Mad Men Season Finale — does Don Draper finally find what he wanted?

After eight seasons, what does life have in store for television's most enigmatic womaniser?

By: Nirmalya Dutta | | Published: May 18, 2015 12:57 pm

Of all the different fan theories predicting Mad Men’s endings no one came close to predicting what Matthew Weiner had in mind. We’ve had people suggesting that Don Draper would fall off a cliff, do a DB Cooper and hijack a plane or even die of a tumour (which would at least explain the bloody hallucinations) but no one could’ve predicted exactly what Matthew Weiner had in mind for TV’s favourite womanising alcoholic! Also Read - The 10 hottest men on television

Spoilers Ahead – Do not read if you don’t want to know what happens in the last episode. Also Read - 5 types of men women should never date (Part 3)

The first time we ever saw Don Draper, it was in a smoky restaurant drinking a whiskey cocktail (called Old Fashioned) while pondering how to sell cigarettes without claiming they were ‘healthy’. A decade later, we see Don Draper sitting on the edge of a cliff in California uttering the words ‘Om’ after achieving a yogic peace of mind! This perhaps, better than anything else epitomises how much the world has changed since the series started. In fact, we saw Don Draper a lot of things that are un-Drapery, we see him attend a group therapy session where he breaks down in tears and seems to finally achieve a semblance of reconciliation. Also Read - 5 types of men women should never date (Part 1)

The face you make when you figure out how to appropriate a culture/movement #MadMenFinale pic.twitter.com/4zJC8LOxwP

— Matthew A. Cherry (@MatthewACherry) May 18, 2015

From a health perspective, it was a near-perfect ending since we’ve seen Don and gang abuse their bodies beyond belief. They smoked like crazy, drank enough liquor to suffer from liver cirrhosis twice over and had sex with so many people that it could’ve sparked off an HIV pandemic (had the disease reached American shores by then). As far as exercise has been concerned, we’ve seen Don work out only twice (discounting the calories burnt during sex) in a decade. Once he did about 15 push-ups in front of Betty and another shot saw him swimming at the New York Athletic Club. It’s good that finally Don is caring about his mental and physical health. On the other hand, we saw firsthand the effect of smoking when Betty was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was particularly ironic since Don spent the better part of his professional life peddling cigarettes.

Don Draper – the messenger of doom?

Don’s professional life was almost synonymous with cigarettes. Of course he pulled that little bluff where he wrote that letter to the New York Times claiming that his agency wouldn’t deal with a cigarette company because it ‘didn’t allow him to sleep properly at night’, but that was just a ruse to save the agency’s skin after losing Lucky Strikes. That he was willing to work again for a tobacco company was quite clear when he interrupted that meeting with Commander Cigarettes claiming they should force him to work for them.

But things never worked out and we didn’t see Don near a tobacco account but he unwittingly did help spark off a new era of diseases and debilitation with the infamous Coke ad. There’s actually a school of thought that soft drinks are about as dangerous as cigarettes and should come as a warning. In fact, one research suggested that even one soft drink a day (350ml) can increase a person’s chance of getting type 2 diabetes by 20%. Sadly, soft drinks have yet to achieve the villainous status of cigarettes and continue to be routinely endorsed by celebrities. It doesn’t help that most children and young adults are extremely impressionable and will do anything their favourite celebrity tells them to do. In fact, the major cost of the soft drink industry is advertisements because otherwise, they would’ve extremely cheap. This is sad because it suggests that despite finding inner peace, Don Draper just helped trigger another epidemic! PS – this is the ad we’re talking about.