haunting television heralded the end of an era.
Among the flurry of anticipation countless theories were put forward about how the series would end. Will Don Draper’s fall from grace end with a bang, or with a whimper? Is Don Draper secretly D B Cooper? Or is he just the person inside all of us that desperately wants to move forward but is painfully inert?
Of all the finale theories, there was one ending I didn’t expect. The one where all the women in the show, against all the odds, land on their feet. But that – in my mind – is exactly what happened.
The reason I didn’t expect this is because I have gritted my teeth through seven seasons of sexism. I have forgiven the show for this because it was created as an historically accurate depiction of the 1960s and ’70s. That being the case, the show’s creator Matthew Weiner couldn’t not have included the barefaced sexism that did exist during that time in the show. In fact, what the show depicts is probably letting those decades off a little easy.
I quietly expected the show would end for the women in the same way it began: with them sidelined, ignored or insulted. But it didn’t. The major female characters were the only characters who came out on top.
For the uninitiated, Mad Men ends with its famous anti-hero, Don Draper, realising his destiny of being devastatingly static and unfulfilled. After seven seasons and more than ten years of attempting to remake and improve himself, the show ends with him right backwhere he started, only this time stripped of all the almost-meaningful relationships he ever managed to forge during the show. While the women in the show land on their feet, Don’s ending is less that he lands on his back as that he doesn’t land at all – he is stuck in a constant cycle of disappointments; always moving in circles and never moving on.
But while Don is falling, all the women – most of whom he mistreated along the way – end up flying.
Peggy Olson, Don’s secretary in Season One who rises through the ranks to become his peer, ends up overcoming all her demons and getting finally getting the work/life balance she always wanted. Peggy spends seven seasons thinking she could not have the ambitious advertising career she wanted and have a fulfilled personal life at the same time. But after her amazing, rapid ascension to the top of the advertising business, Peggy realises that she can have it all. She falls in love with her colleague and confidant, Stan, who tells her: “There’s more to life than work”.
Stan’s words, combined with a phone conversation with Don in which she finally lets go of her desperate need for his approval, propel her to a satisfying and fitting conclusion.
Peggy’s position as the true hero of the series is cemented in her conversation with Pete – the colleague who seduced and then rejected her – who tells her, “one day, people are going to brag that they worked with you”. Peggy echoes Pete’s words from seasons before when she smiles, nods and replies, “A thing like that”.
Betty, the wife that Don controlled, tortured and then abandoned, also gets the ending she deserves. When Don finds out that his ex-wife is dying of lung cancer, he offers to come home and look after the children when she dies. But Betty, finally finding her voice and her value, turns him down with a tone in her voice that could freeze the sun. “I just want everything to be normal,” she says. “And your being gone is part of that”. And with that, Betty finds the courage to stand up to Don one final time, when it matters the most.
Even Joan, the secretary we met in season one who thought the only important thing in life was to get married and stop working, ends up propelling herself forward. When we last see Joan, she has left the advertising world that so mistreated her, and has started her own production company. Her company name, which uses her own maiden and married names to create the illusion of a partnership – “Holloway Harris” – is the perfect finale to a long process of her rejecting all the men who have disappointed her and realising she never needed any of them in the first place.
Perhaps Don Draper’s story could only end with a heartbreakingly standstill moment. But the power of the finale was not in the tragedy of Don Draper’s non-ending; it was in its resounding high-five to girl power. The women in this show faced barriers that always seemed frustratingly, definitively insurmountable. But the strongest message of that final episode was that they weren’t. And to me, that felt really, really good.