Mad Men: how will it end for Don Draper?

MATT BERRY, TOAST OF LONDON STAR

Don Draper is one of the best-written characters in TV in a long, long time. He’s horribly unfaithful, incredibly controlling, and all of these things that make you want to keep watching. He’s not the hard-bitten cop who has a boss who doesn’t understand him. He is very cleverly written in a way that you can’t get bored of him. I think that might be it. With a lot of other TV characters, after 28 episodes you don’t care whether they live or die. Whereas he’s definitely not that. You really still want to know what’s going on with him.

There are some great conspiracy theories out there. The best one is the DB Cooper theory. DB Cooper was an actual person, though that wasn’t his name. I don’t think they ever found out what his name was. He bought a plane ticket in 1971 [from Portland to Seattle], and he got on the plane. He demanded $200,000 dollars and two parachutes, and with the first parachute, he put the money in and tied it round his waist, and then told the crew to get to the other side of the plane. And then the other parachute he attached to himself, jumped out, and was never seen again. Nor was the money, I don’t think. His FBI drawing looks exactly like Don Draper. So if Don Draper turns out to be that guy, that could be amazing. I think it would be perfect for Don’s character. No one knew who he was, false name, never seen again. And it’s about the right timeframe. I don’t think it will be that. I don’t think he’s alive. I think he would be quite soon dead after the show. Whatever the ending is, it will be very, very bleak. That’s what I’m thinking. Or he’ll go off to the UK and reinvent himself. He could go off and manage Jimi Hendrix or something. But I don’t think so. I don’t think Mad Men will end positively for anyone who has any close dealings with Don. They might just surprise us and have it very normal, and just have it end. But everyone wants something big, don’t they? Whatever it is, it will be very clever. That I’m certain of.

STELLA MOZGAWA, WARPAINT DRUMMER

I think that the first half of the last season was starting to see the female characters being called into focus a lot more, and staking their claim, because the cultural climate of the show is so different from the beginning of the show to the end. Peggy and Joan have established a lot more power now, and the men are flailing. So I feel like the women are a lot less ancillary, and less peripheral, and I think that’s something they’re going to push further in this last season. Already Peggy is on her way to being the Don Draper – and also “the don” in a mafioso sense: she’s moved to the top of the industry, and is very much an equal to Don. I feel they’ll go into that a bit more. Peggy will become the substitute to, or the successor to Don Draper. Obviously Matt Weiner wrote for The Sopranos, which had this very climactic end. I think he’ll definitely do something similar with Mad Men.

HUGO BLICK, CREATOR OF THE HONOURABLE WOMAN

Mad Men burned a narrative path for what is possible in the medium: it was revolutionary. I’m off to Africa to research an altogether different revolution for a project, which perhaps wouldn’t be allowed the narrative ambition it pursues if Mad Men first hadn’t scorched that path. It’s not the scale, it’s the depth of character: their inconsistencies, certainties, heroism and villainy, the sheer detail of their lives exposed, and all played out over a single narrative arc approaching 70 hours of screen time. For the team, and Matthew Weiner in particular, this is remarkable creative discipline. On a personal level, I have always looked on Don and Betty as my parents, almost literally; I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother still kept an air rifle in her closet, that is if she wasn’t already abandoned to a nursing home from the fallout of a life spent in almost total Betty-like solipsism! My only true surprise is that I rarely meet anyone else who admits to having endured a similar upbringing of postwar, new-moneyed, alcohol-infused self-destruction. So, perhaps uniquely, I am a child of Mad Men. Though I suspect not.

TOM & LORENZO, MAD MEN BLOGGERS

It’s become something of a series-finale cliche, but we just can’t imagine the show ending without some glimpses of the characters at later stages of their lives. We don’t need to see every major milestone and death, but just some brief scenes depicting Peggy in the 1980s or Don in old age, assuming he makes it to old age. Betty as a shoulder-padded Republican power wife in the Nancy Reagan mode; please, God. Aside from that, we don’t have expectations, because we’ve learned not to apply them to anything Matthew Weiner’s working on. He lives to subvert expectations.

We’d be surprised if Weiner went for any sort of shock ending, though. Aside from the occasional lawnmower amputation, the show deals more in quiet moments and subtlety. And he’s too smart a showrunner to attempt some sort of deliberately vague Sopranos-style ending because it will always be looked at as a rehash of someone else’s idea. We expect something thoughtful; a grace note to sum up the emotional journeys we’ve been on with these characters, but subtle enough to spur months if not years of debate on what it means. And we are prepared to exhibit embarrassing displays of weeping and nose-blowing.