In which I’m mad at mad men…
As it seems like the rest of the country is expressing their anger with their votes today, or so the media would have us believe, I figured today would be a good one on which to publicly express my distaste for “Tomorrowland,” the concluding episode of the most recent season of Mad Men. I have my thoughts about the current election cycle, but there’s no need to express them as the world is overloaded with political commentary right now. I’ll come back to them in a bit. But I do want to let out a healthy WTF to the last episode of Mad Men, so here it is: WTF?
This is not a Glee situation here, in that I’m not even close to being done with the show. In fact, it’s the opposite scenario: Mad Men has been so good for so long that I’ve grown to expect even subpar episodes to be so only because they fall just short of brilliance, not because they weren’t actually up to snuff. It’s routinely so incredibly written and tightly structured that you just expect it to continue along apace. And then “Tomorrowland,” about which I ask again: WTF???
It was actually a really good episode and I was totally into it and all of the sudden there was an abrupt dissolve from one scene into the next, made even more so by the fact that Mad Men almost never has them, so it was particularly noticeable and jarring. The dissolve took us from lunch with the Don, Sally, and Bobby Draper and Don’s secretary Megan at a diner in Los Angeles to Don and Megan in Don’s apartment in NYC. How much time has passed? What’s gone on in the meantime? Wait … What’s he doing? He’s … no … is he … he’s not going to … but … he can’t be … holy s*** he just asked his secretary, that girl from Hot Tub Time Machine, to marry him. WTF?
I will say that there was, towards the end of the episode, a glimmer of hope—much like Democratic Senate candidates winning in Connecticut and West Virginia—and that was when Don and Betty had their Cheeveresque final meeting in the kitchen of the Ossining house they once shared. The conversation was haunted by the specter of what was unsaid that probably should have been over the years, and it was realistic and lovely—really the only enjoyable moment featuring Betty all year. Betty walked out of the frame one way and Don the other, and then they were gone and all that was left was that gorgeous lone bottle of rye on the counter, so symbolic and tragically meaningful. What needed to happen right then was either a fade or, preferably, a hard cut to black screen and the end credits. Walk away and call it a season.
Instead, another freakin’ dissolve, this time to Don and Megan in bed at Don’s apartment. Megan is asleep and Don is awake. He turns to look towards the window and the camera zooms in on the window and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” comes on and now we fade to the credits. This might have been a decent ending were it not for the visual acuity of the shot that ended the previous scene. How could they have anything after that shot, and scored with something is banally ironic as Sonny and Cher no less? It had all the subtlety of a jack hammer. Overall, the last segment of “Tomorrowland” was so abruptly haphazard, so tonally inconsistent, and so out of left field it just infuriated me. And Matthew Weiner wrote it, so it’s not like someone else abused his baby.
I guess the good news is that it’s not a gimmick ending à la The Soprano’s annoying final episode. I will definitely watch to see what happens from here, but I was left stunned and disappointed in the writing and pacing of the show for the first time ever. How do they recover from this? I guess we’ll find out this summer, which is at least more quickly than we’ll find out how we recover from this election, which won’t be clear until November of 2012.
