Matthew Weiner’s overtly cyclical approach to the end of Mad Men hit a despairing, strange and ultimately hopeful climax in “The Milk and Honey Route.”
This was not a perfect episode of Mad Men, but I might admire it more than any other episode the show has churned out in this half-season (or maybe even going back to last year). The episode lines up character arcs by theme and ideas even as, tonally, they don’t totally mesh. But while other recent episodes like “New Business” and “Field Trip” ended as airlessly and disconnected as they began, “The Milk and Honey Route” builds to an emotional powerhouse of a finish.
If we consider the great dramas of the past decade-and-some who have been given the opportunity to write their own conclusion, Mad Men stands apart dramatically. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad were as character-driven as they were tightly-plotted, and they each, as a result, structured magnificent closing runs. However much you’ve loved Mad Men, and however much faith you’ve had in its captain, the challenge of concluding such an experimental, episodic and definitively indefinite piece of storytelling was undeniable. The theories about Don Draper falling out of his window, mimicking the metaphorical credits sequence, certainly echo the met expectations of Breaking Bad and the deliberately unmet ones of The Sopranos. Death brings about an end. It puts a pin in the story.
The deep, painful beauty of “The Milk and Honey Route” is rooted in the way it ultimately inverts that equation. We learn in the series’ penultimate episode that a major character will die -- and it’s Betty, the person who’s long been the show’s toughest to love. Cancer has hovered over Betty from the very first season, during which she was reeling from her mother’s recent death. In season five, she has a similar scare. And all through the show, she is perhaps Mad Men’s most chronic smoker. She spins it into an elegance and a more -- remember that image of Sally adopting her mother’s puffing mannerisms in “Waterloo” -- but it’s always been a lurking threat. It’s been a sneaky coping mechanism, most evident when she aggressively reaches for a pack after being delivered the fatal news.
“The Milk and Honey Route” is not about death, though. It doesn’t exactly flirt with end times, either, even as so much of this season has and even as the end is indeed approaching. No, as the episode’s title suggests, this is an episode about the road to better things and to greater promise. We watch Don, Pete and Betty as people who have actually learned from the last 10 years. They’re ready to chart a new path. For Betty, that path isn’t so material. For a woman who, psychologically and physically, lacked control over her own life, this run of episodes has demonstrated her newfound ability to do something for herself -- to be her own person, and to finally break out of her cynical, bitter shell. It’s been an earned breakthrough, both for Betty and the show. We’ve beared witness to her encounters with counter-culture hippies and the profit-chasing, delectably-selfish “Mad Men.” She, again through a combination of societal and personal limitations, could never figure into either. She’s not wired like Peggy or Joan. But in going back to school, she’s finally understanding that the self has value. She’s eased in her anger towards Don, and even Sally.
“Control” is a key word for Betty. The second episode of the first season centers on her undiagnosable “shaking” condition: she gets behind the steering wheel, her hands start to shake and she turns totally numb. It’s in the outside world, where she knows her husband is up to no good, and she knows there’s a world beyond her pristine suburban streets she can’t be a part of. Her reconciling with that anger has long been her fight. In “The Milk and Honey Route,” she’s handed her fate, and it’s a cruelly timed one. And yet she accepts it. She goes back to school. She swallows the news, and she smiles. She’s in control of her fate, and she’s happy. She deserves to stay that way in her final days.
Betty has always been a stronger and more complicated character than fans would give her credit for, and the same goes for January Jones as an actress. Her goodbye note to Sally is written to perfection by Weiner and Carly Wray, keeping Betty’s emotional distance in-check while also allowing her to profess her love and her admiration for her daughter through the uncontested magic of words. But Jones’ delivery is so graceful and so spot-on; just aching enough, just proud enough, just distant enough and just loving enough. It’s as beautiful and tender and conclusive a moment as you could ask for from Mad Men.
