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" Season 7, Episode 7: &amp;quot;Waterloo&amp;quot; ANNA PEELE: Tom, my boy! Let&amp;#039;s just get right to it, because I know it&amp;#039;s what you&amp;#039;re thinking about: How did you feel about Bert Cooper&amp;#039;s farewell performance of &amp;quot;The Best Things in Life Are Free?&amp;quot;  TOM JUNOD: The most striking thing about it \u2014 other than Robert Morse showing an old hoofer&amp;#039;s aplomb \u2014 was that Bert Cooper&amp;#039;s message and his manner of presentation were so at odds. His message: The best things in life are free \u2014 i.e., advertising is bad, bad, bad, and the values I lived by were in error. His manner of presentation, however, was exactly that of a certain kind of advertising, circa 1969. What made the ending so strange was that it was played absolutely straight \u2014 Don is having a vision. He&amp;#039;s tearing up, and reacting as if he&amp;#039;s actually seen what we&amp;#039;ve seen. So I&amp;#039;ll play it straight, too. Don wasn&amp;#039;t imagining things. Matthew Weiner wasn&amp;#039;t simply trying to give Robert Morse a suitable sendoff. The scene wasn&amp;#039;t just an indulgent bit of parody inserted at the exact moment Mad Men should deliver an emotional payoff. Bert Cooper is trying to tell Don something: Don&amp;#039;t work for McCann. Because he gave his life to advertising, and now he knows where he wound up: In hell. It&amp;#039;s just that hell looks exactly like an ad.   AP: Yeesh! And here I thought you were going to tell me you got choked up just like Don and I. I don&amp;#039;t think Mad Men was saying Don shouldn&amp;#039;t work for McCann. They weren&amp;#039;t damning Cooper to hell because he sold people bromides for a living and made his coworkers remove their shoes when they entered his office (although he got pretty lax about that at the end there). The show is just stressing the importance of having something beyondadvertising. Don needs Megan, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Peggy needs a fat little neighbor boy to love (or a porn-style handyman to fuck), and she needs to not install ceiling tiles that look just like the ones at Sterling Cooper. Cooper needed someone besides his housekeeper and an ambition that reached toward the moon \u2014 recall his eulogy of Ida Blankenship as an &amp;quot;astronaut&amp;quot; for ascending from a barn to a skyscraper, a description that also applies to Don. Everyone needs someone to sit around the Burger Chef table with. TJ: I kid, I kid! I don&amp;#039;t think Cooper was literally speaking from hell, and I agree with everything you say about the message behind Cooper&amp;#039;s soft shoe. But I didn&amp;#039;t get choked up about it. And I had a hard time understanding what Don got choked up about, because I had a hard time understanding what he actually saw. I mean, I started off this season hoping that Don would actually get up off the mat and become something resembling a human being and you started this season pooh-poohing my sentimentality. Well, Don got up off the mat and became something resembling a human being. I got everything I wanted \u2014 they even killed off an integral character of the show without resorting to anything close to tragedy. This was the softest season of Mad Men ever \u2014 or maybe just the most hopeful. And I thought it was sentimental. So sentimental that I couldn&amp;#039;t even respond to the sentimentality sentimentally. Hence, hell. A guy can dream, can&amp;#039;t he? AP: I love that your hell is you rejecting Mad Men&amp;#039;s attempts to sell us heart. You thought you were Sally, but you were really Betty all along! Of course, Betty and Sally have a lot in common. Like Betty, Sally&amp;#039;s bouffant grows tumescent when she&amp;#039;s aroused. She&amp;#039;ll also settle for a man she doesn&amp;#039;t really want as long as he gives her attention. Remember when Betty had that weird flirtation with creepy child neighbor Glen? I think the reason you didn&amp;#039;t care for Don&amp;#039;s transition to nurturing mentor and understanding husband and doting father is the same as Cutler&amp;#039;s: &amp;quot;Now that I&amp;#039;ve been backstage, I&amp;#039;m deeply unimpressed.