Television Review: The Phantom (Mad Men, S5x13, 2012)
The Phantom (S5x13)
Airdate: 10 June 2012
Written by: Jonathan Igla & Matthew Weiner
Directed by: Matthew Weiner
Running Time: 48 minutes
The penultimate episode of Season 5, Commissions and Fees, delivered a narrative payload so seismic that it rendered the subsequent season finale, "The Phantom," strangely difficult to appreciate. The death of Lane Pryce was a gut-punch that fundamentally altered the trajectory of the series, a dramatic event that Matthew Weiner appeared to be resigned to replicating, or perhaps simply unable to repeat, by the time he arrived at The Phantom. While the episode still represents high-quality television—characterised by the meticulous period detail and sharp dialogue that the show is renowned for—it suffers from a pervasive sense of anti-climax. The episode feels less like a conclusion to an arc and more like a narrative mop-up, a holding pattern before the next season's launch.
Set against the backdrop of Easter 1967, the episode finds Don Draper in a state of physical and spiritual disrepair. He is suffering from a debilitating toothache, a pain that he stubbornly refuses to treat with medical intervention. Instead, he relies on the primitive remedies of cotton balls and liberal doses of whiskey. In his intoxicated state of misery, Don begins to see "a phantom"—a ghostly vision of his estranged brother, Adam Whitman. This hallucination serves as a physical manifestation of Don’s unresolved guilt and trauma. It is not until he finally visits the dentist and has the tooth extracted that the vision returns. Adam appears to him in a moment of lucidity, telling Don that "he will be around." It is a cryptic line that hints at the persistence of the past in Don’s present life, suggesting that his attempts to escape his origins are futile.
Beyond Don’s internal hauntings, there is another "phantom" at play, though this time the term is used with derision by Marie Calvet, Megan’s mother. Upon visiting her daughter, Marie dismisses Megan’s fledgling acting career as a "phantom"—a fleeting illusion that will likely amount to nothing. This sentiment hangs over Megan as she goes through period of profound insecurity. She has been receiving disturbing prank calls, a mystery that is eventually solved when the caller is revealed to be Roger Sterling. Roger, still reeling from his own enlightenment, wants to continue where their brief fling left off and invites Marie to take LSD with him. She declines. Meanwhile, Megan, desperate to secure any acting work, attempts to leverage her position as Don’s wife to get him to use his influence to land her a role in the next SCDP-designed commercial. Don initially refuses, citing professional boundaries, but eventually relents to her pleading.
Don also has to grapple with a financial "ghost from the past" when he discovers that SCDP had held a US$ 175,000 insurance policy on Lane Pryce. Without consulting the other partners, Don decides to take US$ 50,000 from this fund and give it to Lane’s widow, Rebecca. The gesture is intended as a gesture of goodwill, but she treats Don with disdain, interpreting the money as a sign of his guilty conscience rather than a kindness. The memory of Lane’s suicide also haunts the office space itself; the personnel are wary of using his office, which eventually leads the company to decide to buy another floor entirely.
Perhaps the most chaotic storyline belongs to Pete Campbell. While commuting on the train, he encounters Harry and Beth Dawes. Beth, having been brought to the city to treat her severe depression through electroshock therapy, calls Pete and suggests a rendezvous at the Hotel Pennsylvania—the very place she stood him up previously. Pete agrees, and Beth has sex with him because she fears she will forget him. When he returns home to Trudy, Pete is horrified by her plans to build a pool and her desire to continue living far away from the city. Later, he visits Beth in the hospital, pretending to be his brother, but she does not seem to recognise him. The tension culminates when he meets Harry on the train; Pete is so infuriated by Harry’s treatment of Beth that he insults Harry, leading to a brutal fight. He is beaten first by Harry, and then by the conductor, who throws him off the train for his attitude. When he returns home with bruises, Pete explains the incident to Trudy as a car accident. She believes him and, in a twist of ironic fate, decides to agree with his plan to buy an apartment in the city.
Elsewhere, Peggy’s work at Cutler, Gleason and Chaough is progressing, albeit with a peculiar condition. Ted Chaough insists that she start smoking in order to work on a new female brand of cigarettes for Philip Morris. Later, Peggy meets Don in a cinema. They discuss their respective careers, a conversation that highlights the professional distance that has grown between them, before they settle in to watch the 1967 version of Casino Royale.
The episode concludes with a montage that has become a staple of prestige television finales. It shows Megan acting in a commercial, Peggy in a motel on a business trip, Pete listening to something in his earphones, and Don sitting alone in a bar when two young women approach him, asking if he is alone. The montage is bookended by Nancy Sinatra’s "You Only Live Twice," a song that feels strangely appropriate for a show about reinvention, though it also highlights the anachronism of using a song from the James Bond film of the same name, released just months after the period depicted in the episode.
"The Phantom" caused significantly less enthusiasm among critics than its predecessor, a reaction that can be attributed not only to the lack of "wham" moments but to a sense that Matthew Weiner, who directed the episode alongside Jonathan Igla, appeared to have lost some of his creative juices. Like most season finales of 21st-century prestige television, "The Phantom" serves as a bridge rather than a breaker. There is hardly any substantive plot or serious character arc, except in the case of Pete Campbell. His adulterous affair inadvertently and ironically helps him attain a part of his pre-marriage life and freedom. Seeing Pete, arguably one of the least popular characters, get beaten not just once, but twice, is certainly deeply cathartic for a large section of the audience.
Weiner later explained that he envisioned the episode starting from the last montage and worked his way backwards. This retrospective structure explains some of the narrative weirdness, but it also exposes the self-indulgence of the finale. The montage looks beautiful, and the use of "You Only Live Twice" is thematically resonant, but the scene itself seems typical of a self-indulgent season finale—focusing on aesthetics over narrative propulsion. Weiner relies too heavily on symbolism, which in this instance, is often too obvious. The toothache serving as a metaphor for Don’s troubled soul is heavy-handed, and Adam’s ghost explicitly telling him "the tooth isn't the only thing rotten" leaves little to the imagination.
Furthermore, the whole storyline about SCDP obtaining a new floor serves as a flimsy excuse to stage a well-composed shot of Joan and the four partners. This might indicate that "cool" images are beginning to take precedence over clever plot and characterisation, a trend that should not bode too well for the future of Mad Men. While The Phantom is not a bad episode, it is a disappointing one, overshadowed by the brilliance of the episode that came before it. It is a serviceable, if somewhat listless, conclusion to a season that had previously been operating at a peak of intensity.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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