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NagaviBindzuriani
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When Nic Pizzolatto decided to end the highly scrutinized eight-episode run of True Detective's first season with what was essentially a high five, the internet community of television obsessives (see also: the internet) cried foul. How could a mystery this pitch dark and paranormally tinged — the antlers, the pedophilia cult — all end with male bonding? Who knows what we wanted out of the end of that show. (I'm using the royal We; I wanted a space vortex and I got it, so I've been loving life for the past year.) What we did know is that this was the kind of show that had to stick the landing. There were too many moving parts, too many signs and symbols and trails of breadcrumbs we had followed; we needed to see it all snapped back up so that we could be assured of order and purpose in this fictional world we had invested two whole months in.
It was a mini-flashback to the mid-aughts' crop of loopy, conspiracy-driven shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica — that frenzied kind of analysis that scrutinizes the trip but only insofar as it informs the destination. The nice thing about these shows falling out of vogue, supposedly, is that sticking the landing on more conventional serial dramas isn't so much a technical feat as it is an emotional one. And emotional satisfaction, unlike jokes and mysteries, has a much blurrier scale of success.
Mad Men is a show about the trip; it's barely even about sub-destinations within the trip. Like life, at any given point in any given season we're seeing the builds and decays of so many arcs and relationships at once that the overall impression is that of a straight line. The ads for its final half season hail it as "the end of an era," but if we've learned anything from its seven-plus-year run, it's that something so discrete as an "era" doesn't really exist. The '60s will run into the '70s, and only in hindsight will we decide that there was a clear line of demarcation.
Nowhere is that more clearly demonstrated than through Jon Hamm's perennially falling Don Draper. In the opening of Sunday's midseason premiere "Severance" we find him in such a déjà vu-inducing place (shocking spoiler alert: bourbon, cigarettes, woman in furs, intermittent existential crises) that even a pro-trip viewer such as myself felt a fleeting tinge of regret at having poured so much time into this show. It's only when we revisit more dynamic characters like Peggy and Joan that we are reassured that we haven't just gone in a time warp back to 1960.