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‘Mad Men’ Gives Joan And Peggy The Real Thing

CREDIT: FRANK OCKENFELS 3/AMC
CREDIT: FRANK OCKENFELS 3/AMC

Did the women of Mad Men get the endings they deserve?

Betty, who we have rarely seen not smoking a cigarette, has six months to live before lung cancer takes her away. Yet in her last moments, she’s been able to achieve an agency that has been denied to her all her life. The woman who once was married to a man who conferred with her psychiatrist behind her back is now ensuring that her sons will be parented by her own brother and sister-in-law, not their father, as is her parting wish. In one of the finale’s best moments, Betty tells Don a heart-wrenching truth: Don being absent is normal, and she wants to keep everything normal.

Sally, parented by exceptionally selfish, childish adults, demonstrates a maturity and willingness to forgive two arguably unforgivable people. Peggy, in the parlance of the day, has it all: the dream job, the perfect guy. Trudy is happily married, hopping on a private jet (to Kansas, but still). Megan is a million dollars richer, free to pursue her acting career and whatever else her heart desires. Meredith, American hero, handles her pink slip with bubbly grace, assuring Roger that she always lands on her feet.

But what about Joan?

Halfway through the finale, Joan makes Peggy an incredible offer: to be a partners in a new production company. Joan lures Peggy in with the promise of her name on the letterhead. Can’t you see it now? Harris Olson. The partnership offer is for Peggy only. As Joan explains, “You need two names.”

Eventually, we see that Joan gets this done, as she gets everything in her life done, by herself.

Joan enjoys the company of men, she courts and manipulates their attention; she excels at managing women, overseeing the secretarial pool of the office in her sharp, steady way. But when shit gets real, the only person Joan has ever really been able to count on is Joan.

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The abortion that wasn’t. Raising her son. Managing the office. Securing the Jaguar account. Staunching the geyser of blood as it spurted out of Guy’s leg after Lois ran him over with a John Deere lawnmower. How often have we heard Joan look at an impossible situation and say, in her charming-yet-authoritative voice, “I’ll take care of it”? Before Olivia Pope tossed water on all the fires with an “It’s handled,” Joan took care of everything. Even — especially — herself.

Mad Men has always lifted its women and leveled with them, granting successes and snatching them away, giving them happiness that is really just the moment before they want more happiness.

But Joan has always been the savviest person on the screen — she is, as far as we know, the only woman in the main cast who didn’t try to sleep with Don (remember Peggy’s hand on his in “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”? We were all so much younger then). Peggy sees a world she can still mold to her ambition; she’s young enough that she might actually be right. Joan is a product of a different time, raised by her mother “to be admired,” as she once told Don, but coming to terms with the truth of who she is: someone who wants so much more than to be admired, someone who is too smart to be strictly ornamental, too ambitious to fulfill her own definition of a secretary: a cross between a girlfriend and a waitress.

Joan sees the world for what it is. In the finale, she tells Roger, flatly, that Greg isn’t supporting their son not because he found out that Roger is Kevin’s father, but because “he’s a terrible person.” She takes her fifty-cents-on-the-dollar from McCann — both an insult and a jackpot — and moves on with her life. We are given no inclination to believe that she chased Richard out the door when he was turned off by her professional dreams.

So isn’t it perfect that her production firm is just her name, twice over: Holloway Harris. Isn’t it perfect that the woman who once worked for an ad agency that bragged about occupying two floors in the Time Life building when it really only had one is lauching the second stage of her professional life with a title that implies there are two partners behind the scenes when operations are, in fact, manned by one woman alone?

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And how sweet is it to see this hustle — something that Don would and has done: a lie about a name — employed in the pursuit of a worthy cause?

I don’t know that anyone could have predicted, based on their relative statuses in the pilot, that Peggy would be the one to end the series in the arms of a man who just professed his love to her and Joan would be flying solo, establishing a production company with only the women in her life (her babysitter, her mother) at her side. And the Peggy-Stan happy-ever-after is such blatant fan service it doesn’t even feel like part of real Mad Men; it felt like Matthew Weiner caving to the gods of the gif.

But Joan’s ending feels earned and real; it is a surprise in the context of where she started, but not when considered alongside everything she’s been through.