Advertising men, they con - End of Season 6 of Mad Men

What are we up to now, Season 6 of Mad Men? Watched the season-closer last night and once again found the season entirely compelling even though there's hardly a character that we like. Yet we love to loathe them: the addicted and narcisstic and sexist men, the ice-cold and ruthless women. Yes, we kind of like Joan and Peggy, and yes Megan has become a very nice and caring if beset-upon spouse and soap actress, and yes some of the peripheral characters in the ad agency and even Roger, my twin, have their redeeming qualities - but what a world! What's great about this season, at last, and particularly this final episode, is the evolution of Don. From the first episode, when he thought about Hawaii as a place to disappear, I was pretty sure that Don would vanish into a new personality - as he had done after his service in Korea, when he adopted the Don Draper identity from a comrade killed in action. I was only partially right. By the end, he isn't disappearing into a new personality, but he is at last recognizing and even proclaiming who he is and where he came from. After many flashback scenes to his difficult childhood, he at last recognizes that his childhood is formative - repressing these memories is literally killing him (as he begins to see after a night in the clink for punching a minister - who reminded him of a boyhood trauma). In one of the great scenes in the entire series, Don completely blows apart a client-pitch meeting (with Hershey) by telling the group that he was raised in a whorehouse and he yearned to be like other kids. Everyone at the table is aghast, of course. Roger asks Don if "any of that was true" - his closest friend and business partner, and he'd known nothing about Don's life. Advertising is all an illusion, deceit - obviously - much like Hollywood/LA (where the plot seems to be heading - Don yearning for a new beginning) - and Don is now exposing some of the hypocrisy and lies, especially his own. Partners force him to go on leave indefinitely - and season ends with him showing his astonished kids the dilapidated house where he grew up; amazing that they know so little about him (and I was surprised to learn he grew up in the NY metro area - we'd been led to think he was Midwestern). The look on Sally's face at the end is great - she's become a really good actor, BTW. So where will Don go? One might think that he will give up the business and become a writer - trying to tell the truth about his life. But that's a romantic notion - of writers, and of life.