Mad Men

[Laugana]

I too thought he was going to have a plane crash, or last week I kept thinking that the job offer was all a con by the drunk guy.

[Xerlic]

My first thought after watching the finale was "I really want a coke.".

[BerenTebogo]

Wait I thought this show ended a while ago.

What all is this?

[Auspice]

Wait I thought this show ended a while ago.

What all is this?

They pulled a Breaking Bad and split the final season in halves.

[Marootsoobutsu]

I don't think I've ever seen cyclic manic-depression as well portrayed as it is with Don Draper.

The guy who hates is life, but fights ferociously to defend it. The guy who hates the excesses that he lives for, who possibly learns in a sense-- he learns that what he does is wrong-- but is trapped in his pattern. He wants, desperately, to want to die badly enough to make it happen. But he can't, because however much he hates himself, he really does want to live. He wants to continue.

Because there are those manic moments. Those moments of clarity, where he reaches greatness. Those times where he FEELS what he is constantly screwing his life up over trying to find. He reaches that high-- for him, it tends to come where he connects with understand people, and his vehicle for that is advertising. It doesn't come in the moments of doing his job; it comes at his moments of greatness. Of winning some contest that only he is playing.


I liked the finale. Don hit his low. Don hit his high. As they said-- Don runs away. He'll be back. It's what he does. But each time he runs away, it's bigger, it's bolder, it's more viscerally concrete. It's a weird kind of fantasy to want to be Don-- not in the endless wreckage of lives made worse for his passing through them, but to know the feverish desperation to escape, and to watch someone do it. To not watch him get away with it (except, at some level, with his job), but to watch life go on after not getting away with it.