Okay, don’t read this if you haven’t seen the Mad Men finale (this means you, Carole).

From the reaction of the TV blogs I’ve seen today (and who the hell are these people?) the season closer either makes no sense because we don’t know Megan (the secretary Don up and proposed to, after a trip with his kids to California) is or it’s lyrical and romantic (seriously, someone wrote that) because that’s a new, open Don who pops the question. Leave it  to Roger Sterling to speak for the viewer: “Who the hell is Megan?” (He is often called upon to sound the much needed note of bitter reality in the show, as when he asks Don fresh from his meeting with the American Cancer Society, “Did you get cancer?”)

Faye, the good, loyal, mature Joyce Brothers type doctor who looked like she was cleared for take-off sealed her fate in the first scene when she suggest that Don deal with his dual identity problem and overcome his anxiety by grappling with the past. Uh-huh. Not only might that crimp DD’s style as TV’s ultimate (and literal) swinging dick (or Don), it would stop the show cold. Who the hell wants to see an individuated Don Draper?

Personally I think it’s all about impulsiveness. Betty fires her kids’ nanny without consulting anyone, or thinking of the consequences of her actions. (Consequences that include Don taking Megan on the trip to LA when he doesn’t have a babysitter.) Don proposes to Megan in the wee small hours of the morning because… well, she’s good with spills (as my friend Paulette said)! She wipes up Sally’s spilt milkshake in no time and doesn’t lose her cool — and that might just have been the moment when he decided he couldn’t live without her. So unlike his last wife, and his crazy abusive parents. Having been raised the unwanted orphan of his father’s whore mistress seems to make Don want some stability, strangely.

Or does he? I find all the California stuff fascinating. At the end of season two I thought Don might just go native; there he was hanging out with local hot-rodders, sort of a Tom Wolfe without the white suit. Any minute I thought he might drop acid. Instead he went back to NY but the Golden State still seems to represent the promise of change for him (as it did for the rest of the country), to be anyone he wants. Whoever that might be.

I believe series creator (and director of last night’s episode) Matthew Weiner has mentioned Seconds before, the 1966 John Frankenheimer flick that starred Rock Hudson as man in a gray flannel suit who trades in his old life (and face) to be reborn in Malibu as a barefoot swinger. Things don’t work out so well. It seems that second chances are as chancy as hell.