It's always surprising when something actually happens, in the sense of "large events above and beyond the inner lives of the static characters." Usually the action consists of a small but telling event that means nothing at the time but gets put under the electron microscope by the people who like to tease meaning out of everything. It's possible, for example, that the red wine stain on Don's floor is just a red wine stain, not a metaphor, not a call-back, not a sign that Megan was really killed by the Manson Family and this is a dream Don is having while drunk at the funeral.
Some fans were complaining that the show wasn't wrapping up enough. Wasn't spending its last moments right. We need closure on everyone! But the point of the show, it's seemed to me for years, isn't closure or growth, to use two tired words fiction is required to provide. It's the absence of both. Megan's story got closure, but she didn't. Sally Draper may get one more knowing look of disgust, but she's not going to grow anything but up. (She is, as Don informed her with the certainty of a bad medical diagnosis, like her parents.) Roger Sterling will float along until a vein in his head pops like a balloon.
Anyway, something happened, and it was startling, if soapy, and led to that tidy, almost poignant last shot: the partners have convened to calm everyone's fears, and the staff simply gets up and walks out, leaving them standing in a row, like rocks in an ice floe after everything melted away. The line-up of the partners is a hallmark shot, from the first time they stood in the new offices to the shot in the McCann boardroom.
The move gives the last two episodes something to do, and gives us the ending the show seemed unwilling to provide. The firm is done. Don, far from falling to his literal or metaphorical death, lands on his feet with a Coke in his hand, the winner of the most American prize he could imagine. That'll do.
Oh, by the way, I found this imagine in an old mid-60s New Yorker ad. Wonder if it was the inspiration. If anyone wants to do a story about advertising in the 1890s, it would fit.
VotD You're probably wondering if the Chilean volcano eruption was observed by UFOs. Of course! Here's proof.
This goes along with the UFO interesting in Chile's copper mines.
