Pete Campbell is not looking for a new job, but there's one heading toward him at jet speed. Drunk, desperate Duck Philips has headhunted him into an ersatz interview with an executive at Learjet, the private aviation firm that heretofore had a reputation for providing playthings to Hollywood stars. But there are no stars in Pete's eyes when---with the same clarity of vision that helped him predict the rise of the youth and African-American markets, and which helped him secure wayward clients Burger Chef and Avon for his new bosses at McCann---he proposes a different clientele. "Corporate executives should be your core business," he tells the impressed exec, explaining that the company's best bet is to market its service as "a tool, not a frivolous extravagance." Giving people what they want is well and good. Giving people what they need? That's something else entirely.
Providing high-priced jets to high-powered suits seems miles away from the emotional abattoir that is "The Milk and Honey Route," Mad Men's penultimate episode. It was an hour of television haunted by death and graced with unexpected rebirth, in which the characters barely set foot in their agency's office---Don has officially quit, walking away from millions in the process, and Pete is about to follow suit. But while the Learjet material seems incidental, the course of action Campbell plots for his future employer also maps the path of the characters. Pete, Betty, and Don all reject glamorous illusion for journeys of necessity.
At first, Pete seems like he won't be going anywhere at all. He's crushing it at McCann, where as one of Sterling Cooper & Partner's last partners standing he's proven himself valuable enough to potentially earn the Coca-Cola account. We've heard that before, of course, but back then it was bait for Jim Hobart to catch his white whale, Don Draper; Pete appears to have snagged it fair and square. When Duck swims along with a win-win scheme involving Learjet clutched in his beak (and a trail of empty bottles in his wake), Pete reacts at first with exasperated indulgence, then irritation, and finally---when he learns Philips has told not just Lear but McCann that Pete is thinking of jumping ship, to the two companies' mutual delight---outright rage. "Always looking for something better, always looking for something else," he sighs to his philandering brother over dinner, while skipping out on a meeting Duck had set up for him. Whether it's money or sex, why is a good thing never good enough?
Of all things, it's Learjet that helps him come back down to earth. Unexpectedly, he takes Duck's warning that his hot streak won't last forever to heart, and drives straight to his ex-wife's Trudy's house. They've been getting along great as co-parents of their adorable daughter, which has led him to question why he ever thought such a thing was impossible or undesirable in the first place. So he proposes to Trudy all over again, begging her to pack up the kid and move to Lear's Witchita HQ with him. "We're not even halfway through our lives," he says, "and even if we are, we're entitled to more." "Of what?" Trudy responds, and Pete immediately backs down off his choice of words. He doesn't want more, he wants enough, which is what he had when he and Trudy were together and happy. His new job comes with unlimited use of their jets as a selling point, which he touts to his ex at length---but for Pete, the point is having someone to travel with, and someone to come back to. It's reminiscent of Peggy's ad for Mohawk Airlines in the Season Two premiere: a little girl asking a returning businessman "What did you bring me, Daddy?" But it also evokes Don's masterpiece, the Carousel pitch: "It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved."
Sadly, and brutally so, there will be no such happily ever after for Betty. (There may not be for Pete and Trudy, but fuck it, call me an optimist.) She's dying from lung cancer caused by smoking cigarettes, the price of the glamorous illusion that the series wove into its stylistic DNA from the start. (Happy Mother's Day from all of us at Mad Men!) Not since Don broke down in tears in Peggy's arms after the death of his friend Anna---and maybe not even then---has this show served up an image as devastating as Sally Draper reacting to the news from her stepfather Henry by covering her ears with her hands so she doesn't have to hear it anymore. Henry wants Betty to fight against the diagnosis for one last year of life, and thinks she's refusing out of vanity or pride. Sally offers a sharper condemnation: "He doesn't know you won't get treatment because you love the tragedy." But Betty, in a fashion far gentler than what we've seen from her before, tells her daughter she's wrong. She's not being a coward by refusing to fight, she's being brave by refusing to lie. "It's not a weakness," she says to Sally. "It's been a gift to me to know when to move on."
But Don, like Pete, is facing the opposite but complementary conclusion: Knowing when not to move on is equally important. Plagued by nightmares of his past coming back to haunt him, he winds up stranded by car trouble in the America's quaintest motel, where he quickly ingratiates himself by tipping big and fixing anything that's broken, from the front desk typewriter to the Coke machine. (So Don Draper gets to work on Coca-Cola after all.) He's embraced by the local veterans, and for the first time unburdens himself about the terrible truth of his Korean War origin story---not the identity theft that made him "Don Draper," but his accidental killing of the man himself.
Yet like the Carousel, the karmic wheel spins around and around, and smacks Don in the face with a phone book each time. He's rewarded for his generosity and candor by getting wrongfully accused of stealing the money from the VFW's big fundraiser by the drunken old vets, who attempt to beat it out of him. Don knows that the real culprit is the motel's bellhop, and that he'll regret going from small cons and hustles to a crime so big he can never undo it. "If you keep [the money], you'll have to become somebody else, and it's not what you think it is. You cannot get off on that foot in this life," Don warns him. "You think this town is bad now? Wait until you can never come back." The kid coughs up the cash and Don drives him to the bus stop, only to give him the keys to his Cadillac instead. Go ahead, make a fresh start---just do it because you're driving toward your future, not away from your past.
Indeed, the good people at Learjet would appreciate how deeply mobility and responsibility are intertwined in this episode. (It even ends with a song by Buddy Holly, whose death was caused by a pilot who flew when he shouldn't have.) In an hour that began for Sally with plans for a trip to Madrid and a reprimand from her dad that the money he spent on her field hockey equipment will go to waste, this teenager is entrusted, in short order, with comforting the man who helped raise her over the impending death of the woman he loves, mothering her little brother Gene when her parents are too caught up in the crisis to do so themselves, and finally making the arrangements for her mother's funeral, down to the dress and plot she'll be buried in. "Sally, I always worried about you, because you march to the beat of your own drum," Betty writes in a letter intended to be opened posthumously---but which, given her accurate characterization of her kid, she probably had a hunch would be read long before that; those psych classes are being taken by one hell of a student. "But know that's good. I know your life will be an adventure." With any luck, Sally now knows that adventures mean more if you have the strength to embrace their end.
