How Does Mad Men End?

I was probably the only person who ended up seeing the final episode of Mad Men's penultimate season at 8am on a Saturday morning (them's the breaks of shift work), but given how quiet social media had been about it I was pleased with how the season ended.

With one last season left to go, it does leave questions regarding how the show will actually end, so I've decided to take some guesses at what will happen to the main characters:

Don Draper
While his professional career is looking at a nadir and his marriage to Megan looks to be heading towards disaster, I wonder if there appears to be an uptick in his relationship with his children. As a Dad I found Sally's near-throwaway comment about not knowing anything about her father to be particularly cutting, so to end a series with him taking his children back to where he grew up was interesting.

A brief attempt to move away from alcohol at the culmination of the series leads me to think we'll see further health issues for Don in the final series. Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see him die at the culmination of the series.

Footnote: If Jon Hamm plays Don Draper for the full seven seasons and doesn't earn a major acting honour, that's an absolute shame on those organisations who overlook him. He's fabulous in the role, I can't imagine anyone else as Draper.

Peggy Olson
For quite a while I've felt that the show will end with one of the female characters becoming the one that the show was really all about. While thinking - and to some extent, hoping - it might be Sally I just think that too much time has been invested in Peggy for it not to be her. It fits too nicely, young secretary becomes copywriter, becomes respected, leaves, rejoins and (as I would guess) becomes partner and finally figurehead of the firm.

Let's be honest, every guy in the show has disrespected Peggy in one way or another. I think the show ends with her on top... and alone (unless you count her cat).

Roger Sterling
Fact: no-one remembers that in the first series of Mad Men Roger Sterling suffered two heart attacks. Changes of behaviour in that time? None. This is rearing it's ugly head again next season, trust me. I think we lose Roger at around episode nine or ten, and no-one will be sadder than me about that.

Megan Draper
As series six wore on there were rumours that Jessica Paré (who plays Megan) would be leaving the show, and that the character itself would be killed off. I love Mad Men, so it probably makes me a bad person that I'm disappointed that she appears to be coming back in season seven.

Seriously, just about every scene with Megan makes me ask, "What was the point of that?" She's my least favourite character by a long way. I think she and Don split early in season seven, and we see precious little else from her after episode five.

Pete Campbell
I wouldn't say I like Pete as a character, after all he's a pretty horrible person, but I've come to appreciate him, and certainly appreciate Vincent Kartheiser's portrayal of him. I just can't really muster the enthusiasm to see where he ends up. I suspect in some way though he gets back on side with poor, kind, trusting Trudy. She deserves better.

Sally Draper
The last few weeks saw Sally lose trust in her father, and suddenly strike up a liking for cigarettes and alcohol. Hold on, give me a moment here...

(I need to compose myself here. I originally liked Sally because in the early series she was a little like my eldest daughter was then, which of course leads to fears regarding how that same daughter may turn out like Sally one day...)

So this makes Sally easy to predict. She gets into drugs, into boys and goes to Woodstock.

(Excuse me while I go away and throw up.)

Betty Francis
I suspect that Henry (another character I'm not particularly bothered about) is dispensed with at some point in series seven, but quite how that occurs is something I'm not too sure about.

I do think that Betty and Don regain a more amicable relationship for the sake of their children, but it only remains platonic. I don't think it goes back to where it ever-so-briefly did in series six.

Joan Harris
Meh.

What do you think ends up happening with the major characters?

Update Time

I've had a busy time of things lately with my youngest daughter now reaching the grand old age of two, so I thought this would be an interesting time to review a few prior posts.

A Few Personal Lifehacks
Ah, backups... I've changed again! Remember how I started with weekly backups stored locally, and then advanced to daily backups? Well now I've gone a step further, and have finally started backing up some items online with Amazon Web Services. This is because I've had failures with both internal and external drives, and so therefore I opted for a third level of backup. Some photos - especially those of the kids - are too valuable not to be kept elsewhere.

Backups as a whole are an area I tend to think about a lot and consider a great deal. I know I consider my data too valuable not to back it up and keep those backups up to date.

