Photo

Season 7, Episode 8: Severance

In the 1962 film “The Notorious Landlady,” Fred Astaire plays a boss who offers some strong advice to an up-and-comer played by Jack Lemmon. “You’re at a level where you can only afford one mistake,” he says. “The higher up you go, the more mistakes you’re allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.”

When “Mad Men” had its premiere in 2007, it was 1960, Don was 34, and one mistake could have ruined him. He was walking a high wire at the top of a skyscraper, and fans morbidly wondered not if but when he would fall. An alcoholic, philandering impostor hiding a baroque childhood as the son of a prostitute and a cheap john, Don was concealing so much that he was terrified that one mistake would lead to the downfall of his marriage, his job, his family or his career.

Over six and a half seasons, Don screwed up, over and over. And all of the terrible things Don feared actually happened: His stolen identity was revealed. His affairs were discovered. Two marriages collapsed. His self-destructive alcoholism consumed him. He lost accounts. He lost friends. He nearly lost his job and his firm.

But Don didn’t just survive those mistakes. As Sterling Cooper broke through the ceiling and reached new heights, Don also grew powerful enough that his mistakes couldn’t bring him down anymore. Just as Peggy Lee sings in the song that plays during the premiere’s opening scene, Don looked around, surveyed the wreckage of his life and his war-torn decade, then waltzed onward. “Is that all there is to a fire?” Lee sings. “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing.”

It’s April 1970. What to do after a decade of assassinations and war, divorce and trauma? Bring on the wide ties. Vomit out the paisley. Make Ted dress in 50 shades of yellow, like he’s Colonel Mustard from the board game Clue. Buy Joan a new dress. And bring in the new girls. Aside from the color palette, what has really changed?

Over the course of six-plus seasons, Don didn’t figure much out. He didn’t find meaning or become a better father, husband or employee. He kept blundering from one fiasco to the next, making the same mistakes over and over again. But he survived. And he made some modicum of peace with his flaws. As the show’s final, seven-episode run opens, Don is still standing, still smoking — and still selling the fur coats he once tried to up-sell Roger Sterling decades ago. Only, unlike that overeager kid, this Don now has the swagger that comes from power. (“Show me how smooth your skin is.”) At some point in the 1960s, Don’s mistakes became his style.

That sordid childhood history Don desperately tried to hide? Now he’s sitting in a diner, spinning the nostalgic carousel of his memory as if he were playing spin-the-bottle. His once-shameful secrets have become chitchat, pickup lines deployed on girls half his age.

When we last left Don, he had just gotten rich off the firm’s merger and seen Bert’s ghost boogie off into the ether after delivering the morbidly ironic message that “the best things in life are free” — a reminder that the merger was the emptiest of victories. In this episode, Don sees the ghost of Rachel Katz, the woman who dared him to love her and saw right through his lies. “You don’t want to run away with me,” Rachel answered Don when he asked her to go to Los Angeles in the first season. “You just want to run away. You’re a coward!” When her ghost tells Don, “You missed your flight,” it’s an elliptical version of Ken’s earnest lament for “the life not lived.” At her shiva, when Rachel’s sister tells Don she “lived the life she wanted to live,” it’s a more direct slap in the face.

Don has fantasized about a romantic escape plenty before: He once left the schoolteacher Miss Farrell idling in her car. And he drunkenly told his bohemian mistress Midge, “Pack a bag. We’re going to Paris” — just as Peggy, who is following in Don’s footsteps in so many ways, suggests to her fresh-faced Emory University grad in this episode. Neither Peggy nor Don were willing to take the risk. Peddlers of aspirational fantasy, both tend to see happiness as something you desire, or fabricate, or sell, rather than something you can make manifest. Addicted to work, skeptical of change, they leave their passports at the office.

Peggy and Joan get their hard-earned plotlines in this episode, but the other women in Don’s life — Betty, Megan and Sally — are absent. On the other hand, there are so many echoes and afterimages of Don’s women that the premiere is something of a sexual séance: The casting-call models echo the ones who inspired Roger’s heart attack. Don’s hundred-dollar assignation reverberates like a slap from the prostitute Don once paid. The stewardess and oracular waitress remind us of Don’s thorough familiarity with all aspects of the service industry. Moreover, when the stewardess cleans up the red wine spilled on his white carpet, she is the afterimage of a floor-scrubbing Megan — the ex who left her earring behind, like a stain.

The firm is also haunted by the ghosts of past accounts: Topaz, Fillmore Autoparts, Dow. When Ted bungles an idiot pitch about “three types of women,” it’s a bastardization of Don’s two types of women (Marilyn or Jackie) campaign, and just another suggestion that Madison Avenue is just another dead-end street.

All series long, we’ve watched these ad men and women climb the corporate ladder. Now that they’re at the top, it seems the final run of episodes will ask what it all meant. What does this show have to say about how people change? Watching this elegant, evocative, self-referential hall-of-mirrors premiere, it was hard not to look back and think of Hegel’s curse: “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

The Sterling Cooper & Partners crowd likes to mock the agency McCann Erickson, but are they any less chauvinist, with the all-day casting calls? Joan is still harassed just the same as ever — maybe even worse. (“I want to burn this place down.”) But at least she can afford a new frock. Nothing will ever be enough for greedy Pete, whose partner status just means he has a bigger suite of things to complain about. Given a chance to walk away from the office wars that took his eye, Ken instead decides to sign up for another tour of duty, fighting for the other side.

Has anyone learned anything? Maybe just a very little. Maybe Don and Peggy and Joan and the crew aren’t so different from Ken’s father-in-law. He spent his whole life working for the most advanced chemical company in the world, and now, with all that experience behind him, he’s beaming, proud that he has learned something new: how to cook a Pop-Tart. In a toaster. It’s a victory of sorts — but it’s laughably small.

For the most part, everyone seems to be making the same mistakes, over and over. And if mistakes become a style, the broad ties, cheap tuxedo shirts, miasmic paisleys and mutton-chopped chauvinism of S.C. & P.’s later days are not a good look. With just six episodes left, it may be too late for a makeover.

A quick note: These recaps are not intended to be exhaustive; that would be exhausting for all of us. I’ll just try to pick a theme each week and continue the conversation. So please share your thoughts in the comments. What do you make of the premiere? Where do we go from here? Will anyone ever escape that office? And how did all the hints of death inform your conspiracy theories?

Logan Hill is a journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, New York, Rolling Stone, “This American Life,” Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Wired and others. You can follow him on Twitter at @loganhill33.