. He's either a self-absorbed new-age spiritualist who abandoned his kids or the most incomprehensibly cynical ad man in New York.
Hahaha. 10 minutes before the end when he was going through his list of sins I almost laughed like 'eez, are they ending with "actually. Don's a shit head and he should hate himself. bye."
I have never really enjoyed the commune or hippie style excursions in the show. I don't know if they are genuine, but they've always felt like tourism to me in what is otherwise a show that feels honest about things. Even in this finale, I was very curious about what Don was doing until Stephanie took him there. I was just hoping he would hurry up and leave, because nothing any of those characters feels meaningful to me. Even the story of the Leonard I was only a little invested in. It barely felt important enough for an important character development in Don, let alone the last one.
Bascally I'm still like Don was walking around there with his arms folding, except I would have just left after one night.
So I don't find much satisfaction in the idea that Don stayed there or embraced a life indicated by that experience. I think he did go back to New York and make the Coke pitch, harvesting that experience for the work.
Beyond the stuff in the last few minutes, which I thinks points to him doing that, there was also the phone call to Peggy where she says he can come back and 'it's happened before' with regards to other people, and she asks doesn't he want to work on Coke. Also, Don worked at McCann which was the agency who made that ad, and Coke has been brought up several times recently as something Don has always wanted to do. It's also clear that Don's trips away are usually not a positive thing, they are a reaction to some crisis or another, where he spirals downwards until he finds something to grab onto and pick himself up again. I don't think there's much to suggest that this one is any different. There's plenty of stuff in place to support looking at the ending that way.
I think it is more in line with the story of the show and the character that he would go back. I don't find much appeal in the alternative, which is that the show's ending should be looked at on a different textual level than rest of it. Don didn't go back, and the ad was made by someone else. He stayed in a commune, or wandered (as an unhappy drunk?) for the rest of his life. The ad was only shown to demonstrate how advertising processes genuine emotion, but we leave the world of the show for it and go into the real world, or something.
Nah. I think he went back.
Don Draper/Dick Whitman is one of television's greatest villains.
Like, I can't even read him as an anti-hero. That finale shows him as a straight-up villain.
If that's what Weiner has been going for the entire time, props to him. Because Christ, that's fucking brilliant and ballsy.
What's villainous about him?