&amp;quot; Don was always most appealing as an enigma. Now that we know so much about him, he&amp;#039;s just less sexy. Especially since what Mad Menseems to be leaving us with in the midseason finale is that he was really a good guy all along, and that now that he&amp;#039;s dealt with his childhood issues, he&amp;#039;s lost all of that anger and violence and lust. I just never thought that Mad Menwould turn into the anti-Seinfeld, in which characters learn lessons and become better people. TJ: Neither did I. But I sort of love it \u2014 because I honestly believe it takes more balls for Weiner to risk putting Don (and everybody in the freaking cast) on the road to redemption than it does for him to have Don throwing up in a trash can again and again and again. But let&amp;#039;s leave no doubt: Don is on the road to redemption. The penitential engine that was Mad Men has changed course. That bottle of Canadian Club on the nightstand when Don gets fired by Megan? He doesn&amp;#039;t drink it. That lie that&amp;#039;s waiting to be spoken when he calls Megan after getting the breach-of-contract letter? He doesn&amp;#039;t speak it. The way he looks at Peggy during Peggy&amp;#039;s pitch? It&amp;#039;s fatherly, in the least ambiguous and most admirable sense of the word. It&amp;#039;s even loving, by God. He has earned the approbation of Cooper&amp;#039;s ghost \u2014 and that &amp;quot;Don, my boy.&amp;quot; He even gives a pitch, with his old mastery, in an episode that&amp;#039;s all about him not giving a pitch. That spiel that he gives Ted at the end, about the value of work? That&amp;#039;s a pitch, and it&amp;#039;s vintage Don. He even sells Cutler, who has become the only character in the show who&amp;#039;s going to hell. My favorite disclosure of the night: Cutler participated in the firebombing of Dresden during WWII. He turned people into flaming Jell-O. He bombed Kurt Vonnegut! That explains a lot. AP: Hell isn&amp;#039;t advertising, it&amp;#039;s people who don&amp;#039;t respect creative! Even if he was speaking the words to that hack Lou Avery, Cutler said, &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t owe you anything. You&amp;#039;re a hired hand. Now get back to work.&amp;quot; Which is what it sounds like I&amp;#039;m saying to Matt Weiner when I start picking apart Mad Menfor evolving. My favorite episodes of the series will always be the middle episodes of the middle seasons, which noodled around in the minutiae of the most quotidian parts of the most minor characters&amp;#039; lives, but this is a series about a man with secrets slowly moving toward truth and how that fundamentally changes him. It&amp;#039;s also a series about media and television and public consumption. Matthew Weiner couldn&amp;#039;t have known that Mad Menwould become so incredibly popular among people who love television and people who love to talk about television, but he had certainly experienced the importance of &amp;quot;the fact that all of us were doing the same thing at the same time&amp;quot; during his time on the writing staff of The Sopranos. We could literally devote the entire 2,000-word recap to why Joan irrationally hates Don so much, even after they flirted at the bar in the Christmas episode and he tried to stop her from screwing that red-faced Jaguar dealer. We could talk about how Peggy longs for a family and the scene in which she held Julio and we realized that we haven&amp;#039;t seen her interact with the child her sister is raising even once and how that must be coming. We could talk about every allusion to the moon this season, from 2001and &amp;quot;The Monolith&amp;quot; to Roger and his daughter staring up through the holes in the roof of the barn to Bert&amp;#039;s final soft-sock number. I know this is anti-intellectual, but it almost feels ungrateful to critique something I love so much. Is that crazy?  TJ: If there&amp;#039;s one person in the whole crazy world of Mad Men I don&amp;#039;t worry about or feel sorry for, it&amp;#039;s Matthew Weiner. I remember how critical we were about the first episode of this season \u2014 we both dismissed it, as &amp;quot;boring,&amp;quot; and Weiner seems to have survived. But that was before we started our recapping, in earnest, and still had it in us to say simply if we liked an episode or if we didn&amp;#039;t. That&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;ve learned, writing about the show week in and week out: You don&amp;#039;t gain perspective on the quality of the show; you lose it. I think I know how Season 7 \u2014 or 6.5 \u2014 worked; but I don&amp;#039;t really know if it was any good or not. That&amp;#039;s why Cooper&amp;#039;s song and dance presented an opportunity: All I had to decide was if it moved me. And it didn&amp;#039;t. It seemed like an indulgence of art for art&amp;#039;s sake in an episode otherwise achingly sincere. But I have to give Mad Men props for squeezing every ounce of sentiment from every storyline in tonight&amp;#039;s show except the death of Cooper. It&amp;#039;s always a little chancy, killing off a major character at season&amp;#039;s end \u2014 it was sort of a big deal when M*A*S*H and even thirtysomething did it, but now it&amp;#039;s become a matter of routine. Cooper singing &amp;quot;The Best Things in Life Are Free&amp;quot; seemed a matter ofMad Men trying to subvert its own clich\u00E9. A more effective subversion was showing the suddenly enriched Pete grinning among the mourners after the partners meeting. That&amp;#039;s the kind of thing that Mad Men does best. The waking dream sequence that Don experienced? Not so much. Did it move you, Anna?  AP: It did. Bert dancing with the girls he could never sleep with in real life (remember when he was just a punchline and we found out he didn&amp;#039;t have testicles?), moving with self-contained \u00E9lan through the office with no shoes on moved me. But you know what didn&amp;#039;t move me? The closeup of Don crying. Now that you&amp;#039;ve absolved me of the sin of thinking critically about Mad Men, I can see clearly that where the show once had a void in the form of brooding alcoholic question mark Don, its empty center is now Don&amp;#039;s good-guy image. We can applaud the show for dragging Don&amp;#039;s head out of the funeral-home trashcan and wiping the puke from his newly beatific lips, but they did it so quickly I&amp;#039;m surprised he doesn&amp;#039;t have whiplash. I&amp;#039;m sorry, but I just don&amp;#039;t buy it yet. Seven episodes wasn&amp;#039;t enough to redeem Don Draper. Let&amp;#039;s hope the next seven are enough to redeem Mad Men. TJ: Whoa! But let&amp;#039;s not write off the whole series quite yet. Part of my criticism is rooted in my own nagging literal-mindedness. Like you, I didn&amp;#039;t like the closeup of Don crying \u2014 but only because I kept thinking he couldn&amp;#039;t have really seen what he&amp;#039;s supposed to have seen. The sentiment I was okay with. The mixture of absurdity and sentiment took away my ability to either enjoy the absurdity or be moved by the sentiment. But it was a pretty big episode, in terms of freeing Mad Men from its nostalgia bubble. Of course, it did the nostalgia really well \u2014 it has trouble when it puts the sixties in a headband and a fringed leather vest; it&amp;#039;s incredibly effective when it puts the sixties on TV. I watched the moon landing the way Sally and Bobby did, and I can vouch for the way the show handled it. But the best thing that Mad Men does \u2014 or seems to do \u2014 is speak to our age by devoting microscopic attention to an age gone by. Mad Men stepped into the future tonight, which is to say it stepped into the present. It described two visions of where we&amp;#039;ve ended up: Cutler&amp;#039;s vision of &amp;quot;computer services and media buys, pinpointed with surgical accuracy&amp;quot; vs. the vision of electronic connection that Peggy articulated in her pitch. This whole season was about Data vs. Story, and Weiner ended up making his own pitch for the power of the latter, with a tear in his eye. By the way: Joanie doesn&amp;#039;t hate Don. She loves him. And in the new, improved, all-happy-ending-all-the-timeMad Menof the next season, they&amp;#039;ll get married, with Peggy as Joanie&amp;#039;s maid of honor, Sterling as Don&amp;#039;s best man, and the show ending in an orgy at Sterling&amp;#039;s pad, symbolizing the triumph of creative. I can&amp;#039;t wait. AP: Cheers to that, and to this moving, frustrating, endlessly debatable season. And until we meet again in 2015, Tom, remember: I&amp;#039;m not stupid, I speak Italian.  More Mad Men on Esquire.com &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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