Looking Back at Mad Men's 5th Season
Warning: This article contains spoilers, if you have not watched the last three episodes of Mad Men’s 5th season, come back and check it out after you’ve done so.
Okay, so we all have our opinions about this past season of Mad Men – it’s been soft, it’s been predictable – we’ve seen it before.
Well, from the looks of the last seconds prior to the fade to black on the show’s season finale – we might be seeing some things all over again.
This season of Mad Men has had its mental workings in some ways play out like a modernized episode of Dark Shadows – it has taken some of the best written psychological flaws in each of our characters and carried each of them to their respective ends to horrific conclusions. Take for example, Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) sub-conscious murder of a past demon in a disturbing nightmare scene. Or Roger Sterling’s (John Slattery) downward spiral towards being an LSD addict, clearly the result of a botched mid-life crisis. The only exit that could be worth celebrating is Peggy’s (Elisabeth Moss) exit from SCDP – while it might not be a celebration for those of us viewers who love Peggy, it was definitely a step in the right direction for the character who always wanted to seek out greater challenges and overcome being a woman in a man’s world.
The now infamous indecent proposal which Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), now a single mother with a soon-to-be divorced husband in Vietnam has accepted for a mere sense of financial security.
I’ve read many articles that have said Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) was an insignificant character on the show and went out in an unsurprising way – while I agree that there was no surprise to his end, there was still the same shock as though we didn’t know that it was going to happen. We knew it, but we were still shocked to see it – and the scene was written and directed to perfection with astoundingly great performances by Hamm, Slattery and Vincent Kartheiser.
It can be argued that Lane’s character was insignificant – however, it can also be argued that there were a lot of missed opportunities here for Lane. Don asked him to resign for lying and that he couldn’t be trusted. Don’s whole life is built up on an ever growing mountain of lies, Lane’s own insecurities and awareness that he was never fit to be in their world could possibly have made him become a great villain for Don before meeting an untimely demise – or something to that nature. Okay, it was a remote possibility, but nonetheless it was a possibility.
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