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When Don looks out the window in “Lost Horizon,” he’s not looking down. From his high-rise Manhattan office, his eyes attach to a plane circulating the Empire State Building. He doesn’t want to jump. But he does want to run.
“Lost Horizon” shares the ideas with the eponymous Frank Capra film, in which a man makes the circular journey from regular life to Shangri-La to regular life. “Regular life” holds a magnetic pull. In Mad Men, though, the phrase itself -- a lost horizon -- points to characters’ inability to ride off into the sunset. That image, teased heavily in both literal and figurative fashions in this episode, is what’s fading.
Mad Men frames its third-to-last chapter around its women, the episode progressing not unlike past classics “Babylon,” “The Beautiful Girls” and, most importantly in the context of “Lost Horizon,” “The Other Woman.” Joan and Peggy come up against the McCann -- and in turn, their own -- realities, while Don sets off on a quest to find Diana. It ends in a rather abrupt place, albeit one that fits perfectly for this unusually tense and subtly tragic episode of Mad Men. Don runs away, and he probably won’t be coming back. Joan takes her buyout -- or, 50% of her buyout. And Peggy, in a begging-to-be-GIFed sequence, rolls into McCann with shades, a cigarette and a boatload of confidence. But she comes in just as Joan was pushed out -- we know the bumpy, potentially fruitless path she’ll be forced to take.
All in all, the episode works as a sequel to “The Other Woman,” the climactic fifth season episode in which Joan prostituted herself in exchange for a partnership, while Peggy left Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (as it was called, at the time). “Lost Horizon” brings back the creative director and writing team of “The Other Woman,” with Phil Abraham once again behind the camera to helm an episode written by Semi Chellas & Matthew Weiner. Where “The Other Woman” explored the personal and professional costs of independence for women of the era, “Lost Horizon” exposes the cyclicality of their sacrifices. And while Don, in “The Other Woman,” framed his pitch for Jaguar around the “other” woman who embodies the illusory idea of perfection, he sets out to find in her in “Lost Horizon.” He sets out to find the woman who cannot be saved, and cannot save him.
This was a magnificent episode for Christina Hendricks, and it may very well be her last, save a scene or two. Again and again, these past few seasons of Mad Men have situated the world against Joan; its limitations against her ambitions. Her sleeping with the Jaguar executive in “The Other Woman” was one of the richest moments in Mad Men history, both in the way Hendricks so sensitively and strongly carried Joan through the agony and the way in which the Chellas/Weiner script detailed with such nuance the sacrifice she would have to make to attain true autonomy and independence. In the episodes since, what was promised didn’t exactly come true: the very fact that she had to do that speaks clearly to the pervasive discrimination she has continued to face.
In “Lost Horizon,” she’s presented with the choice a second time. She could sleep with Ferg, the McCann executive who essentially makes himself her partner on scoring back a major account. Professionally, she’d get what she wanted. And since “The Other Woman,” she’s grown stronger and more capable in the field. But for Joan, it’s a vicious cycle, and we’ve learned that right along with her. These sacrifices and consequences offer short-term rewards, but the dream -- the ideal -- is impossible. Joan demands the $500,000 she’s owed as exchange for her leaving. But McCann won’t give it to her. “Take the money,” Roger advises. And he’s right, in the practical sense -- she’s fighting a losing battle. She could raise hell, but she’d lose the fight. It always comes back to that. She’s a cog in a machine that has kept other, similarly-capable women down and unorganized. When she’s told “Women love it here,” she smirks. She knows they don’t, but she also knows what he means: it’s a culture of “favors,” as an earlier episode of Mad Men was aptly titled. She knows it; she tried her hand at it. She just can’t play that game anymore.
