Mad Men returns. Thumbs up or down?

My favorite Pete line...."Put him under house arrest...or ship's arrest....fine in the brig then."

 

I thought it was pretty obvious. When the idea of moving Stan, then Don, out to California was brought up, they said the account was so big they wanted their own creative team out there. The account manager is more of a given.

 

Bert Cooper should have been alot more gracious to Don, Bert's done nothing for the business in the past 5 seasons. For all the money that Bert's made since Don showed up he should have handled it better. Not to say that Don doesn't deserve a forced paid sabbatical but he was rude.

I'm sure Don has a no compete clause in his contract but there must be a bunch of Mad Ave firms that would take Don in a heart beat.

 

Bert's pet project was the public offering, and Don torpedoed that firing the Jaguar executive.

 

Plus Bert had the money that made the split from the Brits possible. He didn't really need to take that risk, he could have quietly rode off into the sunset at his age. I didn't see Cooper as being all that rude. Don seemed put out to even have to be there and then sarcastically asked if he should sit down, Cooper responded with a firm yes to let him know it was serious.

 

I guess I'm just as guilty of this as the next guy but overlooked (at least here) is the scene of Peggy easing into Don's chair in Don's office, five seasons after she was sitting at the desk outside Don's office. She may have lost Ted but she's ambitious enough to forget that in a hurry.

 

Just going to leave this here...

http://www.twitter.com/80sDonDraper

 

As she said, she was in that office "because that's where everything is."

My favorite line came from Roger (of course) - "You know what they say about Detroit. It's all fun and games until they shoot you in the face."

 

The look on her face was amazing. I want to watch the last few episodes of this season a dozen times each, because every scene was letter-perfect.

 

That actually would have been a good closing scene for the entire series.

 

This is how one online review saw it:

10) While the episode mostly focused on Don and his unraveling, Pete Campbell also came apart in his own way. Pete spends most of the evening panicking over his mother, who apparently married Manolo and then "fell overboard" while on a cruise. And while he originally tried to run away from his life to Detroit, Bob managed to sabotage him with Chevy when he proves that Pete can't drive standard (and is therefore not a car man). He heads back to the city, only to reveal that he is moving to California himself. While visiting his ex-family, Pete hints that he has resigned from SC&P, and Trudy lets up on him for a moment and exclaims that he is finally free: "You're free of her, you're free of them -- you're free of everything."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57590721/mad-men-finale-recap-10-best-moments/

If that happened, it was indeed a subtle hint. I didn't get that from anything he said during his talk with Trudy. But then again, the episode drove through Pete's status faster than he could safely drive any car.

My guess is the writer of the review misinterpreted the first part of this from Pete: "I couldn't take any more, and I already looked like the Beverly Hillbillies with the chair tied to the roof." Context suggests he was saying he couldn't take any more of his mother's things, not that he couldn't take any more of the agency's madness. That's the only thing I can think of in that conversation someone could possibly interpret as a "hint" that he resigned.

 

Yeah, I didn't get that interpretation at all. "Free of them" to me, was free of the crazy Chevy executives.