That bittersweet optimism builds impressively in an episode that gradually smooths out its unevenness. As Betty charts out her fate, so too do Don and Pete. For Pete, it comes after a forceful reexamination of who he wants to be. Duck Phillips returns, again. He’s been hired to figure out how to replace Don, again. He drinks, again. And he gets Pete in a sticky situation, again. We’ve been here before. But there’s a major difference for Pete: Don, and Joan for that matter, really are gone now. He’s a lonely divorcee now. And, as “Time and Life” made clear, the opportunity for excitement and boldness has passed. What does Pete want to do with the rest of his life?
He meets with his brother, and they chat about their predisposition to stray from their loving, beautiful wives -- to look for something that’s ostensibly “better” but is truly illusory. When he pitches Trudy a wholesome reboot of family life in Wichita, she’s clearly on-board, emotionally. But she tells him she can’t discard the past; that things cannot be undone. Pete’s gleeful response says it all: “Says who?” To picture a flawless family life for the Campbells in Wichita is laughably naive, but it’s irresistibly sweet all the same. Pete means what he says, and Trudy feels it. And so, she agrees. Why not try it? Why not try to be better? Why not try to take that “Milk and Honey route”?
These deceptively linear journeys of Pete and Betty line up nicely, both in theme and in texture. Here are two of the show’s most notoriously unlikable characters suddenly, seemingly, surprisingly figuring their issues out. Don’s journey here is also a forthright one, but for a penultimate episode, it’s also curiously separate. He’s on the road trip that began last episode, and he’s stopped in Kansas. He meets old vets and encounters a young hustler. For the first half of the episode, the progression of this story is rather clunky. In fact, it’s just weird. No matter how much you trust Weiner to bring the arc around, it’s too flat for too long, following Don as he bumbles around aimlessly -- it’s just hard to connect with or feel, especially with the richer material happening with Pete and Betty in-between.
“The Milk and Honey Route,” both as a title -- it’s based on an old hobo myth -- and an episode, reveals itself to be a sequel of season one’s “The Hobo Code.” In that episode, a drifter played by Paul Schultz teaches a young Dick Whitman the ways of the “hobo.” The lessons learned essentially instill in Dick Whitman Don Draper -- the silhouette, the enigma, the hustler. Seven seasons later, we watch him confess his crimes on-camera for the first time to a group of military vets. It’s a cathartic moment, the latest in a continuation of Don, or Dick, coming to accept himself wholly. It’s a poignant scene that lingers, but unfortunately, the episode undercuts its effectiveness by having those very men beat on Don right afterward. (The aforementioned hustler took their money and framed Don.) It’s necessary for the episode’s arc, but it creates a tonal imbalance similar to how the earlier scenes with Don unfortunately contrasted the work done with Betty and Pete.
In any case, “The Milk and Honey Route” ends nicely, with Don giving the young man a similar opportunity: he gives him his car and the money, an unspoken crash course in “The Hobo Code.” My admiration for this episode stems from this kind of conclusion, so gently and organically integrating the past into the present. That extends to the cancer ghost hanging over Betty from moment one; the combined emulation and resentment being practiced by Sally towards her mother; the constant, forced career and personal shifts put upon Pete. This episode is, in many ways, a breakthrough. Don sits smiling when he sends the hustler on his way. He’s claiming himself, from Dick Whitman to Don Draper to whatever may come next. He’s still being a father to Sally, and he’s more honest than we’d ever seen him before. He is embracing himself, and that, for him, is “The Milk and Honey Route.”
Grade: B+
Notes
* Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” closes out the episode, pretty much affirming the negotiated sense of happiness that built to a crescendo in “The Milk and Honey Route.”
* One episode left! I expect lots of Peggy and Roger…
* Thinking about Don’s role as a protagonist: while certainly his storyline lined up thematically with what else went on in this episode, I almost think it would have been stronger if we had been Betty/Pete centric. In emotion, ideas and the fact that we’re essentially bidding adieu to these characters, their stories worked splendidly off of one another and would have made for a more cohesive episode. Alas, there’s not enough time, and it’s hard to consider a Mad Men episode without Don. Still, the occasional jumps to Don-in-Kansas didn’t really fit and weakened this penultimate installment’s overall impact.