Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of advertising agency Sterling Cooper & Partners.
One small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind. One enormous problem for Peggy Olson.
On the eve of the biggest pitch of Peggy's life, human beings walked on the surface of a celestial body other than the Earth for the first time in history. Bad enough if they died in the attempt, but their success is hardly a solution for her either. "I have to talk to people who just touched the face of God about hamburgers," she laments to Don Draper when he passes the cup from his lips to hers.
But Peggy, it turns out, is a prophet. And like any prophet worth her salt, she speaks with God's voice. She speaks of Burger Chef as if its fast-food formica is the Ark of the Covenant, a vessel with the power to bridge the generation gap and end the conflict over Vietnam, if not the Vietnam Conflict itself. At home, she argues, our connection with each other—the connection we all keenly felt as we watched Neil Armstrong take those first shadowy steps—has been severed. Not so at Burger Chef: "What if there was another table where everybody gets what they want when they want it?"
That's the theme of "Waterloo," the "mid-season finale" of Mad Men's final season. In this episode, desire—particularly the desire of women—is fulfilled. Wishes are granted, closure is reached, and even death becomes a song-and-dance number. What makes "Waterloo" one of Mad Men's finest hours is the way it delivers all that catharsis, yet still questions what happens to it after the curtain comes down.
Let's start with Sally, who's been dealing with disillusionment all season long. She seems set up for a late-night rendezvous with her hunky teenage visitor, but it's a fakeout. As the kid's own mother pointed out to Betty, he's as passionless and directionless as he is shirtless, and Sally has been sick of good-looking facades since grade school. She winds up trying out and discarding his sexy cynicism like a shade of lipstick she doesn't care for. Instead, she plants one on the dude's dorky younger brother. Give her a nerd with the brains to look at the stars, and the soul to understand why that's worth doing, anytime. (And note that Don argued for this kind of stargazing earlier in the season. Sally's her father's daughter.)
By contrast, Joan's dreamboat sailed last week, when Bob Benson made his unsuccessful play to make her his blushing beard. The object of her gaze this episode, and for much of the season, has been money, specifically the vast quantity of it that Don flushed down the toilet by impulsively scotching the agency's public offering. She's got no more use for his recklessness than she does for Bob's genial but loveless calculation. So the deal Roger devises with McCann is perfect for her, both financially and emotionally: By agreeing to it, she's effectively selling Don at a profit. Her giddiness over the windfall may or may not be a sign she's willing to let bygones be bygones with her old friend, but at least now she can afford to do whatever she chooses.
Joan's far from the only woman who has to come to grips with ol' tall dark and lonesome in this episode. Megan, languidly surrounded by scripts and smog in Los Angeles, realizes she's at home this way, more so than she'd be if Don were there to share it. She ends their relationship with a prolonged pause on the telephone; their marriage, which started with the sturm und drang of "Zou Bisou" and dom-sub sex play, ends not with a bang but a whimper. It's taken Betty years to get to that point, but she at last sees Don as "a bad ex-boyfriend" instead of a nemesis. Good—casting him as the antichrist does Betty no more good than Don-as-messiah did Megan. Finally, Don's comic-relief secretary Meredith, having nursed an obvious and unrequited crush on the guy since the moment he returned to the agency, makes her move, and not even rejection makes her realize she's being rejected. She's in love with the idea of Don, so much so that the man himself is barely a blip on her radar. But as both of the former Mrs. Drapers could tell her now, a man is all he is.
Nearly all these relationship dynamics are duplicated, and doubled, in the person of Peggy Olson. (Hell, she's even got a hot handyman to mirror Sally's teen idol.) Money, power, prestige, emotional health—over the years Don's cost her all of this, and helped her win all of it as well. Unsurprisingly, Peggy's spent a lot of time either trying to live up to Don or beat him. Their rapprochement last episode marked the beginning of a final, more mature stage: No longer either learning from the master or trying to become the master in turn, she's simply his peer. She pitches Burger Chef not to impress Don, nor to win some power play against him, but simply because, due to office politics completely unrelated to their relationship, it's a job he can't do but she can.
And she kills it. In Peggy's hands, the family-centric Burger Chef campaign isn't the nostalgic "Carousel" reboot it would have been had Don performed the pitch. She's a stand-in for a whole new generation; her youth means that instead of longing for something she's lost, she's starving for something she's never had. ("Not just for dinner.") When she talks about the cacophony of the news, she's not thinking of the Leave It to Beaver days gone by—she's thinking of the only world she's ever known as an adult, the world that led her to accidentally stab her radical boyfriend in the gut, the world that cost her friend Ginsberg his sanity. When she makes reference to her own personal life, she doesn't bring up her spouse and her 2.5 kids—she talks about the 10-year-old tenant for whom she's become a surrogate mom (and who's become a stand-in for the son she gave up for adoption, who'd be nearly as old by now). We saw Peggy break down over a lot of this back in the season premiere. Now she's taking that pain and making something "beautiful" out of it.
With all this focus on Mad Men's women, you might not even notice how little Don actually does in this "mid-season finale." Megan ends his marriage. Jim Cutler attempts to end his career. Roger cuts the deal to save it. Pete showers him with much-needed praise. Peggy pulls off the big creative masterstroke. Cutler even neuters Don's would-be replacement Lou Avery. All that's left for Don to do is persuade a burned-out Ted Chaough to avoid the underemployed purgatory he himself endured, a task that takes all of one minute to accomplish. For the rest of it, Don's just a viewer, no more of a participant than he is in the moon landing he watches in an Indianapolis hotel room.
And before the episode is over, he's a viewer one more time, for a spectacle only he can see. Bert Cooper's posthumous musical revue sees him surrounded by five women—stand-ins, perhaps, for Peggy, Sally, Megan, Betty, and Joan, Don's five leading ladies. The best things in life, this dead man sings to Don, are free. Whatever the true nature of this fabulously bizarre first-act finale, it's something Don responds to with great delight: His smile is radiant, his eyes sparkle with tears of joy. But when the music stops, Don's left alone, slumped against a desk. "All of us were doing the same thing at the same time," Peggy said of the moonshot. "We can still feel the pleasure of that connection. Because I realize now, we were starved for it. We really were." Don Draper is still hungry.
