*"Are you ready? Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something. *
*Do you have time to improve your life? Do you have precisely 30 seconds for a word from AccuTron watches? *
*The watch appears, bottom third. The second hand moves with a fluid sweep, and above it? 'AccuTron Time.' *
You go into a business meeting. Is there food in your teeth? Ashes on your tie? And you've got nothing to say. The meeting is boring, but you can't be. But you're wearing an AccuTron. This watch makes you interesting."
Freddy Rumsen's right. This is the beginning of something: the end. And the ad pitch for AccuTron watches that kicks off *Mad Men'*s seventh and final season (or at least the first half of it in this Sopranos/Breaking Bad-style last-season split) tells us a lot about how our heroes will handle it. If Matthew Weiner hadn't intended us to "pay attention" to the ad for the watch, he wouldn't have called this episode "Time Zones."
For one thing, there's the contrast between Don's countless, failed man-who-wasn't-there pitches last season, which relied on conspicuously not showing the products involved or the people who might use them. The AccuTron ad centers both the watch and the wearer; its whole selling point is how much more attention the latter will grant the former. Even the framing of the monologue drives home the point: Instead of a distant Don sitting with his back to us, or staring off into the distance, we've got Freddy Rumsen staring right at us, talking right at us. This is an ad written by a man who, having been forcibly disappeared from the scene, has discovered that's not so fun a fate after all. He wants back in, and pleasing the customer is his point of reentry.
The nature of that customer has changed, too. "Late 20s, shaggy, and with a youthful cowlick," Freddy says, before adding the crucial caveat: "But in a suit and tie. This is a businessman." It's tough to hear that and not think of the many Sterling Cooper & Partners employees it describes. Half the staff seems to feint in the direction of the counterculture: Stan with his beard and weed and fringed jackets, Ginsberg with his irony and occasional Vietnam-triggered guilt-ridden breakdowns, Ken with his satirical and pseudonymous science-fiction stories, Pete with his new-found happy-go-lucky attitude and his waxing philosophical about L.A.'s "vibrations," even the much older Roger with his acid and orgies and open relationships and whatnot. But ultimately they remain within the comfy confines of capitalism, using the iconography of rebellion to sell the system. The AccuTron may hum with the electronic "OMMMMMMM" of enlightenment, but it's simply a way for a cool young comer to signal that he's more interesting than the gray-haired suits who surround them. No wonder the terminally lame new head of Creative, Lou Avery, repeatedly shoots it down between terrible (and low-key racist) jokes.
But as Lou's obliviousness indicates, it does take creativity to understand how coolness can be used to sell squareness—and Don Draper's still got that in spades. He may be down and out of SC&P (for two months and counting), but he remains as magnetic as ever. He bowls over Megan's unctuous agent with his good looks and charm. He earns a welcome from Pete Campbell so warm and seemingly sincere that you'd forget they were ever once mortal enemies. He's still influencing his one-time protégé Peggy Olson, even if neither of them realize it: Changing Don's tagline to "AccuTron: It's time for a conversation" may be Peggy "lifting her leg" on the pitch, as Freddy puts it, but it's also bringing it closer in line with Don's maxim that "If you don't like what people are saying, change the conversation," a line she stole whole cloth last season.
And most strikingly—shockingly, even—he's still able to create almost instantaneous intimacy with the beautiful brunette of his choice. This time it's his young, widowed airplane seat-mate Neve Campbell, whose wedding ring serves as the conversation-piece role in the walking AccuTron ad that is Don Draper. Yet the sparks between them fizzle in the end, because the Don Draper of Mad Men Season Seven is on to his own brand of bullshit. "If I was your wife," his new friend purrs, "I wouldn't like this." "She knows I'm a terrible husband," Don replies, an assertion that doubles as an admission. After all, they're only locked in this long-distance relationship because of his constant capriciousness last season: starting a risky affair with a neighbor that ended in disaster, committing to moving to the West Coast then backing out after Megan had already committed to the change of locale by quitting her soap-opera job.
Maybe Don's gun-shy, or maybe he's making an honest attempt to live up to his end of the bargain, even though a lot of the heat between him and Megan has died down. (Compare and contrast their scenes here with the combustible sexuality of the last two season premieres: Season Five's legendary "Zou Bisou" performance and dom/sub "clean-up" scene, or Season Six's sultry weed-and-bikinis Hawaiian bacchanalia.) Either way, Don's knowledge of his own limitations, paradoxically, is what keeps him from cheating again.
Don's capable of some growth, as we've seen. He's opened up about his past to his coworkers and his children (and, unfortunately, the good people from Hershey's). He's learned from his creative mistakes last year and begun adjusting his approach in his pitches, if AccuTron's any indication. Even using Freddy Rumsen as the linchpin of his deceptions has evolved: Back in the second episode of the series, Don used babysitting a drunk Freddy as an excuse for coming home late to Betty after a tryst with his bohemian mistress; now he's relying not on Freddy's alcoholism but his talent, and using him not to pull one over on his missus but to stay in the ad game.
But the cracks are showing. Dig Don's big intro in the episode, strutting out of LAX in slo-mo to "I'm a Man" by the Spencer Davis Group. Our first shot of him is decidedly unglamorous: He's conducting an airport-bathroom shave, seemingly referenced when Steve Winwood sings about the whiskers on his chin seconds later. When he steps out of the airport he's surrounded by similar suits in the arrival area. Megan shows up, looking like a vision, but the two of them immediately have to deal with prosaic issues like running late for a business dinner.
That's all well before we see other characters similarly struggling to self-actualize: There's Peggy, powerless at work, unwitting slumlord at home, still hung up on Ted Chaough; there's Roger, still slipping into three-piece suits between orgies, enduring awkward brunches with his possibly cult-inducted daughter, just wanting to move his girlfriend's boyfriend over so he can get some sleep. And it's long before we get to the "I'm a Man" scene's bookend: hangdog Don freezing his underwear-clad ass off beyond the broken doors of his balcony while Vanilla Fudge's cover of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" plays in that marvelously literal Mad Men music-cue manner.
I mean, sure, I whooped it up for the conspicuous badassery of the sights and sounds in Don's intro sequence, just as I was bowled over by the Freddy/Don pitch. (I believe this was the first time the show ever had a character speak directly into the camera, certainly for such a sustained period of time, and the impact was tremendous.) But unlike the AccuTron man, his hair and his watch signaling that his suit-and-tie image is belied by hidden (if ultimately inconsequential) complexities, Don's seventh-season rollout indicates that there's less left in him than meets the eye.
