Warning: Spoilers ahead.
During a press junket for “Mad Men” earlier this year, actress January Jones said she burst into tears when she saw Betty Draper’s Ossining, NY, kitchen in the exhibit about the show at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.
After watching Sunday night’s episode, it’s easy to see why Jones would be so moved — she knew her character’s terrible fate.
Betty received the worst possible medical news after she fell on a staircase at school: She has terminal lung cancer. Betty being Betty, she elected not to have radiation, shocking her husband, Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), and devastating her eldest child, Sally (Kiernan Shipka). In one of the episode’s best scenes, Betty handed Sally an envelope containing a letter. “Open this the minute you know I’m gone,” said Betty in her usual matter-of-fact tone. “Things happen very fast when you die.”
Sally doesn’t wait that long to read the instructions her mother leaves, on several pages of blue stationery. Betty tells her she wants to be buried in a blue chiffon dress — it hangs in her closet, next to the mink — and encloses a picture of her wearing the dress. She also tells Sally what lipstick she wants to wear and how her hair should be done.
Not all of the contents of Betty’s letter are grim, though. She gives her daughter an honest, clear-eyed appraisal of her character, writing, “I always worried about you because you marched to the beat of your own drum. But now I know that’s good. I know your life will be an adventure.”
This might be the warmest thing Betty has ever said to another human being. It’s all the comfort Sally’s going to get, and she immediately assumes a more maternal role with her brothers, asking young Gene to sit on her lap at the kitchen table.
The other two prominent stories from Sunday night’s episode had much less emotional impact. Duck Phillips (Mark Moses) returned after a long absence, to offer Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) a job with the burgeoning Lear Jet company in Wichita, Kan. A nervous Pete thinks Duck has an ulterior motive, but he’s tempted enough to try to go to Greenwich and convince his ex, the wonderful Trudy (Alison Brie), to accompany him to a business dinner and make him look like a better prospective candidate. No dumb bunny, Trudy blows him off.
Meanwhile, Don (Jon Hamm) is still driving west. In the episode’s opening scene, Don has a nightmare where he’s pulled over on the road and asked for license and registration by a faceless cop who says, “We’ve been looking for you a long time.” Can he still be worried that the government is going to find out that he switched identities with another man in the Korean War? Apparently so, because when his car breaks down in Oklahoma, Don has a truly surreal experience that ultimately reminds us how much of his identity as Don Draper he has cast off since leaving New York and McCann Erickson.
While waiting for his car to be repaired, he stays at a motel, and is there so long that he’s invited to a Veterans of Foreign Wars fundraiser for one of the local vets who burned down his own house. Against his better judgment, Don goes, gets plastered, and, while the old vets tell war stories, he admits to killing his commanding officer. “We were under fire. Fuel was everywhere,” he says. “I dropped my lighter. I blew him apart. And I got to come home.”
The bonding with the old men doesn’t end well, when they come to Don’s hotel room and accuse him of stealing the funds raised that night. One of them beats him with a phone book, but Don denies stealing their “spare change.” He recovers the money when he figures out that the thief was Andy, the motel’s male maid, who was also working the fundraiser. Don gives the kid a piece of advice: “If you keep it, you’ll have to become somebody else, and it’s not what you think it is.”
Brazenly, the kid asks for a ride to the nearest bus stop out of town. To all’s surprise, Don gives him a lift, and when they get to their destination, he hands over the keys to his silver Cadillac. The car is a yet another thing for Don to divest from his portfolio. So, to enumerate, he’s given up his wife, his apartment, his job and his car. What’s left for Don to shed as he makes his way west?
We predict it will be his name, Don Draper, and that “Mad Men” will end as the story of Dick Whitman.