So it seems to me that I was right at the beginning of this season when I said it felt like they had no idea where they were going and what they wanted to do this year. The question is... is this a bad thing?
Let me explain... this season has progressed thus far through three different movements. For two or three episodes in the beginning, they basically treaded water, with the characters doing... not that much important and, as we can see now the writers setting up... very little for later on in the season. It was just kinda dull.
Then we moved into a second act that was Balls Out Insane. Every week seemed at least as strange as the Don In LA plotline, and you began to see a real David Lynch influence begin to suffuse the series. There were strange incongruous moments, shocking gore, suburban creepiness, the whole bit.
Now we've moved through a final phase where they have to set up a big season finale. And so they've decided to pull the pin on Betty finding out about Don's hidden past. To me, this feels like the writing room admitting defeat. It's a moment of "fuck it, we didn't really know what we wanted to do with year three, so let's go to plan B". We've always known that Betty would find out about Don at some point. They've been keeping that one on the back burner since the end of Season 1.
So why deploy it now? It doesn't really flow from anything else that's gone in this season. It doesn't have that feeling one gets from a well plotted work where things feel simultaneously surprising and inevitable. It just feels like they needed to do something to raise the stakes and finish off the year and they were sick of waiting around for Betty to discover The Box so they just did it.
In the meantime, they've set up other plot lines that they've discarded so swiftly they've become red herrings. What happened with Duck? And with the competition between the two accounts men? And with Peggy's newfound sex-drive? They have two more episodes to go, and Sterling Cooper is secretly on sale and it's completely unclear what this year's season is even about which is kind of a big deal when you are doing a serialized realistic TV drama.
That being said... I'm not actually sure that I mind and of this. I think this season has been clumsily plotted and kind of haphazard, but this week's episode was really outstanding and having Betty discover the box has really raised the stakes (my heart was beating so fast I could feel it) and the fucking crazy episodes in the middle of the season were really bracing and exciting.
It does, however, worry me for seasons ahead. It was clear watching (for example) both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under than they had no idea what they wanted to do with the shows after their first seasons. Both shows flailed around with the success rate declining steeply each year until their final seasons, where the first went completely off the rails and the second brought it home brilliantly. It's not clear that Matthew Weiner and his writers have figured out why we should still be watching Don Draper and Co. And by removing Joan from the Sterling Cooper offices, they've taken out some of the key dynamics (Joan + Roger, Joan + Peggy, Joan + Men, Joan + Women) and haven't replaced them with anything yet.
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