Warning: Contains spoilers
First it was the second wife. Then it was the apartment. Now Don Draper’s agency is gone. For a man who saw his job as an anchor in his life, Don is now officially adrift, free to go. He really has nothing — well, almost nothing — left to lose.
In what was intended as a shocking development but now seems like a natural progression, the McCann Erickson agency has “absorbed” Sterling Cooper. As in swallowed whole. The partners — Roger (John Slattery), Don (Jon Hamm), Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), Joan (Christina Hendricks) and Ted (Kevin Rahm) — were thrown for a loop. The boutique agency they had built up and reinvented was gone, like mist.
In a last-ditch effort to save the agency — and what’s left of his pride and identity — Don and his colleagues tried to convince the head honchos at McCann that they could rustle enough business on their own and operate independently out of the Sterling Cooper office in LA, but it was no use. McCann partner Jim Hobart (H. Richard Greene) cut Don off in the middle of his LA presentation, saying, “You’ve passed the test.” To cheer up the partners, Jim said, “You’re dying and going to advertising heaven.” He rattled off all the prestige clients they would now have the opportunity to work for: Buick. Nabisco. Coca-Cola.
For some, Hobart’s vision of their future seemed like nirvana. But Don, sitting perplexed at the table, could not see the possibilities. After all, he’s the agency star. Without that image and the authority that came with it, he knows he will be a shell of his former self. This awareness was fully felt in the episode’s final scene, as Don and Roger try to assuage the fears of an understandably anxious staff. “This is the beginning of something, not the end,” Don says halfheartedly as his employees begin to walk away in revolt, not convinced that they have a future with McCann Erickson. Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), Ted and Pete are willing to give it a go, but Joan knows, after the revolting way she was treated by the McCann guys in the L’eggs meeting, that she has no future with the company.
The episode’s secondary story line yielded the greatest emotional rewards, giving Elisabeth Moss a potentially Emmy-winning scene. Peggy had to cast a children’s commercial. Boy, was it awkward. A wave of guilt for having given up her own son came rushing back and she could not talk to the kids. Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) intervened and helped the kids loosen up. After a long day of auditions, though, Peggy found herself left with a little girl whose mother vanished for several hours. Trying to entertain the child, Peggy let her play at her desk. The kid ended up stapling her own finger, just as her mother — and she was one of those “stage mothers” — returned to pick her up. She and Peggy got into an argument about who was at fault, a confrontation that ultimately led to Peggy admitting to a perceptive Stan that she herself gave up a kid. It was a wonderfully written and played scene. Even though he’s her colleague at the agency, Stan might be the guy Peggy’s been looking for all these years.
Fans of the show also got a final glimpse of Pete’s ex-wife, Trudy (Alison Brie), who called Pete, panicked, because their daughter, Tammy, was not admitted to the Greenwich Country Day School. Pete thought he could pull rank because some members of his family had attended it, but the headmaster revealed that Tammy had performed poorly on a standardized test and would not be getting in. The encounter ended badly, with Pete punching the headmaster, but he scored points with the social-climbing Trudy.
Even though Diana (Elizabeth Reaser), the mysterious waitress, did not appear in this episode, her lingering presence was nonetheless felt when the abject Don sought her out in search of some kind of comfort after drinking all night with Roger and the gang. Knocking on the door of her shabby rented room, he was surprised and upset to find two gay guys inside, wearing bathrobes and having cocktails. Don’s eyebrows shot up when one of the gentlemen invited him in for a drink. They had no forwarding information on Diana, and Don left.
There are only two episodes left and we are wondering: Which Sterling Cooper employees will make the transfer to McCann Erickson? Will Joan just chuck it all and take off with her millionaire boyfriend? And what will happen when Don is reunited with Diana?