*Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of *Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of the Sterling Cooper & Partners advertising agency.
Don Draper's father gave him a lot of things. A Hershey's bar wasn't one of them.Beatings, contempt, a stepmother who hated him, lessons in how to rip off hobos and sell out your fellow sharecroppers, alcoholism, a…complex relationship with prostitution, first-hand knowledge of what it looks like to be kicked to death by a horse – Mr. Whitman had the hookup, sure. A candy bar in which "his love and the chocolate were tied together"? Not even Don Draper could sell you that horseshit. He couldn't even sell it to himself.
Don's about-face in the meeting with Hershey's was the climax of the episode, the climax of the season. And in this season finale? That's saying something. Bob and Manolo, Pete and his mother, Joan and Roger, Ted and Peggy, Sally and boarding school, Megan and her soap opera, Don and his long dark bar tabs of the soul, Grandma Ida, Duck Phillips, Sunkist, GM, the assassinations, the flashbacks, the inner city blues – pretty much every note Mad Men played during its sixth season got blended into an hour-long "Day in the Life"-style chord of doom.
But it was this failed father's story about his failure to be fathered that Matthew Weiner played the loudest. Don could white-knight for RFK and MLK and slain soldiers in Vietnam when a preacher got too preachy; he could pour the contents of his wetbar down the sink; he could throw away his entire life in New York in yet another stab at California redemption; but it's only when he first concocts a fantasyland version of his childhood, then stops on a dime, destroys a potential client relationship, and costs himself his job by revealing it for the phony, Bob Benson-style goldbricking it is, that you know he's truly in trouble.
Ted Chaough's father gave him something, too: a sense of lingering dread so overpowering he could only manage to talk about it for half a sentence. "My father was—you can't stop cold like that," he stammers to Don, turning what seemed to be a metaphor, with Don's drinking standing in for Ted's feelings for Peggy, into a memoir, with Don's drinking standing in for…Ted's father's drinking. Suddenly, Ted's glassy-eyed terror over his involvement with Peggy, his need to flee across a continent to end it, makes more sense. It's not just the pangs of conscience that would afflict any fundamentally decent person in his position, it's the realization that he's addicted to something that could destroy his family.
Confronted with those hollow eyes in the conference room, Don finally melts. His pure-dee bullshit about his father tousling his hair after he mowed the lawn gives way to a heartfelt, teary-eyed confession about growing up dirt-poor and hated in a whorehouse. His childhood experience with Hershey's was an nightmare shadow of the "real" childhood experience with Hershey's, glimpsed in a magazine left on a toilet by a prostitute, accompanied by a mouthful of chocolate purchased with money stolen from a john (the real "currency of affection"). For young Dick Whitman, Hershey's tasted like "being wanted" must have felt. In Ted he sees a man who wants to want his own children, his own family, again. He can't take that want away from them.
Don's Hershey meltdown is the Carousel pitch from Season One played backwards. That was a pitch from a man who had everything, and who needed to remember. This was a pitch from a boy who had nothing, and who, try as he might, has never forgotten.
