"If I don't go into that office every day, who am I?"

That's a question clearly dogging Don Draper as the seventh and final season of Mad Men begins. The query — one that surely becomes an audible whisper when he's up in the wee hours watching TV — may even sound familiar. It certainly should.

That very same question was posed to Don by Freddy Rumsen back in 1962 (or, if you prefer to keep time in episodic-TV terms, episode nine of Mad Men season two), right after Freddy was placed on a leave of absence for drinking until he pissed his own pants on the job.

At the time, Don assured Freddy that the partial closing of doors at Sterling Cooper would only open new windows elsewhere. "It's not an ending," Don said after he, Rumsen, and Roger enjoyed one final night of boozing to celebrate the fact that Freddy had basically gotten fired for boozing. "It's a fresh start."

Those words — "It's a fresh start" — sounded a lot like the ones Freddy spoke in the bravura Accutron pitch he delivered in the tight close-up that opened Sunday's episode. "This is the beginning of something," he confidently promised, confident because Freddy was speaking the words that had been written by Don Draper. As we know, Don has always liked the beginning of things.

Yes, the big twist in the jumping-off point for season seven was that Don is still as full of ideas, as creative with the creative, as he's ever been. But because he — like Freddy once before him — is on leave of absence for hitting the sauce (and the candor about his sad-orphan childhood) too hard, he now needs to use Freddy Rumsen as his representative and mouthpiece within the offices of SC&P. Freddy Rumsen, people: the copywriting old-timer who has never independently come up with a solid ad idea in his life and whose greatest talent is his ability to play Mozart with the zipper of his fly.

Mad Men loves to demonstrate the degree to which history repeats itself with slightly different details, and this Don/Freddy relationship is another example of that. It's also a pretty stark illustration of Don's inability to survive without breeding false identities. What is Freddy right now but yet another guy pretending to be Don Draper?

When Don revealed his true self to his colleagues and his children at the end of last season, for a moment it seemed like maybe he'd finally merged the two sides of his once-fractured soul, that perhaps he'd even end the 1960s in a moment of zen. But as season seven and 1969 begin, Don's more divided than he's ever been. He's bicoastal, in job limbo, trapped — as that striking closing image in this episode conveyed — between two malfunctioning sliding glass doors. Even his inspirations are getting divvied up, parceled out to SC&P and J. Walter Thompson, to Accutron and 7-Up.

Why is Don deciding to work this way and why is he using Freddy as his proxy? The obvious answer is that he's running away: from the sting of getting dismissed, from the embarrassment of his true Hershey's confessions and, by extension, from the reality that he laid his childhood shame out on a conference room table for everyone to see. But one can also read his decision to deputize Freddy Rumsen as something deeper and more disturbing: an acknowledgement that he doesn't want to be Don Draper anymore, so he's handing over the role, including the sensational pitches that come with it, to a guy who really needs the job.

As for Freddy, well, it's obvious why Freddy's doing this, because this is what Freddy has always done. He's often been a fulcrum in the seesawing professional relationship between Don and Peggy, a conduit that has made sure the ideas between them flow. Think back to season one and Belle Jolie, the lipstick campaign that set Peggy on the road to becoming a copywriter. When Peggy, then just another memo-taking swimmer in the secretarial pool, told Freddy she didn't think anyone wanted to be "one of a hundred colors in a box," Freddy repeated that phrase to Don, and Don wound up using a modified version of it in his pitch meeting with Belle Jolie. Now, nine years later, Freddy's handing Peggy the signature Don Draper-crafted slogan: "It's not a timepiece. It's a conversation piece." And Peggy — for the record, the only one in this still-extant trio with an office to call her own — is the one changing it to: "It's time for a conversation." The ad-world seesaw has tipped the other way, with Peggy in the sky and Don's butt on the ground.

It's easy to interpret this dynamic on a surface level as proof that either: A) Peggy has finally triumphed over Don (she was in his chair in the season-six finale, after all) or B) that she can't succeed without Don actively (albeit secretly) serving as the wind beneath her wings. But given fuddy-duddy, grandpa-sweater-wearing Lou Avery's response to all versions of Peggy's tagline — "I guess I'm just immune to your charms," he told her — she's not exactly profiting from the Draper magic right now. She's earned a position of power in the office, but that power is diluted by the men around her, the ones she accuses of not caring about the quality of their work. (Given Ken Cosgrove's one-eyed madness, Roger's ongoing love-in, and Lou's general indifference, Peggy and Joan seem to be the only ones keeping the New York office running.) Peggy's clearly struggling to find inspiration herself. Meanwhile Don's still inspired from a campaign-concept perspective, but quickly losing his capital within the industry.

Which sets up this potential scenario for how Mad Men's final chapter could ultimately play out: with Peggy and Don finally starting their own agency as equal partners, a deal that Freddy Rumsen, of course, would be the one to suggest and facilitate. Admittedly, that seems a little neat and tidy for Mad Men, a little too kumbaya. (Men and women really can work together after all!) But it's natural to hope for that when the two suns in the Mad Men solar system are looking so dim right now. You want both of them to feel repaired and hopeful. You want both of them to shine again.

Really, if Don doesn't like how things are panning out at SC&P and neither does Peggy, they can do something about it. Right? What was that phrase that Don once said, and that Peggy eventually repeated? "If you don't like what they're saying, change the conversation."

Maybe it's time for a conversation, one between Don and Peggy that starts to lay out a new future for both of them.

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