• Mad Men: The Night of Don's Reckoning

    The professional became very personal last night, as Sterling Cooper dissolves and Don has to account for all his past behavior in order to survive. As we all wonder what the future holds, the past has finally been sorted.

    The season finale (directed by show creator Matthew Weiner himself) was all about Don's relationships and how he rectifies them in order to move on creating his own advertising agency. Usually happy to be the lone gunman, Don has to rally the troops in order to stake out on his own, which means checking his ego, doing some apologizing, and letting some of the people in his life know just how he really thinks about them. And Joan came back! And Trudy wore a killer hat. All was right with the world as it—and Don—strikes out in a new direction.

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    Send an email to Brian Moylan, the author of this post, at brian@gawker.com.

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    Don and Roger: It was easy for Don to convince Bert Cooper to get on board with his plan of buying the agency (or striking out on their own, as they eventually do) since Cooper would be let go if the agency was sold again. However, it wasn't going to be a cake walk to convince Roger Sterling, who Don has spent the whole season trying to distance himself from.

    It would seem that Sterling would much rather sit in his office counting his piles of coins like Scrooge McDuck while kicking back a few drinks and then going home to goose his pretty young wife before passing out in his expensive bed than actually run an ad agency. But he has the money and the accounts to make a new agency work, and it seems like he still has the ambition too. What he really needs is Don to supplicate himself, which he does with great sincerity. Roger hits the nail on the head when he tells Don he's no good at relationships because he doesn't value them. We see that with his home life as well as how things go around the office.

    It's great that egotastic Don can be self actualized enough to know he needs Roger to deal with the clients and make them happy, since that's not in his grainy little heart. As we see during their scene at the bar when Roger tells Don that Betty is seeing Henry Francis, Don and Roger work much better when collaborating than they do when competing.

    The other brilliant thing that Roger brings with him is St. Joan. As soon as Cooper brought up the fact that no one knows where anything is, we thought, "What a brilliant way to bring back Joan," and the vision of her sauntering in to save the day with her red hair coaxed into tight perfecting and the gold pen swaying seductively between her enormous knockers brought tears to our eyes. Welcome back, kiddo.

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