Peggy’s journey is, like in “The Other Woman,” the opposite of Joan's. She’s holding her ground at the vacated Sterling Cooper until McCann has her office, name-on-the-door and all, waiting for her. (They mistook her for a secretary. Oops.) In a ravishing, funny scene, she drinks (and drinks) with Roger, who's sticking around at the old office for more obvious reasons. He offers here a foul painting that once belonged to Bert Cooper, and she rejects it. “Women have to present themselves a certain way,” she says to a befuddled Roger. With that characteristic sardonic edge, Slattery responds “Who the hell told you that?” It’s a fascinating, quiet moment that illuminates a very potent idea: Peggy and Joan are figuring out the rules as they press forward. If you watch the first few seasons of Mad Men, you see Joan’s bracing, voluptuous confidence. She knows the office, how to turn everything in her path to suit her needs and desires. Of course, as she’s emerged more curious and more knowing over the seasons, her confidence in procedure and manner is lessened. Her perception isn’t quite so astute or firm. She’s not quite sure what she will and won’t be allowed; she, like Peggy, is unsure of what specifically can get her ahead. With that comes a vital radical streak, but also an element of caution. Peggy’s long been the Mad Men trailblazer, but to carry that idea -- to hold oneself a certain way -- demonstrates the amount of restraint and control she's needed to hold over herself every moment. Roger shrugs her off, but it’s a big moment for Peggy. Peggy, like Roger, needs to be able to say “Fuck ‘em.”
Peggy rolling through McCann with such brazen, funky confidence is directed by Mr. Abraham with a radiating coolness. Remember when Peggy tried out marijuana? Strutted through feminism? When she walked out on Don? Here, Mad Men is playing with her mythology. But it’s no accident that she’s surrounded by departure, the culmination of unsatisfaction. As Don runs out, the promise of his industry officially extinguished, Peggy -- the next generation -- enters in, guns a’ blazing. This is her time. Mad Men hardly works in happy endings, though. Seven seasons of Don suffering, and Peggy getting knocked around in order to reach this point, sufficiently underscores her moment of triumph with enough of a “but…”
Both Moss and Hendricks are mesmerizing in this episode, and their lack of Emmy attention is sadly, still, viscerally irritating to this critic. And Abraham’s direction is just gorgeous; as the series’ director of photography, it’s fitting that “Lost Horizons” progresses like a series of paintings, culminating in a visual evocation of the title, with Don headed West, out to who-knows-where.
Bert Cooper’s ghost is quite present in this episode, from Peggy’s painting to his literal appearance in Don’s car. His death in “Waterloo,” the finale of last summer’s run, signified the turn from the old to the new. So, too, does Peggy’s rollicking entrance and Don’s gentle departure. But what about Joan’s graceless conclusion? It’s a timeless, cyclical tragedy. The colors of Mad Men may change. The mustaches may grow in abundance. Women like Peggy may be able to storm through those high-rise offices as never before. But some things don’t change -- Don is still running away, Peggy still underestimated, Joan still impossibly boxed-in. “Old” and “new” are just driving concepts, blended with reality and artifice. Because while these characters are in various stages of identity construction, it’s hard to believe that any of them will be riding off into the sunset.
Grade: A-
Notes
* So, it’s very likely that, unless there’s a time-jump, Don Draper won’t be interacting with our other core characters anymore. If that’s true, I’m rather unsatisfied we didn’t get a last Peggy/Don scene, regardless of the direction it could have gone in. But his (likely) final scene with Betty, so warm and familiar and yet so distant, was beautifully-executed and expertly-acted by both Jon Hamm and January Jones. It reminded me of the show’s earlier days, the moments in-between the tension when the two were so achingly tender with each other. Good stuff. (We also got a great Don/Joan scene, which leads me to my theory that Joan’s inexplicable anger towards Don last season didn’t really happen!)
* Speaking of Mad Men’s early days, I recalled Don’s visceral anger at Betty for letting in the air conditioning salesman when he knocked on the door of Diana’s ex-husband. He so easily, and with such suave, fits into these fake roles. The scene in which Diana’s ex-husband lashes out at Don provides an intriguing through-line as to the show’s exploration of the malleability of identity.
* This was a hard episode to watch, just because as the clock continues to race, the idea that we might not be spending any more time with some of these characters is tough to take in. But what a feeling.