Matthew Weiner said “success was on his mind” when writing Mad Men’s fifth season. Most of this season meditated on what it is, on what it means and on what we would be willing to endure or to kill to maintain it. Success itself is an artifice under which the characters strain, reconciling their dreams with a dismaying reality. Like the Phantom, the characters mask their true identity when entering society to others and, prophylactically, to themselves.

After dropping consecutive anvils with Joan’s prostitution and Lane Pryce’s suicide, the finale is comparatively tranquil.

Pete remains so, so punchable. Beth reignites their affair. Pete longs for it to be romantic, injecting “love” in place of mutual dissatisfaction. As she washes everything away the grey cloud with electroshock therapy, he confronts fears we’ve long known: his aging would not be “worth something” and his unsatisfactory home life would be “permanent.” He outs himself to Beth’s husband and returns beaten, to a wife far better than he deserves.

Megan chases her artistic dream, leaving advertising for her acting career. She faces a choice to fail on her own merits and acknowledge she was chasing “a phantom” or to use Don to get what she wants, which is not art but success. She feels soulless in advertising, yet has spent the preceding months selling her body and her pretty face rather than her ideas. Her success comes, selling product, in a national commercial.

Peggy receives what she wants, professional respect and independence from Don. Her work atmosphere, however, is just as frustrating. She gets her trip, but it’s not romantic Paris. It’s Richmond. She looks out her hotel room window to absorb the ambience, two dogs fucking.

Weiner hints at Peggy writing Virginia Slims’ iconic “You’ve come a long way, baby” campaign. This success would eradicate any vestige of idealism, exploiting her own sex to sell them a product that would kill them.

Then there is Don. His abscessed tooth is a too obvious metaphor for his past, and the darker parts of his psyche that won’t just go away. He can’t buy off his guilt. Adam Whitman follows him around in his thoughts. He tries to buy off Lane’s wife with a check. She chastises him for “filling a man like that with ambition.” With both Peggy and Megan, Don realizes the closest relationships he established were, ultimately, utilitarian. His wife, Megan, used him to advance her career. His work wife, Peggy, did the same.

We leave with Don, being hit on by two women in a cryptic bar scene, wondering what it is he wants.

[Photos via Mike]