Mad Men's third season concluded Sunday night with one of the series' most straightforward episodes to date, a simple, elegant inventory of a) everything Don Draper possesses and b) everything it cost him. It's an unusually binary approach for a show that doesn't often function with fewer than four or five narrative lines in the water at once, but when your independence costs this much, taking stock should probably always be priority No. 1. See if our numbers match after the jump.
Like so many ambitious men, Don winds up in the red -- way in the red, and what seems on the surface like a succession of betrayals actually is more akin to Don finally filing for moral bankruptcy. And he owes pretty much everybody, from Betty to Peggy to Roger to Pete on down the line. Everyone, that is, except for perhaps Connie Hilton, the wizened oracle with whom Don convenes in the opening scene. Connie has the gossip on Sterling Cooper's sale; by now, the office is not only on the market but has been sold with its parent company to McCann Erickson. That won't wash for Connie, who pulls his New York properties to Don's dismay. But Don's dismay is an even less savory morsel for Connie to wash down, and the old (self-made) man's rebuke is sharp, swift and severe.
But it also provokes this whole accounting in the first place: Who and what does Don take for granted in this disillusioned stage of his work and life, and how far is he willing to go to square up? Start the roundelay, I suppose: There's Bert Cooper, whom Don approaches about Sterling Cooper's sale and potentially buying the company back from the British. Bert doubts Don has the stomach for this high-stakes variety of renaissance, but Don surprises pretty much everyone -- including himself -- by next approaching and apologizing to Roger, who needs to be in for the coup to work. A cynic might say Don's just politicking, exploiting another resource to get ahead. Yet there's something more sincere here, undergirded by admittedly clumsy flashback memories of his father's own business compromise literally costing him his life. That won't be Don, and not least because he left Dick Whitman behind years ago. It won't be Don because -- as Roger recognizes -- he once again has something to prove as an ad man. His ambition hasn't abated; it's just more humane. It even involves the officious Lane Pryce, who'll comply in firing the three men (thus terminating their contracts) in exchange for full partnership in their new endeavor.
Not that magnanimity comes all at once. Nor does it come cheap. Peggy cashes in first, declining to simply join the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce team at Don's demand. She has options now, up to and including leverage over her boss. Pete has the same when Don and Roger find their ideal accounts chief feigning illness at home, preparing for an interview with Ogilvy. Neither will be taken for granted any longer. "You think I'll just follow you, like a nervous poodle," Peggy hisses. "I don't to make a career out of being there so you can kick me when I fail." Through their defiance, Don harnesses energy for his own renewal. He even confides to Peggy how he sees an extension of himself in her, a sincere affirmation of her personal value while his unsalvageable marriage dissolves. Harry Crane, meanwhile, kind-of-sort-of will be taken for granted as he unwittingly walks into the conspiracy with the option to either join as Head of Media (and get started kiping contacts and other account info before the start of business Monday), or be locked in a storeroom for maximum confidentiality before the rest of the office finds out what's going on. Not a tough call there. Even Joan Holloway Harris is back in the mix, shepherding them to their new office in a suite at the Pierre, where dewy fresh starts replace the stale hotel trysts of episodes past.
Or maybe "dewy" is overstating things. Certainly nothing good will come of any of this at home, where Don has been sleeping in the baby's room for weeks and Betty has resolved to follow through with a divorce. It's all dizzyingly certain: She will consult an attorney (with Henry Francis's aid, natch) and suggests Don do the same. Betty is actually doing this. Old Don rears his head: "You should see a doctor -- a good one this time." She replies with withering clarity, "You think I'd need to be sick to want out of this?"
It's the last civilized conversation the two of them will have for a while, fueling the slightly too-convenient showdown to come. After all, she and Henry plan to hit Reno, establish residency and be divorced in six weeks flat. Meanwhile, Don tilts and reels in confusion as Roger raises the Henry Francis matter over reconciliatory cocktails, as if his old friend could have known his wife was imagining a new life with a guy Don's never heard of. Suddenly the viewer is Peggy Olson to Matthew Weiner's Don Draper, sat down in the 11th hour and told to believe, "This is how it's gonna go." It all taints Don and Betty's late-night bedroom confrontation to some degree, which isn't necessarily any less riveting for the sheer clifhanger-y implications of it all: "You're good, and everyone else is baaaad," Don sneers, clutching her close by her nightgown like a sailor in the drunken prelude to a bar brawl. "You're a whore." He'll fight her, take the kids, keep every nickel. She'll go to Reno, she replies, and Don will consent.
And you know what? He will. He'll even call later to reverse himself: "I'm not going to fight you. [...] I hope you get what you always wanted." It's all a part of settling his karmic bill -- the expensive lying, identity theft, infidelity... all that oppressive presumption that seeped through his pores like some hot, toxic vapor. But as Connie alludes early on, don't pity Don. Rather, pity the little ones: Sally and Bobby for starters, who don't know whom to trust in their parents' bust-up. Their helplessness is crushing, as is that of the children of the Sterling Cooper divorce. Take Paul Kinsey, visibly haunted (in a single shot) by the family that left him behind. Or Ken Cosgrove, who thrived in an appartus of comfort, stability and opportunity. It's gone now, usurped by a patriarchy that's fled home and left its young ones for dead. And those who survive will never trust their families again -- at least not until their own Connie Hiltons come calling, jolting them out of the embittered complacency of their own middle age.
For now, though, it's all about adjusting to new life, for better and for worse. Particularly for worse, in the long, cold shadow of the season finale. But 1964 will be here before we know it; Pete has probably landed the first Beatles ad account already. Onward ho.