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Club. Todd Van. Der. Werff: The characters of Mad Men have always been obsessed with remaking the world into something perfect. This season has hung a lantern on that idea with its repeated invocations of the idea of Shangri- La: the fabled place where everything is good, suffering is a half- faded dream, and existence is without pain. But the idea of Shangri- La is so potent precisely because it’s unobtainable, because to actually get there signals the end of all our voyaging. Whatever you want to call it—Shangri- La, Xanadu, Brigadoon—it eventually is lost to us.

It slips back into the mists. Bert Cooper dies, but returns with a message from beyond the grave told in the form of a song- and- dance number to the only man who might be able to hear it: The moon belongs to everyone; the best things in life are free. Shangri- La was never a place; it was always a state of mind. Of course, contentment is easier said than done. To free oneself from want and desire is antithetical to the point of advertising, which exists largely to create want and desire. And yet, of one really thinks about them, most of the world’s major religious and philosophical strains of thought boil down to freeing the self from desire (or at least realizing that what you want is less important than what others need).

The only responsibility we have on Earth is to each other, but we too often twist that into taking care of only ourselves. We spend this entire episode—this entire season, really—waiting for Don to make a pitch.

Mad Men episode recaps, news, and videos — get the latest updates. The AMC show stars Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, January Jones, John Slattery, Vincent Kartheiser. Mad Men is an American period drama surrounding an advertising firm on Madison Avenue, New York City, during the 1960s. The series deconstructs nostalgia of.

The premiere opened with Freddie offering a simulacrum of a Donald Draper pitch, and this episode opens with Don starting in on that which we crave. But that’s thwarted—instead, we get a chance to see how far Peggy has come, as she nails that moment in the room with Burger Chef. When we finally get to see Don make his pitch, it’s behind closed doors—to convince Ted that his impulse to get out of the advertising game and try something else is wrong. To get Ted to wander deeper into Hell. When AMC announced this bifurcated final season, it said that the first seven episodes represented “The Beginning” and the last seven “The End.” Now, that was pretty clearly just some clever marketing on the part of the network, but thinking about these seven episodes in that way makes me realize a bit more what they were trying to do. Any season that’s split in half like this is inherently going to feel a little disappointing, but what “The Beginning” has done is brought us to a place where things are more or less returned to the status quo. Don is back working at the agency without being in danger of losing his job, and he and Peggy are getting along again.

• Don makes a new friend. Joan meets a client for drinks. Peggy hears impressive new work. Roger has a puzzling phone call.
• REALITY: Compare Don Draper's Ads With Those That Actually Ran In The 1960s.

But in the process, so much has been lost. Bert’s life is over, everybody now works for Mc. Cann (the prospect of which sent them scurrying in season three), and Ted has been talked back into a position he doesn’t want to be in. With every gain these characters make—in both the business world and in life—so much more is lost.

And then we have the promise of what comes next, as spoken to us by marketing materials, appropriately. We’ve come to Don’s “Waterloo,” and he somehow found unexpected resurrection.

And now we come to “The End.”Sonia Saraiya: At first, it’s odd that this episode hinges on Bert Cooper’s death. Bert has often seemed more relevant as a character that provides comic relief than one that really drives the plot forward, more a fixture than a character. He is, even in death, a peripheral character, even though his name is on the door of the company. But Bert is peripheral because he’s antique—he’s a relic of an even older era.

As his company aged and time passed, he became more and more irrelevant. Trips to his office required taking off your shoes—a strong indication that it was not quite part of the rest of the world. He was called out only for partners’ votes and pleas for cash. As aware as Mad Men is of the future—because it’s really about our present, told through the lens of 1. Bert was a piece of that past—a piece laid to rest tonight, as astronauts did the unthinkable and miraculous. Watch Kalifornia Hindi Full Movie.

There is no moment that says the past is over more powerfully than the moon landing. And for this show, there is no more powerful moment that says the past is over than killing off Bert Cooper and selling his agency before his body is cold. Bert was the past, and now the show’s sense of past is gone. The future is now, as Cutler intimates to Roger—SC& P is becoming “the ad agency of the future.” And that means the next crop of people to die will be those characters currently left standing in the halls of the Time- Life building.

Great moments have a way of boiling down to the exact same feeling—a dawning realization that outside of the hustle to stay alive, the only thing that is waiting for you, for sure, is death. We’ve discussed this before.

In the very first episode of Mad Men, Don is working on his pitch for Lucky Strike cigarettes. He ends up discarding research from Sterling Cooper’s analyst, Greta, who suggests that the reason people smoke is because we all have a Freudian death wish. Pete fishes it out from Don’s wastebasket and brings it up in the pitch meeting.

Lucky Strike is not moved by the research—they still don’t believe cigarettes kill you—and it’s Pete’s first lesson in two very important rules for advertising. One: Don’t remind anyone of their own mortality. Two: Don’t cross Don Draper. The main one is that Ted Chauogh tells a few representatives from Sunkist that a) he wants to die b) dying isn’t that bad and c) hey, what if we all died right now? We’re in a plane. Let’s find out! Pete Campbell, former proponent of the Freudian death wish, screams into the phone during their conference call: “The clients don’t want to die, Ted!” And he’s right.

He learned it from the best. The second is Peggy’s pitch to Burger Chef—a fantastic scene, where the conversation of the other men at the table is blurred and quiet, overridden by a panicky quiet and the wub- wub- wub of either Peggy’s elevated heartbeat or just the mechanical whirring that we have instead of silence these days. Remember that in the pilot, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” Don was terrified of his pitch to Lucky Strike, and almost choked entirely? Peggy’s petrified, but then Don introduces her, giving her the absolute faith she needs, and it clicks into place. Elisabeth Moss’ performance in this scene is astonishing—even the way she sits in her chair is confident. She’s performing for them, but she’s in her element. Peggy, too, learned from the best.

She runs that room as soon as she opens her mouth, and her deliberate confidence echoes Don and in some ways, surpasses him. He was pitching for the world past, after all. She’s making the first pitch of the future. That’s the voice of a different generation, for sure. Don Draper’s method of selling cigarettes worked on his daughter, but not on this kid. She puts off lighting up for a minute—to kiss a boy! Which we’ll have to discuss—but when he leaves, she starts smoking, folding her arms in an uncanny imitation of her mother’s cigarette habit.

Todd: That’s interesting, because one of the things I’ve been struck by more and more this half- season is the way the show is signaling how all of these people are being replaced—and will replace others. The most obvious example of this is that giant computer, which Ginsberg ranted about until he finally broke with reality. But there are other examples strewn about the season: Lou Avery had replaced Don, something that both Peggy and the audience assumed might fall to her. Don’s children (personified both by Sally and by Bobby this season) are a new generation of Drapers, ready to step in where their father now stands. We like to think that we’re permanent fixtures, that our families or friends or places of business would not stand if we suddenly disappeared, but that’s not really true. Betty has moved on from Don—he’s just like a bad ex- boyfriend to her now. Megan will move on from Don.