Don Draper's Beginning to See the Light: Evaluating "Mad Men" Season 6

Image via Complex Original

Disorienting and weird, the two-hour premiere “The Doorway” is the finest achievement of season six. Don’s reading from Dante’s Inferno coupled with his dialogue-less first 10 minutes presaged the doom and gloom of the episodes to come, and made settling into those first two hours, from the viewer’s perspective, like losing yourself in the woods. (Content fitting form like a corpse in a coffin is one sign of greatness.)

The first-person POV shots, the forests of facial hair, the palpable chill of death—“The Doorway” promised that we would all get lost in 1968, the year everything goes wrong in America. Roger’s monologues in therapy remain some of the best writing we’ve got this season, and did a great job of setting up images and motifs for the season without patronizing the viewer with paint-by-numbers symbolism.

Finally, the neat callback to Mad Men’s pilot—Don’s affair with Sylvia revealed in the last moments, just like the sucker-punch revelation of his marriage to Betty in that first episode—sounded the triumphant note: This was great television.

After the uncomfortable gauntlet of Fat Betty, Mad Men gave January Jones’ character some of her best scenes: snooping in an East Village tenement, cracking open Don’s personality with intelligence and grace, and sharing a smoke with Sally. This was the most dynamic we’ve seen Betty since season three, and it felt good to cheer for a character who had for too long been one of Mad Men’s most unfairly maligned.

If Kiernan Shipka led a My So Called Life-esque spinoff of Mad Men centered around Sally Draper tearing shit up at the dawn of the '70s, the world would be a better place. She's consistently one of the most captivating characters on the show, capable of drawing big laughs (all of her bitching at Betty during the premiere) or bringing the entire viewership to their knees (the painful interaction between her and Don after she catches him with Sylvia). 

There are so few characters left on the show who seem capable of doing good. Sally is one of them.

No, those Johnnie Walker commercials did not make up for the lack of Christina Hendricks’ Joan Harris this season. Sharp relief from those flat sex-sells ads, Joan Harris in season six was tired of the bullshit. Lashing out at Don after losing the Jaguar account, deciding to play with that guy at the Electric Circus, and cutting Pete out of the Avon meeting, Joan leaned the fuck in—by any means necessary.

Last season, Megan exercised power over Don to an unheard of degree. Cleaning the apartment in black lingerie like “you’ll do anything for me” (word to Beyonce), Megan worked Don like the sniveling brothel snoop he is. And then what? She returned to her first love, acting, and asked for Don’s help. By doing this, she became tainted in his eyes, unworthy of his respect and admiration. And what’s worse, the show did nothing to stop Don’s perspective from subsuming ours. Almost all of the Megan we’ve seen this season has been filtered through Don. The show has largely denied us access to her outside of Don, and so we’re put in a position where we start to believe that she’s unworthy of respect, too. This sapped energy from a season that sorely needed some.

Note: In the finale, she took back some agency, walking out on Don after he called off L.A. to save Ted's skinny ass. Watching her assert herself felt like last season, even if there wasn't dirty, dirty sex involved.

Name a bad Ken Cosgrove moment from this season. You can't. In "The Crash," a season six highlight, Kenny smashed a car with the boys from Chevy in a frantic scene straight out of David Lynch's filmography. Then, with speed reanimating his busted legs, he danced a jig for Don. That's two GIFs in one episode.

As if that weren't enough, he became a pirate for us after getting shot in the face during a hunting trip. Ken suffers so that we can smile; we salute the prince of pain, the only sci-fi writer we can root for in good conscience (word to Kinsey, wherever he is).

This season trotted out a number of heavy-handed flashbacks to Don's whorehouse childhood, and for the most part they failed.

Revealing Don's past is a way to put us on stable footing, and it undermines the thesis of the show. The show is about the divides between people, how we are essentially unknowable to one another. Letting us into Don's past, connecting his encounters with prostitutes to his recklessness today lets us know Don in ways that don't work. They feel too obvious, plain as a connect-the-dots puzzle.

Sill, this knowledge of Don's past allowed for many of the finale's best moments. To be sure, we have to know something about Dick Whitman, but the problem is how neatly the flashbacks explained away Don's worst qualities. Emily Nussbaum, writing in The New Yorker, likened it to a serial killer's backstory. If you can make that claim legitimately, the show has moved beyond gentle mystery into something ham-fisted.

There's a thin line between poor plotting and punishment. I'm all for the latter, and have no beef with the show forcing us to watch Don at his ugliest, but season six suffered from too many inert episodes.

"Man With a Plan," where Don keeps Sylvia trapped in a hotel room for what feels like an eternity (which level of Hell is this, again?), is the prototypical example. As later episodes demonstrated, Don could be made to suffer in more interesting ways (see: the conclusion to "Favors," and the characters around him could pick at him to reveal more of themselves (see: Betty in "The Better Half"). The 50 Shades of Submission talk was not cutting it.

Season five set the bar stupidly high as far as unexpected developments (Ginsberg's holocaust story, Lane's suicide), visual storytelling (the dripping faucet at Pete's, the acid trip), and engaging stories that tapped into new moods for the series (all of "Mystery Date's" terrible dread). Season six sat too long with Don, only giving us occasional insight into great characters like Joan, Betty, and Megan. This will keep it from ranking among the show's best seasons when Mad Men draws to a close next year.