Mad Men ends with emotional character development
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Sunday’s “Mad Men” episode was titled “The Milk and Honey Route,” which is a reference to an old handbook for the homeless. So as Don Draper gives his car to a teenager and sits smiling at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, he is living the kind of “On the Road” experience it seems he always wanted.
This week we will not talk much about the phenomenal Pete and Trudy scenes, because so many other important story lines developed. This review will be broken up into two parts.
Who does Don want to be?
He has no idea. But we all know he just wants to feel at home. He wants to feel understood.
Don’s motel storyline didn’t really go anywhere for the first 40 minutes or so, just a lot of him being nice and folksy and fixing things for the sweet family that owns the place. But then it becomes clear he is feeling at home at the Legion.
At his core, Don is a man from a poor family who had his life changed in the war. So when he becomes the toast of the town, it makes him feel appreciated and important like he used to be in New York, where he does not feel that significant anymore.
Then, he begins drinking with a bunch of old, grizzly veterans, and they all swap war stories. Don, as per usual, is reluctant to discuss his past. But a few drinks in and after one vicious story from another man, he tells the story of killing his commanding officer.
This is a tale he would never tell in New York because he would feel ostracized and would be looked at as a terrible human being. Here, they just nod their heads and say that is just how it is.
Don feels understood for once. He feels at home.
Then, they accuse him of stealing and smack him in the face with a phone book. But that is not important. It was important to see Don singing songs with a grin on his face and letting himself feel happy for a short time. The ear to ear smile at the end of the episode builds on the idea that Don loves the journey.
A moment to talk about Betty.
Watch out for spoilers, but in this episode, Betty is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. I am going to ignore the fact that after seven seasons of every character smoking, it takes the last three episodes for someone to get lung cancer.
I want to talk about how beautiful this story line was. I lost a mother to breast cancer about a year and a half ago. I know this experience, and “Mad Men” showrunner Matthew Weiner nailed it.
When Henry drives up to get Sally to help talk Betty into receiving treatment, I saw my father. Henry was trying so hard to be the hero and to fix everything and to make everything better, but he broke down in front of Sally. He was finally showing how overwhelmed and scared he was.
Betty is calm and accepting because she seems to have understand life at this point. She understands she cannot change her fate. She just wants things to be normal, like my mother did. My mother would still insist on washing the dishes and baking for me even though she had just gotten home from a chemotherapy session. Betty just wants to feel normal in her final months.
She tells Sally that she watched her mother die and that she won’t do that to Sally. That is a noble ideal, and one that displays strength that will stick with her daughter for a long time.
Her final note to Sally is the perfect goodbye to Betty Draper or Betty Francis or whatever you want to call her. The first half displays her vanity, how she wants to look when buried.
But at the end she writes what every child would want to hear their parent say. Betty writes it always worried her that Sally walks to the beat of her own drum, but now she knows it is okay.
“Your life will be an adventure.”
