The Milk and Honey Route (S7x13)
Airdate: 10 May 2015
Written by: Carly Wray & Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Matthew Weiner
Running Time: 53 minutes
One of the unspoken conventions of the so-called Golden Age of Television—those halcyon years when HBO and AMC convinced audiences that weekly episodic storytelling could rival cinema for artistic ambition—is that the real fireworks, the proper "wham" moments, are reserved for penultimate episodes rather than finales. The final episode is for resolution, for tidying up, for letting the audience down gently. The penultimate episode is where the earth shakes. The Milk and Honey Route, the thirteenth instalment of Mad Men's seventh and final season, honours this tradition with devastating precision. Written by Carly Wray and series creator Matthew Weiner, and directed by Weiner himself, the episode runs slightly longer than the standard forty-eight minutes, and uses every second of that additional breathing room to close two major character arcs whilst setting the third on a path toward whatever revelations await in the series' final instalment.
The episode divides its attention across three storylines, each occupying distinct emotional territory. Betty Hofstadt Draper Francis, now pursuing a master's degree in psychology at Fairfield University in Connecticut, appears to have found something like contentment. She is studying, engaging with ideas, even attracting the glances of younger students who perhaps see in her a certain sophisticated melancholy. It is the closest we have seen her come to the person she might have become had she not married Don at nineteen, had she not spent her twenties and thirties as a trophy wife in Ossining. But Mad Men has never allowed its characters happiness without exacting a price, and Betty's reprieve is brutally short-lived. A fall at the stairs sends her to the doctor, and the diagnosis is advanced lung cancer. Even with the most aggressive treatment available the prognosis offers only another year of life, most of it spent in decline.
Betty's response is characteristically stoic and, in its own way, defiant. She refuses treatment. She has watched her own mother waste away from illness and she will not subject her children to that spectacle. Henry Francis, desperate, breaks her confidence and tells Sally, hoping that their daughter might succeed where he has failed in changing Betty's mind. But Betty understands something Henry does not: Sally has already seen too much. The episode draws deliberate continuity with Season Three's The Arrangements, in which Betty's father Gene died—an episode that featured the same George M. Cohan song, "Over There," which Don sings here with the Oklahoma veterans. Just as Betty’s father Gene Hofstadt prepared his family for the inevitable, Betty now puts her affairs in order with the same practical fatalism. It is heartbreaking not because it is tragic but because it is so utterly in character.
Meanwhile, Pete Campbell encounters a ghost from his professional past in the form of Duck Phillips, the former Sterling Cooper accounts man whose alcoholism made him a laughing stock in earlier seasons. Duck has reinvented himself as a headhunter, and he is desperate for a major placement to salvage his reputation. He has an offer for Pete: Learjet, a position that would require abandoning the hard-won security of McCann Erickson. Pete is sceptical—understandably so, given Duck's history—but Duck operates with a desperation that borders on genius. He negotiates with McCann behind Pete's back, arranges the terms, and essentially presents Pete with a fait accompli.
What transforms Pete's thinking is not the professional opportunity but the personal one. He offers Trudy reconciliation and a fresh start in Wichita, Kansas, where they might live the quiet, prosperous life they once imagined for themselves in Westchester. Trudy accepts. The reconciliation feels earned not because Pete has become a good man—he remains fundamentally selfish, fundamentally Pete—but because he has suffered enough humiliations, professional and personal, to recognise value when it finally presents itself. It is perhaps the most surprising happy ending in a series not known for them, made all the more striking by who delivers it: Duck Phillips, arguably the most dysfunctional character in a series full of dysfunction, proves to be extraordinarily good at his new job. The irony is almost too perfect.
Don's storyline takes him further west, his car eventually breaking down in Ava, Oklahoma, where he is stranded for several days. He befriends Del Hill (Chris Ellis), the local motel owner, and Andy (Carter Jenkins), a young employee who supplies Don with books and drinks to pass the time. Del, learning that Don served in Korea, insists he attend an American Legion fundraiser, where the drinking is heavy and the ghosts of the past are never far from the surface. Don finds himself confessing, obliquely, to his role in his commanding officer's death—though he stops short of admitting the identity theft that has defined his adult life.
The evening ends pleasantly enough, but the following morning brings a violent turn. The veterans, convinced that an outsider must have stolen the fundraiser money, attack Don. He correctly identifies Andy as the actual thief, forces the return of the money, and restores it to Del. When his car is finally repaired, Don drives Andy to the bus station, advises him against repeating his mistakes, and then does something remarkable: he gives Andy the car and waits for the bus himself, heading further west, unburdened by the material possessions that have always served as his armour.
Weiner uses this Oklahoma interlude to offer Don reflections of himself in unexpected places. Andy is the young man taking ethical shortcuts, committing petty crimes to get ahead—the Don Draper of twenty years earlier. The veterans represent the masculine camaraderie Don has always sought but never quite achieved, bonding with them over shared trauma before they turn on him in a moment of xenophobic suspicion. Weiner, having spent nearly the entire series in the enlightened, urban, bicoastal America of New York and California, here offers a glimpse of rural, conservative America, and the portrait is not flattering. Del Hill and his friends perform country wholesomeness and hospitality until the moment they suspect an outsider of wrongdoing, at which point they become something approaching a lynch mob. It is Hollywood stereotype, certainly, but perhaps also an acknowledgment that Don's romanticised vision of "real" America has always been just that—a fantasy.
The episode continues Mad Men's tradition of pop culture literacy through the books Don reads at the motel: Mario Puzo's The Godfather and James Michener's Hawaii, both texts about American reinvention and the dark bargains such reinvention requires. The younger students at Fairfield refer to Betty as "Mrs. Robinson," a reference that lands with particular weight given her circumstances. Weiner even indulges in a moment of fan service: Don, swimming in the motel pool, notices an attractive brunette (played by Jennifer Spriggs) reading Alberto Moravia's A Woman in Rome. For a moment, the old Don appears ready to make his move. Then her husband and children arrive, and the moment passes. Perhaps it is a sign of genuine growth, or perhaps merely a recognition that the old strategies no longer apply.
The Milk and Honey Route is not a perfect episode—the Oklahoma sequences occasionally strain for significance, and the portrait of rural America feels more observed from a distance than truly inhabited. But as a penultimate instalment, it succeeds brilliantly, closing two major narratives with the finality they deserve whilst leaving Don suspended in that peculiar liminal space where genuine transformation becomes possible. The title refers to a hobo term for the ideal rail route, the one that offers milk and honey rather than hardship. Whether Don has finally found that route, or whether he is merely chasing another illusion, remains the question for the final instalment.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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