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Very mediocre finale for what I think might've the best season. I mean come on that in no way felt like a season finale.
Official Mad Men Season 5 Thread - Episode - 13 - "The Phantom" 6/10 10pm - Season Finale
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I been thinking that for years. Woukdnt even be mad.
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In a lot of ways this season was too obvious. The best thing about Mad Men is its subtlety, and much of that was lost and replaced with pointed direction at what the writers wanted to highlight as the themes of the season. The story lines felt rushed (Don and Peggy's exchange in the movie theater felt especially brief, despite the great lines the two of them had). I intend to watch the season again sometime this summer, but if I had to rank it among the others, it would be my third favorite.
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i loved this episode, i loved this whole season. definitely my favorite season.
so much symbolism and analogies.
ps, you've got to read complex's recap on mad men. the writer does a really good job capturing a lot of the story below the fold, she's a really great writer.
here's the recap to last night's episode.
http://www.complex.com/po...finale-recap-the-phantom
so much symbolism and analogies.
ps, you've got to read complex's recap on mad men. the writer does a really good job capturing a lot of the story below the fold, she's a really great writer.
here's the recap to last night's episode.
http://www.complex.com/po...finale-recap-the-phantom
big j 33
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To me, last week was the season finale and this was the epilogue. It wasn't a great episode top to bottom and felt disjointed the first half, but picked up in the end. I don't think the show wanted to drop another bomb on the characters or have a cliffhanger after the past few weeks.
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It just isn't a good look when 3/4 of the episodes were better than the finale. But whatever it was an excellent season. Extremely interesting and entertaining. Didn't love dons reaction and guilt. Could have been done much better. Didn't love the Peggy don scene (should have been left for next season to have an impact)
big j 33
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big j 33
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Grantland
In retrospect, it wasn't Don's inability to bliss out to The Beatles that made him appear so out of touch this year, it was the residual flickering of his humanity. With a laissez-faire streak that would have impressed even that horndogging Marxist Emile Calvet, Don tried to stake out a moral high ground, forcing everyone else to do his dirt for him, whether it was making Peggy and Ginzo burn the midnight oil, tut-tutting Pete and Roger at the cathouse, or conveniently walking out of the meeting that turned Joan into a partner in exchange for turning tricks. But when the @%*!++'s son finally realized everyone around him was hustling harder than Gypsy Rose Lee, he tore into Dow Chemical like Betty devouring a box of Bugles, startling the suits and maybe even himself. "I'll buy you a drink if you wipe the blood off your mouth," Roger joked when it was over. But Don baring his fangs came with heavy-handed reminders of the cost of such savagery: He lost his tooth and Lane lost his life. (And while Don was big-game hunting and Lane was swinging, Sally and Glen were touring the Natural History museum, feeling out each other's burgeoning feelings while staring at wild animals through a thick pane of safety glass. Eventually, even this was interrupted by the inevitability of blood and nature.)
The losses may not have ended there. Once she spat out a successful career in advertising as if it were a mouthful of orange sherbet, Megan seemed primed to continue her guileless ascent into super-stardom. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Tonys: Megan's youthful confidence gave way to childish self-doubt and pouting. Her desire to act suddenly seemed less about artistic purity — something Don sneered at in the first place — and more about pleasing her deluded father and spiting her doubtful mother. By the time she was drunk and writhing on the bed, offering her body to Don because it's the "only thing" she's good for, she seemed aged beyond her years.
Megan's brush with the abyss mirrored Pete's, who only realized the folly of his fling with Beth after she'd had it conveniently zapped from her cerebral cortex. Both Pete and Megan had been pursuing hopeless fantasies, but Pete alone, with the perspective of hundreds of humiliating train rides, realizes such behavior is merely a "temporary bandage on a permanent wound." Megan maintains her fiction by doing the one thing she swore she'd never do and putting her dreams on the open market. What Don saw in his wife's audition reel was an innocent sweetness that had already vanished; it was an intentional callback to Season 1's finale, "The Wheel," with the "pain of an old wound" replaced with the agony of a fresh one.
In the end, Don arranged her fantasy; even better than a ballerina, Megan got to be a princess. But becoming another transaction on the business ledger cheapened the relationship, perhaps irrevocably. Psychotherapy 101 teaches you that the objective in life isn't to fill the internal void — with liquor, with sex, with money, or with work. It's to learn how to live with it. But that goal seems further away than ever. Don can see the hollowness of Megan's choices but not his own. "You get hungry even though you've just eaten," Don snarled a few weeks ago to the napalm merchants at Dow. Happiness is nothing but "a moment before you need more happiness." Some viewers seem to think the sultry blonde's question that ended the season — "Are you alone?" — was some kind of cliffhanger. But how can it be when we've just been pummeled with 13 hours prepping us for the obvious answer?
