Mad Men Conspiracy Theories

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Ramon Ramirez is a writer for FanSided partner BroJackson.com. For more great content, head on over to Bro Jackson and check out Ramon’s work.


Mad Men closes out its thick, paranoid sixth season tonight. Most of my mid-season questions have been answered–Bob Benson is a hustler with a past who invented an alliterative name and identity to write a new future. No one is going to die (this season), and that includes Megan Draper and her Sharon Tate-esque eye for fashion. Pete’s gun will have to wait for another season. I still think Crane is on the verge of moving to California and starting a new agency–there are too many big contracts on this team and I maintain that someone will test free agency before the night is over.

The speculation switches gears now from what will happen? to what is happening? As in, conspiracies that are woven into the show and tout hidden subtext, impending disaster. There’s so much depth to every scene that part of the joy is letting your imagination run wild–reaching for dots to connect.

On the eve of the finale, here are my five favorite paranoid androids. Some are predictions, others are alternative readings to where we’re headed. None of them subscribe to the notion that this isn’t reality (Don is dead and in hell, or this is all a Ken Cosgrove memoir).

5. Sally is going to blackmail her father, then become her father

Sally has spent most of the series idolizing her father and fighting for time with him. Then she caught him cheating on her step-mother with the mom of the boy that she liked in graphic detail. She’s over Don. We saw her manipulate Glen Bishop during her stay at the preppy boarding school like a well-trained mean girl. She has this secret to hold over Don’s head now. She has increasingly less respect for her mother, Betty, and is starting to get really good at keeping secrets from her (like Sally’s newly forged smoking habit). Don has provided generous portions of daddy issues to Sally, but she’s too strong and iron-willed to be weak. She’s a beast in training and her father has indirectly sent her to destroy.

4. _____ is going to die because _____.

Ted’s fate is sealed because he lied on the couch in the exact same manner as Lane did. This is silly on the surface but so much thought goes into every detail of the show that it’s difficult to not do a double take when you see the images side by side. Especially when we can draw easy parallels: Both men are married to suffocating, unhappy spouses, and neither has a stomach for the advertising game. Ted is too nice and good-natured not to get eaten alive by Don at some point. Megan is going to die because she ate orange sherbet at the HoJo back in Season 5 and oranges in film and television symbolize death. Roger is going to die because he was shuffling oranges in Don’s office just this month.

If there’s one thing I buy into is how much Weiner and Co. enjoy dropping hints into casual dialogue. At the end of Season 3–two seasons before his suicide–Don tells Lane that he’d be a figurative “body” thrown overboard. At the outset of Season 5, Lane is in the office and says “I’ll be here for the rest of my life.” To that end, Roger has said the following: “It’s a lot easier for them to replace you than it is me,” (I read this as nod to how fun his extroverted character is to write), and “This is my funeral.”

3. Megan is getting hers on the side

Megan is now an actress on television with marginal fame. She’s standing on her own and constantly, casually going out for business-related trips to plays or dinners. She is smart enough to know that Don is miles away now, but isn’t reacting with jealousy. I kind of think she’s seeing someone younger, with more in common. It’s body language–relief when Don leaves to work or to California. But it’s also some quietly obvious reactions: Don visits her on the set of a love scene, a co-worker tells her that “your agent is here” and she turns around with clear, swooning elation . . . then realizes her co-worker was being sarcastic and it’s just Don.

2. General Motors is a metaphor for Vietnam

The agency is working on a doomed project (the 1970 Chevy Vega, a car that nearly buried General Motors in the mid-to-late ’70s). Young “soldiers” like Ken are returning from trips shot and bruised, to minimal sympathy. Don is re-assuring the team with mini pep talks about how everything will work out and since when does Don feed his creative team propaganda? Stan has spent most of the season in army green. There’s an episode where the office is sweaty, delusional, high on speed in the office and it’s staged to feel like a hot, humid jungle.

1. Ginsberg is going to have a schizophrenic breakdown

There’s little doubt at this point that Ginsberg is a schizophrenic. He’s at the age, his late mid-to-late 20s, where this mental health disorder takes root, he’s having combative episodes in the office that couple as existential crises. Ted calls him “lightning in a bottle” because his creative juices are all over the place. He’s blessed with a Jewish, self-deprecating sense of humor but that’s just a mask. He’s going through it–the aside about being a martian was supposed to be funny and hint at his creative genius, but it just shows how imbalanced he is. As the fashion blog Tom and Lorenzo pointed out, he’s dressed in clashing, loud prints all of the time. And the line about voices in his head? There’s no doubt this guy is on the edge of a mental health crises, but the bigger picture is how it plays out during the show.