Jon Hamm and Jessica Pare, as his secretary and baby sitter, in the season finale of “Mad Men.” 
Sunday night’s season finale of “Mad Men” was so full of the unexpectedly bizarre that it seemed to belong to the world of dreams. Did Don Draper, the emotionally disabled advertising executive, actually cast aside his age-appropriate psychologist girlfriend, Faye Miller, and impulsively ask Megan, his beautiful young secretary of the easy manner and French Canadian heritage, to marry him? If you are a certain kind of “Mad Men” obsessive, like many readers posting comments on nytimes.com, you lost a good deal of your Monday evaluating this question.
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Christopher Stanley, as the new husband of Betty (January Jones), scolds her for irrationally firing her long-term nanny. Although “Mad Men” is a melodrama, it is one artful enough not to submit so resolutely to its soap-opera soul. It feels unlikely that writers committed to psychological realism would have made the decision to descend so unabashedly into Bobby-in-“Dallas” territory, when J. R.’s seemingly dead, do-gooder brother is discovered in the shower, very much alive.
Instead the finale punctuated the extent to which “Mad Men” is a thoroughly Freudian project, no matter how out of fashion that is. Don’s likeness to Tony Soprano lies less in his moral ambiguity than in his near-cartoonish embodiment of the eros/thanatos drive. Don (Jon Hamm) chases sex the way toddlers go after colorful plastic, and he craves the peace of the death state so profoundly that he killed himself — the person he was, Dick Whitman — and took on the identity of a dead lieutenant during the Korean War in the hope of achieving it.
In Megan (Jessica Pare), Don intuits that elusive peace, and that marrying her would be a way to settle his lifelong agitation, for which alcohol has proved so ineffective. Megan is the Serenity Prayer realized: recovery in a great dress. When Don proposes, he offers her as valid and sensible a reason as any for his abrupt and overwhelming desire: she makes him feel the way he always wished he would feel. So what if they have known each other for a cumulative seven minutes?
As Megan shows so impressively during the trip out West, where she accompanies Don as a baby sitter, she is not easily rattled by the chaos of three children; she is able to enjoy them. She can hop in the pool and sing to them in French. During lunch one day, Sally, the eldest, spills a milkshake. Don, so programmed to the hysteria that his ex-wife, Betty, would have unleashed in response to such a mishap, is happily shocked to see Megan blithely cleaning up, with no inclination to reprimand.
That moment was crucial. During this past season “Mad Men” exalted motherhood more than any other series on television. What Don, the son of a prostitute who died in childbirth, wanted in the end was a woman who he believed would serve as a warm maternal presence not only for his alienated children but also for himself.
The outcome was foretold earlier in the season, when Sally, having run away from home to her father’s office, found comfort in Megan’s reflexively gentle composure. By contrast, the careerist Faye, dispatched to watch Sally for a while, speaks to her in a stilted way that puts her viability as the next Mrs. Don Draper in great doubt.
Whether it intended to or not, the show hasn’t merely commented on the reactionary gender politics of the 1960s and ’70s; it has also embraced them, exacting vengeance on Faye for her lack of maternal instinct and visiting cruelties on Betty for her horrific one. Faye doesn’t get the man in the end, and Betty has become an object of disgust to her new husband, who is furious at her for irrationally firing her long-term nanny when it will cause such disruption in her children’s lives.
Women live and die by their value as mothers, the series tells us. The season finale reiterated how hollow corporate victories are for them: Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s superefficient (and now pregnant) office manager, Joan Harris, is promoted but gets no raise. Despite her successes as a copywriter, Peggy realizes that she is, in the eyes of the world, merely a single girl lacking a man. The days of Jill Clayburgh’s self-acceptance as “An Unmarried Woman” are a long way off.
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