Season 5 Episode 13: The Phantom

"April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain."

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

The season finale was both dense and satisfying. It did what great fiction is suppose to do: create mirrors of our humanity and inhumanity; layer meanings for depth; excite our senses to want more.

We learn from Marie, Megan's mother, that the setting is in April, when she has come to visit her daughter during Easter, a holiday her husband doesn't celebrate because he's an atheist. Easter, the holy day celebrating the raising of the dead, shows Don in the embryonic stage of becoming reborn, and perhaps not in a good way. We see him helping Megan get a job as an actress in a commercial, playing Beauty in a theme of Beauty and the Beast. Will Don become her Beast? By helping her succeed he may have knowingly helped her to leave to pursue her career, just as he helped Peggy and she left him. We are left with uncertainty when a young woman expresses her interest in him at a bar. He doesn't say he's married. He doesn't say anything. We are left to find out next season.

Phantoms are illusions, transparancies of ideas and ideals but also of the living and the dead. In this episode, Don's waking spirit is not the only apparation we see. Adam, Don's younger brother who also committed suicide by hanging, is seen at SCDP and at the dental office. Adam tells him that his tooth is not the only thing rotten to the core. But this is not Adam speaking: it's Don's conscience.

We also see the specter of Peggy by her absence. When the Topaz client complains about using the word "cheap" in a commercial with a young woman, he mentions that "you should get a girl's opinion. I used to take that as a given here." When Don does see Peggy, it is in a movie theater, home of the shadow world where illusions of human existence are projected in an empty room.

Megan is also shown in this other world light when Don watches her audition reel alone in an ethereal black and white silence: it's as though she is already dead.

Lane's spirit hovers at the company when Harry doesn't want to move into Lane's office and at the partnership meeting when his death benefit to the company makes SCDP profitable for the quarter. Joan also feels guilt over Lane's death, as she thinks that if she had slept with him perhaps he wouldn't have committed suicide. When Don visits Rebecca to offer her $50,000 as reimbursement for Lane's capital investment in the partnership, she accuses him of having "no right to fill that man with ambition." She thinks Don had a corrupting influence on Lane, when she finds the picture of the young woman in his wallet and also the visit to the brothel with the Jaguar client. She believes that ambition was the cause of his suicide, the pursuit of personal achievement which Don embodies.

Pete becomes a ghost before our eyes after Beth's electro-shock treatment erases her memory of him. She further describes his (their) affair as "a temporary bandage on a permanent wound." His physical fight on the train again reminds us of his false pride and self importance. But most importantly, that he is just like Howard but does not have the self awareness to realize it. When the episode ends, Pete is listening to headphones cut off from the world and his family. We don't know what he is listening to as he is no longer there. We can not follow him.

Roger also becomes spirit through his use of LSD again, but this time alone, standing naked, arms open to the world from the heights of a hotel room.

Don's guilt is from his manufactured persona, Lane's and Adam's deaths, his damaged familial relationships. His hard scrabble early life and his own accumulation of bad decisions has been glossed over by a successful career and wrapped in a handsome guy package. His guilt manifests itself in a painful tooth which is infected and needs to be removed. The tooth is a molar. Was it his wisdom tooth that was removed?

Season 5 Episode 12 - Commissions and Fees

"Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before stumbling" - Proverbs 16:18

This episode was a disappointment as it seemed like a clip show screened prior to the season finale. It was hurried and seemed to wrap up loose ends while trying to move the characters forward. Lane's suicide was not unexpected, only the method was a surprise. The humor of the car failing to start was a great piece of writing. The men laughing in the office prior to discovery of the body, and again, the entrance of Don and Roger laughing prior to learning of Lane's death seemed false and artificial. However, Lane's motive for embezzlement was revealed to be selfless and we actually see him as a sympathetic character: his tax problems are the result of liquidating stocks in order to capitalize SCDP; and we are reminded that it was his British connection that initially brought the Jaguar account in play, thus putting the agency on a firm foundation and as a force in the advertising world. Per his wife, played with exquisite flair and elegance by Embeth Davidtz *, Lane "never spent anything on himself" only on her and their son's expensive education. He thus becomes the sacrificial lamb to the God of Mammon Avenue. Lane's fatal flaw though is pride. In Ancient Greece, pride was a crime against Olympus as the self inflated individual can not be more important than the gods. Pride keeps Lane from being honest with his wife and his partners at the firm. He can not suffer the humiliation of exposure that he is not the man that he portrays.

Glen, played by the wooden (I can't tell if it's poor acting or just a creepy role) Marten Holden Weiner, is once again shown to be the tortured weird kid at his private school when he tells us that classmates urinated in his locker. Glen addresses the Draper women (Betty and Megan) on a first name basis, to show his equality and sexuality. But with Don, it is Mister: he respects the alpha male, but not the women. When Glen confides to Don and asks why "things turn to crap", Don's response is "you're too young to think like that". With Glen, we are given tantalizing bits that perhaps he too may go off the deep end. He takes Sally to the American Musuem of Natural History where dead stuffed animals are shown in dioramas. When Sally asks about the bison, he says "I hope it's a family that was killed." His book report is also on Nat Turner, the slave that started a rebellion in Virginia that resulted in over 160 deaths, both black and white. When the episode ends, Glen, the young boy with a budding mustache, is shown driving down the road with Don, the only father figure we have ever seen. But clues hint at a violent future for him.

Sally becomes a woman in this episode. When her blood is shed, we also see the blood mottled chin of Lane in death. Her knowledge of her period is humiliating for her, just as Lane's exposure as a counterfeiter was to him. But, we see her as a child not as a woman as she rushes home to her mother for comfort. This brings satisfaction to Betty, who has been jealous of Megan for her youth and figure and her influence over Sally.

The stars are also aligning against Pete. As well as Roger's long standing disdain, we now have Don aggressively pitching Dow Corning because he believes Pete thinks too small. Kenny also wants to sideline him if they land his father-in-law, which Roger calls a "whale" account. Dow Corning will bring them into the "big league" of advertising firms which is what Don wants: more prestige, more power, more pride.

Lane's suicide and Don's resulting guilt will propel the show to it's season conclusion.  Don has been on shaky ground for awhile both professionally and personally. Just when he's getting back into the game, he's dealt with a crisis of conscience. It will be interesting to see where it leads.

* I love Embeth Davidtz early (pre-nose job) role in Army of Darkness, Sam Raimi's time travel spoof of a horror flim, as well as her work in Schindler's List, Matilda, the sappy Bicentennial Man and artful Junebug. Her limited role in Mad Men does not allow her to show the vulnerability that she can bring to the screen. She really is an amazing and versatile actress.