LBeaux

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

Could Sunday’s Mad Men finale have been the TV event of the fall? If you look at the media attention, probably so. I don’t think there’s anything else I’m looking forward to that could top it–especially considering the satisfying payoff. Watching Mad Men I had the same thrill I did watching Ocean’s Eleven the first time. The plot’s execution was so fun that even though I was well aware I was being seduced I gladly overlooked the occasional too-convenient gimmick or plot hole and loved every minute of it.

Here are some critics on the episode, along with some choice quotations:

NY Times (Ginia Bellafante): “How long are we giving [Betty's and Henry's] relationship? (Or more to the point: how long before Sally short-sheets Henry’s bed?)”

Salon.com (Heather Havrilesky): “Even as Betty and then Peggy dress Don down with their unforgiving words, he almost seems to lean into their disapproval, as if he’s relieved that finally someone’s going to call him to the carpet for his clumsy, caddish behavior.”

The New Yorker (Nancy Franklin): “Don walks into the office and sees a secretary crumple a piece of typing paper; that calls up a flashback of him sitting in the kitchen of his boyhood home, while his father, in a nighttime meeting, argues with fellow farmers about trying to get a better price for their grain. His solution is to break away from the farmers’ coöperative, much as Don would later break away from one community after another.”

New York Magazine/Vulture (Logan Hill): “Based on anecdotal reporting, we can confidently state that when Roger disappeared to make that not-so-mysterious phone call, there were screams of ‘Joan!!’ at world-series decibel levels in many Manhattan apartments (followed soon after by the chant ‘Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce! Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce!’).”

New York Magazine/Surf (Emily Nussbaum): “Mostly, Betty’s vanity made more sense to me: I realized that of course Don needed to marry someone so resistant to seeing below the surface, because she had always been a dupe in a conman’s game. He needed a ‘co-phony.’ . . . It’s a humiliating thing to be exposed like that, and the show made their divorce into a metaphor for the worst possible notion of traditional marriage.”

Entertainment Weekly (Karen Valby): “I woke the dog up with laughter when Mr. Cooper pleasantly warned Harry that he either join their team or spend the rest of the weekend locked in the storeroom closet.”

Slate.com (Julia Turner, Patrick Radden Keefe, John Swansburg, Turner again): Keefe: “Part of the thrill was watching these masters of sales patter actually try to sell one another on so audacious an idea. (When Cooper bellows, ‘You sold your birthright so you could marry that trollop!’ Roger replies, ‘This is your pitch?!’) And from the moment Bert mentioned hiring ‘a skeleton staff,’ I knew that could mean only one thing: Joan’s lovely and long overdue return. (’Joan,’ Don says simply when he walks in to find her taking control of the files. ‘What a good idea.’)”

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