And then he realized everything he already had was not right either... and that his life
with his family was some temporary bandage on a permanent wound. - Pete Campbell
Mad Men's opening titles sequence follows a faceless, nameless man whose entire world proceeds to collapse around him. He freefalls - almost as if trying to wake from a dream - amidst a towering sea of artificial structures, slogans, and smiles. And just as he's about to smash into the darkness, he emerges with an arm draped over a sofa, a cigarette burning at his fingertips, calm, cool, and collected.
When the show first began, I simply assumed this anonymous man would be Don Draper. After all, it became clear early on that his life was not as he advertised; no matter how gifted of an ad man he may be, a family man - or a loyal man, at that - Don Draper was most certainly not. But with each passing episode since then, I've slowly realized that the man in this perpetual state of freefall is not necessarily Don Draper the person, but actually shades of Don Draper the character, reflected through the actions of characters surrounding him like shards of glass from a broken mirror.
For a season that has dealt so prominently with the ideas of separation, disconnect, and loneliness, it's fitting that the season finale would be titled The Phantom. It's a season that began with the non-corporeal voices of African Americans chanting for equality on the streets of New York City, then proceeded to dissolve the marriages of two key characters. It's a season that featured the graduation of a major character from SCDP and the untimely death of another. It's a season that toyed with the idea of our past hanging over our heads - like ghostly shadows of lives that were and lives that could have been - and the degree to which we would sacrifice safety, security, and sanity for happiness.
The Phantom reminded me of one of my favorite episodes, the Season 1 finale The Wheel. Both episodes offered alarming moments of quietude, of unbridled self-examination and self-reflection. Both dealt with the lingering farewells to lives that could have been but never will become. And both featured profound moments of beginning anew, of returning to what is comfortable, and of admitting that the life lived now is not necessarily the life worth living.
Up until this season, Pete Campbell had largely been Don Draper's punching bag, reduced to living an echo of a life inferior to Don's own. But recently, it's becoming clear that Pete has truly harnessed a bit of Don in himself (Don even acknowledges this in the episode Signal 30). Indeed, Pete's been staying in the city overnight with Beth, a woman who began the season as nothing more than a sexual fantasy, while leaving Trudy to raise his child alone at home.
But in this episode, Pete's forced to come to terms with his short-lived fantasy. Sent to the hospital to undergo electroshock therapy, Beth's mind is wiped clean of Pete's very existence. So when he tries to reignite their relationship, it becomes clear that he's speaking to a complete stranger, a shell of a person, a phantom. Instead, he poses as friend who's in the wrong room and in the process, bids farewell not just to the Beth he once knew, but to the illusion of a happy life: "He needed to vent off some steam. He needed adventure. He needed to feel handsome again. He needed to feel that he knew something, that all this aging was worth something." Gazing at this past life - a life that seemed happy from the outside but was hollow on the inside - Pete, like Don's own realization in The Wheel, can't admit his own unhappiness until it's too late. Both men pursue something fleeting, something evanescent, something ghostly, without regard or recognition of the lives they already have. When will these boys learn?
Speaking of letting things fester, Don's toothache in the episode prompts him to finally come to terms with all that's rotten in his life. Indeed, Don's journey this season has largely been passive - Bert Cooper even went so far as to remark, "You've been on love leave." But Don's transformation from philandering ad executive to honest husband has been reflected through Megan, his new wife. Throughout the season, Megan has proven she can be as motherly - if not more - than Betty Draper; and she's proven she can support Don and be happy about it. But has Don been happy? Indeed, it's also this same youth that forces Megan to wrestle with her own doubts as a wife and as a woman. At one point, Megan pleads with Don for a chance to audition for a commercial, which plays as a distant echo of Betty's own ambitions to rekindle her modeling career in Season 1. Don tells her she's above commercials, that she shouldn't concern herself with petty work. She immediately concedes only to rush to the bathroom and quietly sob. Even Megan's mom, in town visiting, tells her to grow up, to stop chasing her childhood dreams, to forget the ghosts of desires she once held.
But later on, Don gets a chance to watch Megan's audition tape. Sitting alone in the dark, Don seems to be transported to another time and another place, to a moment in his life when he actually understood what happiness meant. And like his nostalgic moment of reflection in The Wheel - as he stood in the dark, gazing at Betty's smiling face, reminiscing of a time long gone - is there any doubt Don's watching his own hopes and dreams vanish before his eyes? He's been here before with Betty; but will he learn to hold onto Megan or let her slip through his fingers too? Will he grow from this season's excursions or simply revert back to the old Don Draper?
In classic Mad Men form, this question is left unanswered. "Are you alone?" a sexy lady coos to Don Draper as he sits alone at the bar, sipping on his trademark Old Fashioned. He doesn't answer; and this question lingers like a dark cloud not necessarily because Don doesn't know what to say, but because we already know the answer to this question. He's just congratulated Megan on landing the commercial; and he's just let her go to chase her dreams. But even as he walked away from her, slowly engulfed by the darkness as Nancy Sinatra's You Only Live Twice played, I couldn't help but feel Don losing a sliver of himself with each step, fading into nothingness, heading towards his inevitable freefall.
