Brandon's Blog

9/17/2015

Backlog

I finished Mad Men last night, which (spoilers) pretty much ended with the whimper I predicted.  I put Mad Men in a special group of what I would call “vibe shows,” which I find to be difficult to continue interestingly past a few seasons.  Being that it was a vibe show and a period piece, all the more difficult.  It was fun to watch their set and costume designers gradually transition to the early-70s look, with Sterling growing the ridiculous mustache and the clothes slowly changing.  The descent to a Siddhartha-style ramble-to-enlightenment worked suitably for me, although I would probably recommend reading Siddhartha over investing in all the ups-and-downs of the series to get to that end point.

Don essentially discovered that he didn’t like being Don, and we had a bit of a death-of-self moment on the way to an all-in-on-the-cliche literal Buddhist enlightenment.  Sterling found a sort of pseudo-nirvana by calibrating his hedonism in the realism of his life stage, which maybe would have been the fate I would have preferred for Don.  Or perhaps this was really to show us that this was the fate for Don if he had continued on in his previous oscillations, but instead he shed it all off to go “Om” by the seashore.

The final sequence was a classic Mad Men final sequence, really showing that the intelligence of the writers and producers so far outstripped the manifested intelligence of the plot.  By abutting the “buy the world a Coke” commercial to Don’s meditation, with the Coke commercial pleading Coke as the “real thing” amid a faux-hippie backdrop, it was probably the most scathing judgment of the advertising industry they could conceive.

Edit: All of this is incorrect, Don uses his enlightenment experience to go back to the agency and make the Coke add.  I hate this.

All the sub-major and minor characters just piddled into a linear extrapolation of the last few seasons, which really backed up my perception that these folks were just never really more than caricatures.  Pete’s conversion from irritating scumbag to irritating reformed scumbag was the most satisfying of the lot, while Betty’s terminal lung cancer (they had to do it to somebody after all that smoking) prevented them from ever needing to do anything with her character.  Sally gave up adventure to take care of the family (why, thematically?), the boys have essentially no consequence (and never did), Coop’s dead, Joan does her business hustle thing, Peggy finds love in a probably ten minute sequence that is the bouillon cube reduction of chick flick soup, shadow-Don disappears into a big company.  Don’s second ex-wife reportedly returns to Canada, where I presume there’s no acting work, so why’s she there?  Maybe I dozed.

Anyway, they just couldn’t really osmose their smarts at a high enough concentration to make it work for me, but I’m glad I saw it through.

/spoilers

Backlog is on my mind now, as I’m trying to get my podcast playlist calibrated to neither pile nor exhaust under normal steady conditions.  I’ve found that commuting is so greatly helped by intelligent or humorous conversation rather than radio rattle, or even music shuffling, that this is of considerable value to me.

I feel I should enshrine my current list, as it’s so hard to discover these things, at least outside the iTunes sphere: