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“Stop struggling. You won.”
“Time and Life” is an all-encompassing episode of Mad Men, in most every sense of the phrase: in the way it fits nearly every central character, every major point of its history and every one of its persisting themes into the main action. It moves at a breathless pace, energized by its characters’ reinvigorated sense of purpose and independence. It’s a continuation, or perhaps in retrospect a meditation, on past season finales including “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” (season three) and “The Phantom” (season five). But that freeing radicalism fizzles. The clock has finally run out -- “stop struggling,” the McCann head honcho tells Don, Pete, Roger, Joan and Ted, “you won.” Or, in Mad Men terms, it’s time to stop running.
The holistic quality to “Time and Life” -- that is, tonally, emotionally and narratively full -- is what renders it such a special episode of TV. It is, through and through, a masterful hour of storytelling, from the imagery to the writing to the performances. It’s also what Mad Men has been lacking in these past few weeks. While an episode of this caliber isn’t exactly possible on a weekly basis, the cohesion and resonance in “Time and Life” is at a level that, hopefully, Matthew Weiner et al. can match from here on out.
In “Time and Life,” the firm is facing disillusion -- yet again. They outsmarted British investors in season three, and outdid McCann-Ericsson once before; can they pull it off a third time? Initially, it’s a thrilling race to the clock. The partners scramble to gather clients that won’t make the leap to McCann, who’s planning to absorb SCP and accept the casualties: Burger Chef, Secor Laxatives and all those brands we’ve come to be intimately connected with are ready to jump with our heroes. To have Joan, Don, Roger and Pete all center stage is a powerful expression of unity at this late stage, as it’s been deliberately held throughout this final run of episodes. But there’s also something different about “Time and Life.” It lacks the promise of earlier happy endings. It seems that these characters’ quest for fantastical independence has run its course. And I go back to that quote I began this post with: “Stop struggling. You won.” Indeed, these characters reached what they hoped for. Why fight?
Fittingly, this episode is riddled with reflection. It’s not positioned as another breakthrough, another exciting reinvention; the characters’ progression in this hour is not defined by what may come, but by what came. Don, at its center, has “come out,” for lack of a better phrase, with his push towards individual freedom complete. Joan sacrificed her dignity. Pete ran to the promise of California, and came back no different. And Roger? He’s been through it a million different ways -- he’s marrying Ms. Marie Calvet, the latest variation of what-he-needs. These people have done it. They’ve made the circle. That Don is still looking for Diana, or Roger marrying Marie, or Pete still healing (and perpetuating) old wounds, indicates that their journeys haven’t led them to an exactly satisfying place. It’s why they’re trying this old gambit yet again.
But Mad Men and its universe has changed, fundamentally. The decade has changed from one of uneasy promise to one of promising unease. The colors have emerged brighter, more alienating in their modernity. But some things don’t change. Joan manufactured her role; earned it. But McCann, for all its promise to Don and friends, is still offering her chump change. She’ll be absorbed, bought out for all intensive purposes. They don’t know her sacrifice, and frankly, they don’t care. As Peggy learns in “Time and Life,” it’s a sexist world that cares about money. For people like Peggy and Joan, your value has to be high enough to overcome that barrier.
And what of Peggy? She’s working on an ad involving children, and in the process her ghosts seep into frame. She confesses to Stan. She lashes out at a mother. She looks inward. Her arc in “Time and Life” is handled so delicately, as she’s (rightly) confident and firm in her decision all those years ago to give up the child she didn’t ask for, but she knows herself to be unalterably scarred by that choice. And while everyone around her continues to race for independence, Peggy swallows her pride. Matthew Weiner and Erin Levy, who by the way wrote “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.” back in season three, draw a fine line between Peggy and everyone else, even as each character ends up in the same place. That argument between Peggy and Joan back in the season premiere comes into focus full-force; the two wrestled with conflating concepts of femininity and success, and it’s fascinating to watch their different approaches to McCann’s coup: Peggy accepts it, knowing her work can speak for itself. But Joan cannot. She’s bound to be undervalued again. But stop struggling, Joan. You “won.”
You can feel “Time and Life” as very different from earlier episodes like it from the get-go. The ghosts of the past are inescapable here. Early on, Joan and Pete explore their options in a cab, alone. It’s a great, simple moment between two Mad Men principals that is tended enormous weight: Pete knows her sacrifice, Joan his willingness to allow her to make it. But through the seasons since, you sense a greater, mutual understanding. In Mad Men, to varying degrees, against different odds, everyone’s fighting the same battle. It’s why Don and Roger can still go out and get skunk-drunk; why Joan’s resentment of Don from last season appears curdled; why scenes between Peggy and Pete evoke such richness. We’ve watched Ms. Olsen and Mr. Campbell chart their paths through seven seasons even as they introduced themselves to us together, in a basic one-night stand that would forever alter them both.
This is the magic of “Time and Life” in a nutshell. It situates the greater idea of success against the fact that the characters, save Peggy, feel unfinished. Pete’s paramount ambition (and family name) certainly drove him ahead of the pack, but that only means he’s aged quicker, and that he’s learned the same lessons as Don and Joan and Roger without much time in-between. Peggy goes to McCann content, but we know what path she’s on. We know when Don asked her last episode what she wanted, she couldn’t say a word that wasn’t professional. She’s been shaped by circumstance, mentored and taught by a man whose flavors ranged from cold to secretive. As for everyone else? It’s a beautiful thing to spend time with all of these characters, watch them feed off of one another for inspiration and energy, but there’s a melancholic undercurrent. At a certain point, what’s done is done.
As we talk about the show’s own historical engagement, it’s important to interject that Jared Harris, of all people, helmed this episode. For an hour of television so rooted in all that came before it, how fitting that one of the show’s literal ghosts -- Lane Pryce, the lowly accounts man who would eventually commit suicide -- would return to dictate the mood, the callbacks and all else from behind the camera, sight-unseen. Harris does a magnificent job. His framing of the five partners (see above), sitting side-by-side, looking towards us, is a direct inversion of the five partners (with Bert replaced by Ted) standing on their new second floor, looking out the window in “The Phantom.” They were looking out, there, at the possibilities. There was no time for reflection. Now, Joan is weighing her choices; Don, pared down and without a firm sense of anything, is left to once again look for Diana; Roger is headed into the next short-lived marriage; and Pete is still pettily schmoozing and fighting over his family name. Harris’ direction manages to somehow create a beautiful, independent episode of Mad Men by intently, visually relying on the imagery of the past. It gives Mad Men a rich, achingly holistic quality that makes the march to the finish all the more devastating.
It’s also in the language. In the bar, as Roger leaves a drunk(er) Don for the upteenth time, he squeezes his cheeks together and says with utter sincerity, “You are okay.” It’s something Don said, in a very different context, in the pilot. And as Peggy reflects back on those season one events without reprieve, and you hear the way she so authentically and confidently divulges to Stan, you’d be hard-pressed not to recall season one’s Peggy as meek, yet to be schooled in the world of advertising. My, how much she’s grown. And my, how gently it happened.
Ostensibly, the McCann team is giving Don, Roger and Pete everything they ever wanted: the biggest clients, the lushest travel destinations, the most substantial paychecks. All they have to forgo is their name -- well, that and their sense that there’s more. Their growth, formulated by every season and every episode in the lead-up to “Time and Life,” is now to be considered finished. They did what they did, and now they are who they are. This is it, folks. This is the destination.
That’s all there is.
Grade: A