Mad Men promos offer more questions than answers for final season

With Mad Men’s seventh and final season starting next month, television network AMC has rolled out a couple of cryptic publicity pieces.

Normally, promos are no big deal. But with Mad Men—saturated in symbolism and rabidly dissected on Internet forums—the promos have become something of a March tradition, a chance for fans to read the tea leaves, as it were.

The first is a poster by legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, perhaps best known for creating the "I ♥ New York" logo as well as his 1967 portrait of Bob Dylan. An explosion of colour, it shows the familiar silhouette of Don Draper (Jon Hamm) superimposed over a psychedelic tableau featuring a woman and a bottle of wine. Perhaps it’s just Draper’s voyeuristic pose, but there’s something foreboding about it; and as the show moves into 1969, the vibe is definitely more Altamont than Summer of Love.

“Believe it or not,” series creator Matthew Weiner told the New York Times last week, the poster “is related to the show, and not because it’s psychedelic. That’s not what it’s about. What it’s about is the material and the immaterial world, and that’s what I loved.”

Most likely, he’s speaking in generalities of Don’s womanizing and functional alcoholism and middle-class angst. But when Weiner mentions the immaterial world, there’s a link to the rumors that Don’s wife Megan (Jessica Paré) is dead (or doomed), based on a drug-fuelled hallucination of Don’s, as well as wardrobe similarities to Sharon Tate. In either case, it’s clear that the gang at Sterling Cooper & Partners have wandered a long way from Camelot.

The second ad, a 15-second video teaser, shows Don disembarking from a gleaming Boeing 727. As he descends the staircase, he puts on his hat, a stodgy, 1950s fashion statement completely at odds with the psychedelia of Glaser’s poster. Has Don finally become so far out of touch with the times that he’s completely irrelevant?

And where has Don arrived—the greener pastures of California? Is he back in New York to deal with whatever Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) did with that rifle he’s been waving around since season one? Or, is this a nod to—or confirmation of—persistent Internet rumours that Don will turn out to be D.B. Cooper, who also famously travelled by 727?

Most importantly, why is there no livery on the airplane? Is the tailfin purposely supposed to look like a cross? Has Don—long conjectured to be the falling man of the show’s titles—been taken to heaven, as Warren Beatty was to be (albeit by Concorde) in Heaven Can Wait?

Thankfully, the writing on Mad Men has been intelligent, thought-provoking, and unpredictable for six seasons. There’s no reason to suspect that things will change now, and that we’ll be saddled with a Dexter-style finale or some Bobby-in-the-shower Dallas switcheroo.

We hope, anyway. The answers will start to come April 13.