This was Mad Men's Game of Thrones penultimate episode shocker, the one with a death that hit us all hard. Lane may not have been handsome, or suave, or charismatic, but he was the stolid presence, the glue that held the various raveling threads together. For the facade to finally crack, for the hopeless person underneath the crisp accent to bare himself, was disturbing and sad. We may have laughed at his failed attempts to woo Joan, we may have cringed at his desperate attempts to get his father's approval, but we thought he'd soldier on, stiff upper lip and all that. We did not expect to see him take such a brutal final act. But should we have? Weren't the signs there all along; wasn't there a thick cloud of dread hovering over Lane for some time now? It's so easy to ignore the signs at the time, so easy to see them after the fact.
As we begin, all is very well at SCDP now that they have entered the Jaguar-era. Other agencies are licking their wounds and enviously chatting about SCDP's automotive coup. Pete is beaming as the wunderkind who landed the big one, bringing the company from the brink to its new-found car-filled success. Lane is being lauded as the genius responsible for the company's financial turnaround. Joan is settling comfortably into her new place at the partner's table. And only Don seems bothered by how all this good fortune was brought about.
At Casa de Francis, Betty and Sally are butting heads as per usual. Sally is outraged her mother would have the audacity to make her go on a ski vacation (the witch!), Betty is over her daughter's adolescent moodiness. So, in one of the more entertaining exchanges between the exes, she calls Don and lets him know that her problem will soon be his. She's not asking, she's telling.
But Don has bigger problems that an irate ex-wife and a temperamental daughter. Bert brings by a canceled check that Don appears to have signed, giving Lane his Christmas bonus. Now, everyone had agreed to forgo bonuses this year, but Lane is in a big of a sticky wicket having misappropriated some of the firms funds. He had to find some money from somewhere to cover up his misdeed and so he forged Don's signature. As the chief financial officer for the company, he assumed this would go unnoticed. But with all the talk at the partner's meeting about changing the billing practices, unfortunately for him, Bert decided to check out the books.
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Lane is devastated, to say the least. He has always wanted to be seen as an equal partner, to be respected and esteemed. But that never happened, he has always been second class. Just as his father never valued him, just as his wife took him for granted, he has never felt appreciated or "one of the boys" at the firm. And now he is desperate and at Don's mercy. Don sees no choice in the matter. The chief financial officer for the company embezzled funds and forged a partner's name on a check to do so. This is not a mistake, this is a crime. He could fire Lane, have him arrested. Instead, he believes he's giving Lane the fairest shot - resign, I'll cover the money, and no one has to know. But that only makes Lane more upset.
And look at this from Lane's perspective. It was his idea to leave PPL and help start up the new firm, he was the one who put up his own money and did not ask to be compensated while building the company. He did the nitty gritty work while the other partners basked in the glow of the firm's ultimate success. But his stubbornness and his pride kept him from asking for help when he needed it. Now it was too late to ask for that help.
Don thinks he knows how Lane feels. Don has lived with lies, lived in fear of being found out. But Don has also lived a charmed adulthood and none of his sins ever came back to destroy him. When the real Mrs. Draper demanded to know why he stole her husband's name and identity, instead of exposure and ruination, Don was given the gift of a lifelong friend. When Pete tried to undermine Don with the truth of his identity, Bert brushed if off with a "who cares?" Don has never had to pay the ultimate price for any of the bad things he had done, for any of the lies he told. He doesn't see that Lane may not see a better future arising from the ashes. He doesn't see how Lane's entire identity was rolled up in being a successful, American ad agency exec. Losing that was losing everything.
If anything, the greeting he gets from his wife has to make this all even worse for Lane. She's proud of him, she wants to go and celebrate his good news. This is all he's wanted and now it's all a sham. To make matters far worse, his wife surprises him with a new Jaguar to commemorate all his recent successes. Lane can't tell her that it's all a lie, that he can't afford the car, that he has lost his job. He is overcome with dread. That night, he tries to end it all in the garage. But the vaunted car is such a lemon it can't even start up. Lane the lackless loser can't even succeed at killing himself.
But while Lane deals with the lowest point of his life, everyone else goes about theirs completely unaware. Joan plans an Easter holiday, after rebuking Lane's untoward comments. Don talks to Roger about landing a bigger fish, like Ken's father-in-law's company, Dow Chemicals. Roger gets Ken to go along with the plan, accepting his demand that Pete be left off the account should they land it. Sally appears unannounced on Megan's doorstep and Megan is furious that Don couldn't spare a moment to let her know ahead of time that she'd be spending the weekend. Sally goes out with Megan and her actress friend and wants to feel grown up like they are. So she arranges for her friend Glen to come visit her.
Don takes the Lane news as a kick in the ass. The firm needs to stop wallowing in mediocrity, grasping for one small client after another. They need to land the big one. And there is a big one right under their noses. So, despite being told repeatedly that the Lucky Strike letter he wrote has killed him and marked him as an ungrateful backstabber, he tries again to make a pitch for Dow. He is passionate and prepared and makes a great presentation, as Don always does. But will it be enough?
