As the beginning of the end arrives for Mad Men, series creator Matt Weiner forces his characters to ask themselves: What is their life unlived?
How do they relate to it? Do they long for it, or do they shut it away, burying it under layers of routine and accomplishment? After so much struggle for success, material comfort and -- to put it simply -- the “American Dream,” are the faces of Mad Men at all happy with their lives ... lived?
“Severance,” the eighth episode of Mad Men’s split final season, begins with what appears to be an intimate moment between Don and a beautiful young woman. She models a chinchilla coat for him, and Don's words quietly dominate her as he enjoys a cigarette and drinks coffee -- “You’re not supposed to talk,” he coolly says, that quiet Draper swagger we know well filling the room. “Show me how you feel.”
What looks like another one of Don Draper’s countless seductions results in whiplash, as it’s revealed to be a model casting for Wilkinson, a new client at SC&P. The other ad men were in the room with Don the whole time, and the hopeful model trots out, job well done, seduction over. Business is going well, it seems, since McCaan acquired the ad firm, and Don -- along with other members of SC&P -- are now richer than they’ve ever been.
Later, during another decadent yet quickly forgotten night out with beautiful women, Don, Roger and their ladies chow down at a diner. But Don can’t take his eyes off the waitress, who triggers something in his memory -- what, though, he does not know. Has he met her before? Slept with her? Given Don’s revolving bedroom door, it's easy even for us to believe she's a past on-screen conquest.
Don returns home, turns on the light in his apartment, and swiftly turns it back off, perhaps not wanting to see the emptiness of his current life. He phones his assistant and gets his messages, all from women interested in seeing him -- this is not evolved-Don of the previous Mad Men season; this is Don Draper, back to his old ways.
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He invites over Trisha, a TWA flight attendant. While drunk and stumbling around in her panties with Don, she spills red wine on his crisp white carpet -- but instead of acknowledging the glaring stain, Don tosses a blanket over it and pulls her to the floor. Trisha giggles as she finds an earring on the ground -- another one of Don’s love interest? Don corrects her; it belongs to his ex-wife Megan, a small, bejeweled ghost coming to haunt him as he falls back into old habits. Don quickly tosses the ring off frame and returns to the present, unfazed.
In the office the next day, Peggy and Joan take a meeting with Topaz Pantyhose, and inform their client that Hanes and its new line of tights (L’eggs) are aiming to topple Topaz from the hosiery market -- and there’s not much Topaz can do to stop them.
Joan brings up Topaz’s woes with Don, noting that the brand is being pushed out of the bottom of the market -- and since Topaz isn’t a department-store brand, they seem out of ways to reinvigorate the company’s image. Don nonchalantly suggests a complete rebrand to be sold in Macy’s stores. It’s an ambitious plan, but not unfamiliar to Don -- after all, he did the exact same thing with himself, from Dick Whitman to Don Draper, a complete severance from his past.
Despite his severing, though, Don’s past continues to haunt him -- this time, in his sleep. He dreams of another Wilkinson model casting, where Rachel Menken (one of Don’s earliest love interests in the series, and a woman with whom he wanted to run away) arrives to model fur. Don is stunned to see her, and she tells him he “missed his flight.” With that, she exits, and Don wakes up in the arms of another woman.
The dream drives Don to try to get in touch with Rachel -- but he learns that Rachel has passed away just days ago from leukemia. Don reels.
Meanwhile Ken visits his father-in-law, who has just retired and tells Ken about how happy he is with leisurely life. This gets Ken’s wife stirred up later, and she implores Ken to take up writing, his true passion. Ken brushes this idea off. But the next day, Roger and an executive from McCaan unceremoniously fire Ken (because he left McCann with the Bird's Eye business years before), stating that Pete will take over his accounts.
Ken tells Don that he cannot believe the fatefulness of the dismissal, coming on the heels of his conversation with his wife. Don seems confused by this, and Ken says it must be a sign of “the life unlived.” As Don is still grappling with news of Rachel’s death, these words linger with Don, a reminder of an alternate path not taken -- and now never able to be taken -- with a woman he once loved.
In an effort to make better sense of past, of his fuzzy memories, Don visits the diner again and talks to the familiar waitress, Diana. She bears resemblance to Rachel, and as Don tries to build a bridge to his past through Diana, the encounter quickly devolves into a back-alley hookup. Diana shrugs a dazed Don off afterward, telling him to leave.
Meanwhile, Peggy and Joan meet with McCaan men to discuss Topaz strategy. Throughout their well-prepared meeting, they deal with sexist joke after sexist joke, Joan receiving the bulk. Joan and Peggy quarrel afterward, and Joan seeks retail therapy at a store where she used to work. But she tells a sales lady who recognizes her that she's mistaken, buying up a storm and embracing her new life as someone who is -- as Peggy put it -- “filthy rich.”
Peggy reluctantly agrees goes on a blind date with Mathis’s brother, Stevie. During the dinner, Stevie is given a meal he did not order -- but decides to go along and eat it anyway. Peggy is perplexed by this -- why eat something you don’t actually want? They swap meals, but the brief moment underscores the episode’s running theme of accepting a life that you may not have wanted, but were dealt nonetheless. What is available to us if we speak up and ask for more? For what we always craved?
Peggy flirts with her own “life unlived” during her date -- on a drunken whim, she tells Stevie that she’s never taken a vacation, and she and Stevie decide to fly to Paris. But the plan hits a bump in the road when Peggy cannot find her passport. The date ends well, but when she awakes -- brutally hungover -- it’s as if her previous night was nothing more than a dream ... one where she travels, has a man she adores, and is not jaded by years climbing through the advertising ranks.
Don stops by the beginning of Rachel’s shiva, and her sister Barbara makes it clear that Don is not held in high regard. Seeing Rachel’s children, the path she walked down after walking away from Don, rattles him. Rachel’s sister says to Don, “I don’t know what you’re looking for here,” and perhaps Don does not either. “She lived the life she wanted to live,” Barbara remarks.
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/mad.men_.inside.png" caption="Elisabeth Moss and Christina Hendricks in the final season of "Mad Men."" credit="AMC.com" alt="mad.men.inside"]
Don returns to the diner to speak with Diana again. He explains to her that he isn’t there for sex, and tells Diana about his dream of Rachel, and her death. “When people die, everything gets mixed up,” Diana curtly says, not delving into Don’s sentimental moment. “Maybe you dreamed about her all the time.”
“Severance” is framed with a Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” The lyrics speak to disenchantment, to having it all but all not feeling like enough. As characters including Don, Roger, Peggy, Joan and Pete reach the ostensible apex of their lives, all seem unable to avoid a sense of disillusionment, of all of this not providing the happiness they thought it would.
Weiner, true to form, leaves small historical Easter eggs throughout the episode. Diana reads John Dos Passos’ “The 42nd Parallel” from the “USA” trilogy, a book that could be considered to have no true plot. Instead, the trilogy explores the lives of men and women as they intersected -- or didn’t intersect -- during the early part of the 20th century. In a way, Mad Men bears shades of “The 42nd Parallel” in its conveying of everyday people trying to make sense of their lives as America changes in the background.
Another appears in “Severance” as Don lies in bed with President Nixon’s 1970 Cambodian Incursion Address on in the background. In it, Nixon lays out plans for military operations in a war that would eventually become a scourge for many Americans, a war that could never truly be won. Don listens and stares at the ceiling, a blank stare washed across his eyes.
During “Mad Men’s” seven-season run, what ties have been severed along the way? What lives have the characters chosen not to live? In “Severance,” past lives are described as dreams -- dreams of writing for Ken, or California existing like a “dream” in Pete’s past. Peggy’s blissful date night ends the moment she opens her eyes the next morning.
But the past haunts like a nightmare for Don more than anyone else. No matter how hard Don works to cut ties with his past, it always comes back. If “Severance” has hinted at anything for “Mad Men’s” final handful of episodes, it is that after years of watching Don Draper become the man he is, his mind is now wrenched with thought of the man he could have been.