A FAN'S NOTES.

Now that the world is probably past caring, I'd like to put my two cents in on the closing episode of Mad Men Season 6. This is currently the only show with which I have a traditional fan-type relationship anymore -- that is, I watch it without caring if it's good.

And for the most part I've come to the conclusion that it isn't, much. Daniel Mendelsohn's overheated critique back in 2011 had some fair points, the most convincing being that a lot of what happens in the show, especially the ooh-ahh bits, often seems cooked up and ridiculous. (Whatever Bob Benson turns out to be or mean in the end, for example, I don't see how his leg action with Pete Campbell can possibly add up to anything but another tawdry stunt to make viewers gasp. Which, I admit, I did.)

And the most cooked-up, ridiculous thing about Mad Men has been the double life of Don Draper/Dick Whitman*. That it happened, and how it happened, is absurd, as is the maintenance of the fiction, with the insanely convenient assistance of the real Draper's widow and despite the fact that people keep finding out about it, on at least one occasion from Draper himself. If Mad magazine were still doing classic parodies, that would be a huge part of this one, along with Draper's enough-already death imagery ("So how should we sell Cool Whip, Don? I'm thinking fridge-as-morgue").

You can see why Matt Weiner wanted it, though; instead of having Draper merely tortured by ambition and an inability to connect -- features that a successful ad man could have even without the spooky backstory -- he can be extra tortured by Living a Lie in a more literal sense. It adds moody, Gothic shadows to what is essentially just another grey flannel suit story, and sometimes peril to spice up the drama.

Because I'm a fan I have gone with it -- and in this season, as Draper's behavior became more outrageously self-destructive and other characters were either outright turning on him or revealing that they could do without him, I expected that he would push someone too far and get the ass-kicking he'd been asking for, probably via the explosion of his secret in a way that couldn't be papered over. How surprised and impressed I was, then, that Draper did it to himself, and that he seemed at least willing to keep pulling that string till it all unraveled.

And this is one of the great things about being a fan: Sometimes your team pulls it off. Everything that is not absurd and cheap about the character and the show is in that speech. I don't like to get into the minutiae-meanings that Mad Men Monday Morning QBs pick over every week, but Draper telling the guys from Hershey, just before he goes into the soliloquy, "I have to say this because I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again," is a magnificent thing. The speech he's about to tell them exposes not only details of Draper's real past, but also the sorrow and longing that are his creative wellspring, such as it is -- the place where those cheap, pretty stories he's been so good at selling come from. It's the Cup of Loneliness. Telling the story -- right after telling the bullshit version of the story -- isn't just Draper unmasking himself, it's Draper unmasking everything he's been doing for every client in his career. And though the specific and obvious outrage of the blown pitch is bad enough to get him fired, it feels to me as if his real firing offense  is admitting that his business is as much of a fraud as he is. To preface this as Draper did with a statement that is equally winsome and vicious -- like he had to tell them this horrible thing before they left him forever -- is something more like art than must-watch TV.

Oh, and Jon Hamm was totally up for it. Bravo. He walked the line.

Also: The characters I'd been feeling sorry for because Draper had been fucking them over don't seem so worthy of my affection anymore. (Particularly Ted Chaough. What a passive aggressive cunt.) But there I go, being a fan again. It's just as well it's over for a while. Now maybe I should read a book.

*UPDATE. I originally had this as "Dick Whitten"; thanks, TribalistMeathead, for the catch. I tend to slide Dick Whitman into Dick Whittington, the poor boy who becomes Lord Mayor of London Town, and I guess I got caught halfway through.