While Don does his Don thing at the Dow meeting, Sally is having an awkward time with Glen at the American Museum of Natural History, culminated by the young girl "becoming a woman" that day. Scared, she flees back to her terrible, horrible, awful mother's loving embrace. They may be mortal enemies at times, but Betty and Sally are inextricable. Betty relishes in the victory as she tells Megan that Sally came home to her, because "l think she just needed her mother."
But while everyone else was living their lives, Lane finally took the last act in his. He went to the offices he had helped build, sat at his desk and typed up his resignation letter. I'm not one for pointing out the derivation of words, but resignation is the appropriate word here, meaning not just to retire or give up one's position, but two other more poignant meanings: an act of ending a game by conceding defeat without being checkmated or the acceptance of something undesirable but inevitable. Lane has been defeated all his life, not living up to others' expectations of him, nor his own expectations of himself. The sad sack who never reaches the pinnacle of those around him. He accepts his fate; he's never going to be a winner. He accepts as undeniable that his life will never get better from here. Don can talk all he wants about the future and bouncing back and picking oneself up, but Lane is not that person. He's tried, but he's been knocked back down every time. So it goes.
At SCDP, Lane's secretary can't get into his office. Joan tries to enter with a key, to no avail. So she goes to the office next door to find out what's wrong. Pete, then Ken and Harry, look over into Lane's office and are met with a horrific sight. Don and Roger come back from their meeting, feeling pretty good, only to find the office abandoned save for the partners huddled around a desk. They are told that Lane hanged himself. When Don hears this, he is overcome. All he wants at that moment is to save Lane from any further indignity, to cut him down and put him to rest. Memories of his own half-brother's suicide must be flooding back to Don, along with the feelings of guilt of how he should have seen this coming or should have done something to stop it. The secret of why Lane killed himself will be buried with him as Don will not let his name or image be sullied by revealing the truth.
Quotes:
Scarlet: Shouldn't we have a vote on the fee versus commission question?
Don: l already said no. Or should l leave so you all can do whatever you want?
Betty: Hello? l wanted to know if you would have any problem with me strangling Sally.
Don: Should we be having this conversation on the phone?
Joan: I'm thinking about taking a vacation this Easter.
Lane: Oh. Where are we going?
Joan: Do you think there's a difference between Bermuda and Hawaii?
Lane: Well, neither are suitable for commemorating the death and resurrection of Our Lord.
Don: lf you needed it so badly, why didn't you ask?
Don: But what is happiness? lt's a moment before you need more happiness.
Glen: Why does everything turn out crappy?
Don: What do you mean?
Glen: l don't know. Everything you wanna do, everything you think is gonna make you happy just turns to crap.
Don: You're too young to talk that way.
Glen: But it's true.
Observations:
The Sally story-line seems shoehorned in this episode. I'm not sure what was the point. Sure, it gives Megan more opportunities to be irritated with Don and to feel that he doesn't appreciate her or her dreams and aspirations. It gives Betty the chance to get one up on Megan when Sally runs back to her maternal arms. And it gives the creator's son another chance to show that talent skips a generation. But it doesn't really say anything other than adolescence is hard.
For a show that's very quotable, this episode had a dearth of great quotes. But the best is one of the show's most memorable--"What is happiness? lt's a moment before you need more happiness." If anything summarizes the consumer culture of the 1960s and beyond, it's this. It's what advertising and our economy runs on--the insistence that what you have isn't enough, you can never be satisfied, you always need more. It's also a luxury that our modern life has given us. We don't have real needs, so we create needs. I have to have that new car, even though my current car is perfectly fine and gets me from point A to point B. If there's always something better down the line, then how can we be happy with what we have? Isn't that just settling?
The black humor award goes to whoever thought of the famed unreliability of the first wave of Jags in the US being the punch line for a failed suicide attempt. And the touch of Lane snapping his glasses in two only to have to tape them back together in the aftermath.
Did you notice that Sally was able to take the go-go boots she wasn't allowed to wear at the Codfish Ball to her non-date with Glenn at the museum.
Five years after Don's callousness indirectly led to his half-brother's suicide, it was sad to see that he had not developed any more empathy. Don is still too self-absorbed to notice how what he says and does affects other people. He didn't see it with Lane and he doesn't with Megan either. To him facts are facts and people should just brush themselves off and deal with reality. He doesn't understand that other people might feel hopelessness and despair and can't simple reinvent themselves to "get over it."
Ken Cosgrove, who never really seemed to want to be in the advertising business, certainly showed a new cunning and cut-throat side of himself as he allowed Don and Roger to court his father-in-law's business on his terms. Does this mean he has forgotten about being a writer, or is potentially sticking it to Pete Campbell just too attractive to pass up?
If you were curious, as I was, the 4A's is a real organization. Established in 1917, when one would have thought people would have been busy with that first war to end all wars, a bunch of advertising execs got together and formed a trade association "to promote, advance and defend the interests of our member agencies, their employees and the industry at large." Last year as this is written, they celebrated their 100th year.