The capitalistic tentacles that wrapped their way around everything in the agency also made their way to the writer's room. The hall of fame run of "Signal 30," "Far Away Places," and "At the Codfish Ball" were breathtaking in their interiority, more interested in cinematic formalism than tired TV soap operatics. Seeing an already great television show transcend its medium was as unsettling and thrilling as uncorking a bottle of vodka and hearing a marching band pour out. But, as latent hippie Roger Sterling can tell you, enlightenment eventually wears off. One got the sense that when the home stretch of the season appeared suddenly on the horizon, breaking through Weiner's unhurried meditations on emergencies, the showrunner felt the sudden necessity of "plot" to be as vulgar as Don found Jaguar's indecent proposal. Lane's pivot from embezzlement to suicide seemed rushed and the machinations that led to Joan becoming a partner were as clumsy as Don's attempt at stopping them. But Weiner has never been above a little meta sleight of hand — in fact, he may have overindulged this season, between the introduction of a harried, interestingly dressed Jew who writes all of Don's best material to casting his own son as the post-suicide embodiment of youthful freedom and escape — and so perhaps all he was doing was waving the white flag of artistic surrender. The audience demanded a grisly payoff for all those frightful hours of buildup, a gruesome glimpse of Lane's bloated corpse, and they wanted the overdue return of O.G. Don Draper, the adulterous, booze-swilling cad. And after weeks of feints and foreplay, Weiner grudgingly gave us both; a ***@% no better than the rest.
Only indefatigable Peggy managed to escape the office and its cycle of compromise and despair. She didn't flinch when Don literally threw money at her face, and when he asked her to name her price she refused to play coy like Joan. She merely walked away. (It's a credit to Weiner's relative restraint that she didn't start screaming "They're dead! All my friends are dead!" when she finally hit Sixth Avenue.) In "The Phantom," the two meet again in the movie theater, this time as peers, but the respectful coolness suggests they'll never exactly be friends. "Add me to your call list," Peggy implores, with all the warmth of a punch card computer. As heartening as it is to see Peggy finally flourish on her own, it's equally depressing to hear Don's view of interpersonal relations, now pitched somewhere between early Sting and the earlier Hobo Code: "When you help someone, they succeed and move on." And despite Peggy's defiance of Emile's arch prediction for all "little girls" — she flew away, all right, but didn't need to spread her legs to do so — it's hard not to shake the feeling that her reprieve from Mad Men's doomy gloom is only temporary. Alone in her hotel room on a glamorous business trip to Richmond, Virginia (motto: "Sic Itur Ad Astra/Thus do we reach the stars"), she peeks out the window. Her only view: a couple of mangy mutts humping deliriously. Inside, she's curled up comfortably beneath the sheets, a bottle of brown liquor by the bed, but outside animal instincts still rage, the only options being getting @!@$@% or getting @!@$@% over. And that window won't hold forever.
Has a great show ever given us a more depressing season? After considering it for a few days, I no longer want to argue with critics who found Sunday's finale to be a letdown. Everything these people touch is destined to disappoint, from Roger's skirt-chasing and acid-dropping to that once bright and unspoiled white rug. It's hard to imagine Weiner improving things next year; 1968 was when the idyllic promise of flower power died messily in front of the real power of guns and authority. I'd weep for the future, but we are the future. It can't be a coincidence that Weiner left it to the show's youngest main character to spell it out. "How was the city?" Glen Bishop asked Sally after the glamorous Codfish Ball. "Dirty," she replied.
Cut to black.
In retrospect, it wasn't Don's inability to bliss out to The Beatles that made him appear so out of touch this year, it was the residual flickering of his humanity. With a laissez-faire streak that would have impressed even that horndogging Marxist Emile Calvet, Don tried to stake out a moral high ground, forcing everyone else to do his dirt for him, whether it was making Peggy and Ginzo burn the midnight oil, tut-tutting Pete and Roger at the cathouse, or conveniently walking out of the meeting that turned Joan into a partner in exchange for turning tricks. But when the @%*!++'s son finally realized everyone around him was hustling harder than Gypsy Rose Lee, he tore into Dow Chemical like Betty devouring a box of Bugles, startling the suits and maybe even himself. "I'll buy you a drink if you wipe the blood off your mouth," Roger joked when it was over. But Don baring his fangs came with heavy-handed reminders of the cost of such savagery: He lost his tooth and Lane lost his life. (And while Don was big-game hunting and Lane was swinging, Sally and Glen were touring the Natural History museum, feeling out each other's burgeoning feelings while staring at wild animals through a thick pane of safety glass. Eventually, even this was interrupted by the inevitability of blood and nature.)
The losses may not have ended there. Once she spat out a successful career in advertising as if it were a mouthful of orange sherbet, Megan seemed primed to continue her guileless ascent into super-stardom. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Tonys: Megan's youthful confidence gave way to childish self-doubt and pouting. Her desire to act suddenly seemed less about artistic purity — something Don sneered at in the first place — and more about pleasing her deluded father and spiting her doubtful mother. By the time she was drunk and writhing on the bed, offering her body to Don because it's the "only thing" she's good for, she seemed aged beyond her years.
Megan's brush with the abyss mirrored Pete's, who only realized the folly of his fling with Beth after she'd had it conveniently zapped from her cerebral cortex. Both Pete and Megan had been pursuing hopeless fantasies, but Pete alone, with the perspective of hundreds of humiliating train rides, realizes such behavior is merely a "temporary bandage on a permanent wound." Megan maintains her fiction by doing the one thing she swore she'd never do and putting her dreams on the open market. What Don saw in his wife's audition reel was an innocent sweetness that had already vanished; it was an intentional callback to Season 1's finale, "The Wheel," with the "pain of an old wound" replaced with the agony of a fresh one.
In the end, Don arranged her fantasy; even better than a ballerina, Megan got to be a princess. But becoming another transaction on the business ledger cheapened the relationship, perhaps irrevocably. Psychotherapy 101 teaches you that the objective in life isn't to fill the internal void — with liquor, with sex, with money, or with work. It's to learn how to live with it. But that goal seems further away than ever. Don can see the hollowness of Megan's choices but not his own. "You get hungry even though you've just eaten," Don snarled a few weeks ago to the napalm merchants at Dow. Happiness is nothing but "a moment before you need more happiness." Some viewers seem to think the sultry blonde's question that ended the season — "Are you alone?" — was some kind of cliffhanger. But how can it be when we've just been pummeled with 13 hours prepping us for the obvious answer?
The capitalistic tentacles that wrapped their way around everything in the agency also made their way to the writer's room. The hall of fame run of "Signal 30," "Far Away Places," and "At the Codfish Ball" were breathtaking in their interiority, more interested in cinematic formalism than tired TV soap operatics. Seeing an already great television show transcend its medium was as unsettling and thrilling as uncorking a bottle of vodka and hearing a marching band pour out. But, as latent hippie Roger Sterling can tell you, enlightenment eventually wears off. One got the sense that when the home stretch of the season appeared suddenly on the horizon, breaking through Weiner's unhurried meditations on emergencies, the showrunner felt the sudden necessity of "plot" to be as vulgar as Don found Jaguar's indecent proposal. Lane's pivot from embezzlement to suicide seemed rushed and the machinations that led to Joan becoming a partner were as clumsy as Don's attempt at stopping them. But Weiner has never been above a little meta sleight of hand — in fact, he may have overindulged this season, between the introduction of a harried, interestingly dressed Jew who writes all of Don's best material to casting his own son as the post-suicide embodiment of youthful freedom and escape — and so perhaps all he was doing was waving the white flag of artistic surrender. The audience demanded a grisly payoff for all those frightful hours of buildup, a gruesome glimpse of Lane's bloated corpse, and they wanted the overdue return of O.G. Don Draper, the adulterous, booze-swilling cad. And after weeks of feints and foreplay, Weiner grudgingly gave us both; a ***@% no better than the rest.
Only indefatigable Peggy managed to escape the office and its cycle of compromise and despair. She didn't flinch when Don literally threw money at her face, and when he asked her to name her price she refused to play coy like Joan. She merely walked away. (It's a credit to Weiner's relative restraint that she didn't start screaming "They're dead! All my friends are dead!" when she finally hit Sixth Avenue.) In "The Phantom," the two meet again in the movie theater, this time as peers, but the respectful coolness suggests they'll never exactly be friends. "Add me to your call list," Peggy implores, with all the warmth of a punch card computer. As heartening as it is to see Peggy finally flourish on her own, it's equally depressing to hear Don's view of interpersonal relations, now pitched somewhere between early Sting and the earlier Hobo Code: "When you help someone, they succeed and move on." And despite Peggy's defiance of Emile's arch prediction for all "little girls" — she flew away, all right, but didn't need to spread her legs to do so — it's hard not to shake the feeling that her reprieve from Mad Men's doomy gloom is only temporary. Alone in her hotel room on a glamorous business trip to Richmond, Virginia (motto: "Sic Itur Ad Astra/Thus do we reach the stars"), she peeks out the window. Her only view: a couple of mangy mutts humping deliriously. Inside, she's curled up comfortably beneath the sheets, a bottle of brown liquor by the bed, but outside animal instincts still rage, the only options being getting @!@$@% or getting @!@$@% over. And that window won't hold forever.
Has a great show ever given us a more depressing season? After considering it for a few days, I no longer want to argue with critics who found Sunday's finale to be a letdown. Everything these people touch is destined to disappoint, from Roger's skirt-chasing and acid-dropping to that once bright and unspoiled white rug. It's hard to imagine Weiner improving things next year; 1968 was when the idyllic promise of flower power died messily in front of the real power of guns and authority. I'd weep for the future, but we are the future. It can't be a coincidence that Weiner left it to the show's youngest main character to spell it out. "How was the city?" Glen Bishop asked Sally after the glamorous Codfish Ball. "Dirty," she replied.
Cut to black.
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Just finished up season 5.
Wow ....
Wow ....
roc boy jada
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Sorry if a thread was made already; searched and didn't find anything.
Promotional photos:
http://blogs.amctv.com/photo-galleries/mad-men-season-6-cast-photos/roger-don-joan-pete.php
http://blogs.amctv.com/mad-men/2013/01/season-6-premiere-announced.php
Promotional photos:
http://blogs.amctv.com/photo-galleries/mad-men-season-6-cast-photos/roger-don-joan-pete.php
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Weiner said the premiere will be like a movie.
big j 33
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My bad. 
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when does it start up again?
