Spirited finale ends Mad Men
The not-so-sterling admen and ad women of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce are both shaken and stirred, as television’s most sophisticated prime time drama closes its fifth and most polarizing season tonight, with an episode called, appropriately, The Phantom.
Anyone familiar with the sudden, wrenching twist at the end of last week’s episode of Mad Men, in which debt-ridden financial officer Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) hanged himself in his corner office, — his face purple from self-imposed asphyxiation, knows it will haunt anyone and everyone at the Sterling Cooper office who saw it. Lane Pryce was probably destined to rest in peace, and his memory will be a phantom that hangs over everyone’s heads when Mad Men picks up tonight.
Whether the firm will be compelled to change its name, now that Pryce is no longer an active partner, is just one complication. An equally pressing matter is the sudden departure, two episodes ago, of secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson who, tired of being taken for granted by Sterling Cooper’s boys’ club, quit the firm and decided to strike out on her own. Olson, and the actor who played her, Elisabeth Moss, was as much a part of Mad Men’s heart and soul as Don Draper himself. It may be hard to remember now, but when Mad Men debuted on July 17, 2007, one of the first scenes was an oh-so-green Olson reporting to work her first day on the job, shepherded at the time by bossy, in-control office matriarch Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks).
From the beginning, Mad Men was a perceptive, meticulously detailed, at-times entrancing parable of the shift in the mores and attitudes of Madison Ave., and the world at large, in the early- to mid-1960s. Don Draper was always going to be the protagonist and Mad Men’s central character, but it was through Olson’s character that most viewers saw the period’s profound changes reflected for their own eyes. Her absence will be keenly felt in tonight’s finale, even more so than Pryce’s phantom presence, and the question of whether she’ll be back will be one of the big issues facing Mad Men as it heads into a sixth and potentially defining season early next year.
After an at-times dark and depressing fourth season in 2010, this past season opened with an unusually bright and sunny outlook as Draper found love, marriage and something approaching happiness with his new soulmate, Megan Draper, nee Calvert, played with a canny intelligence and insouciant charm by Montreal‘s Jessica Pare.
This past season was set during 1965. Mad Men is slated to last another two seasons, and creator-producer Matt Weiner’s pattern so far has been to hook each season on a specific year. Whether those future seasons will include Peggy Olson is a question that might, or might not be answered tonight. Either way, if Mad Men has taught anything this past season, it’s that it remains television’s most mature and intoxicating concoction of romance, elegy, social parable and political observation.
(AMC — 8 & 10 p.m.)