The Problem With Joan Harris
We've now had five series of Mad Men, and I'm still not overly keen on the character as a person. Great series to show the acting talents of Christina Hendricks though. I have a new respect for her as an actress, although I still think no actress matches Elisabeth Moss on the show (Kiernan Shipka might get there one day, but not just yet).

I found season five of Mad Men quite odd. Brilliant at times, frustrating at others. I've seen some reviews which felt the whole series was brilliant, and yet I felt a little bit disappointed by it. And yet I'm still wondering where it ends up going in season six, and who'll feature, how they'll feature and even what year it will begin in. If it is 1968 that augurs well in my book.

vBulletin's Venture Into Blogging
Seems a bit odd to me that this continues to be the most popular post I've written, and by some distance. I haven't written about vBulletin for a while but I think as a whole the vBulletin team have lost their way. What was a simple forum software is now a massively bloated content management system. The overall package, which used to weigh in at a manageable 10Mb, now hovers at the 30Mb mark (which does matter for some of us). Where products like Wordpress will update quickly and simply through a wizard that even downloads the software package for you, the vBulletin upgrade is somewhat more laborious in comparison.

I still don't trust it as a stand-alone blogging platform (duh, I'm blogging here after all) but I can see how it makes sense when used with a forum (as I've tested myself over at Braves-Nation.com). Unfortunately the implementation isn't great, there is no uniformity in regard to tags that might see more linking between posts written by separate users, and once again, there's a mammoth amount of bloat there. Pity, it could be so much better and leaner. Unfortunately the way vBulletin has been going recently I can't say I'm hopeful of improvement, and I've even been considering switching to Xenforo.

My Top Three Twitter Peeves
Can I add one to this? People asking celebrities to retweet their causes, all... the... time. But you know what's great? Whereas another site (that won't be mentioned by name) consistently does things to annoy their users Twitter seems to find ways to make things better. However it wasn't until recently that I discovered that you can turn off retweets by anyone you're following. It's a game-changer, something else which enables you to get Twitter working the way you want it to.

The Problem With Joan Harris

Disclosure: At present I'm in the middle of watching series 4 of Mad Men on BBC4. I'm behind America and anyone who has been watching on torrents by quite a way.

Since I first heard about the drama series Mad Men (BBC4 if you're in the UK, AMC if you're in America) I have consistently heard one character mentioned above all others. Whether she's referred to by name, hair colour, her job, or - most likely - her figure, you'll probably know who I'm speaking about. The curvy one, the office manager, the redhead, Joan.

Call me odd, but she doesn't do anything for me. Now this isn't anything against Christina Hendricks, the actress who plays her. The appeal, or lack of it, comes from the character herself. Joan is sure of herself. She gets what she wants. She is determined, forthright, rarely smiles, bitchy to people who she either doesn't like and who she doesn't have time for. She knows she's popular, and has that cocky, hip-shaking swagger that goes along with it. Furthermore she doesn't look as if she would be easy to get along with. In other words, she's the kind of girl who used to make my life a misery at school.

Is Joan without appeal? No, and she's certainly a character who plays her part in the rich tapestry of the show (as her brief absence in the latter half of series 3 showed), but in my mind this has been shown when the outer veneer has been removed and what lies beneath the surface is shown in greater detail. There are several examples of this, the most notable being:

• Her exit from Sterling Cooper in a flood of tears when her idyllic future was seemingly falling apart in series 3.
• Her frustration at being separated from her husband at the start of series 4 (N.B. Bonus points to Mad Men for not showing him to be a complete scumbag in this episode as it would have been so easy to do - lots of shades of grey in this programme that I love).
• Her genuine distress as Roger Sterling's two heart attacks in series 1.

Nasty, not smiling, robot Joan, not attractive. Not to me anyway, sorry for not being conventional.

And I know I advocate Betty "I didn't even cry when my father died" as a more attractive reason for watching this programme. I can't explain that. Sue me (unless you live somewhere where you can actually sue me, in which case I'd prefer that you didn't).