SPOILERS for Mad Men's second-season finale ahead...
A couple of weeks ago on this blog, I asked critic Matthew Gilbert about the scarcity of TV characters who evolve in believable ways over the course of a series. Is Mad Men one of the rare exceptions to the rule, perhaps best illustrated by The Sopranos, that TV characters don't change?
The most memorable aspect of the second-season finale was the sympathetic portrayal of advertising account executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), who was introduced to us last year as a shallow, selfish, and infantile human being. One of the comic high points of Mad Men's first year came when Pete, jealous of a colleague's short story being published in the Atlantic Monthly, went to desperate measures to get his own prose in print -- and had to settle for an appearance in Boy's Life magazine.
Most TV series would have kept the character running in place for years, as a dependable source of humor, but Mad Men has kept Pete interesting and unpredictable. He seemed to hit a low point in humanity earlier this season, when he exploited his own father's death in a plane crash in an attempt to snag a new client. But even in that episode he was more self-aware than he was last year (when he never seemed to think twice about taking advantage of any opportunity that came his way).
In this week's finale, Pete had to choose between two mentors -- Duck Phillips, who praised Pete for the plane-crash gambit, and Don Draper, who voiced confidence in Pete's loftier abilities. He picked Don, a choice that was both moral and shrewd. (Duck was the wrong horse to bet on in terms of office politics.)
Then, toward the end of the episode, we got the scene we've been waiting for all year, in which Pete finally discovers that his fling with Peggy two years ago had resulted in a child -- which Peggy gave away for adoption. I think almost all Mad Men viewers were looking forward to this with a kind of sick glee. It would be one more humiliation for the obnoxious Pete, who would undoubtedly respond with an amusing fit of petulance (similar to when he was chewed out by his wife for buying a rifle last year).
But, no, the moment came after Pete gave a startlingly sincere declaration of love for Peggy -- who, just as sincerely, tried to let him down gently by telling him that it was better for both of them to move on. Perhaps a little too proud of her own personal growth (which has also been considerable), she then went one step too far by revealing the existence of their now-vanished child.
His flabbergasted reaction -- "Why would you tell me that?" -- was anything but comic. I immediately thought of Peter's flabbergasted reaction in the penultimate episode of the first season, when Pete exposes Don's secret past to agency head Bert Cooper -- who responds by saying, "Who cares?"
The first-season moment was hilarious; the second-season moment was heartbreaking. Can the third season of Mad Men catch viewers off guard again?
