Jump Pete, Jump!

Ever watch Mad Men, the TV series about advertising companies in New York in the 60s?  Trish and I watched the entire series via Netflix streaming, viewed the finale just a few days ago.  It was time it ended, was getting dark, heavy, depressing.  I thought the series was well done overall but was extremely disappointed by the last episode.

The lead-in was always the same, showing simple sketches in silhouette, extremely cool, less is more.  One sketch showed a guy in a suit falling, falling, falling (slow-mo), still falling, with a lofty skyscraper in the background.  No clue was ever given about the who, what, why, when or how, but I always assumed the fall presaged an actual event.  I was expecting that event to take place in the final episode and I was enthusiastically cheering for my personal favorite, the most despicable person in the series, to be The Jumper.

There were any number of despicable characters and one might say the world would be a better place if any of them, or all of them for that matter, had taken the plunge.  If you watched the series, you already know from the post title who I was backing.  Yep, it was Pete Campbell.  That weasel had the ethics and morals of an alley cat and was a sucker-upper extraordinaire.  Mr Smarmy in the flesh, complete with smarmy smile that made you want to slap the living shit out of him every time he appeared on screen.

I thought The Jumper's silhouette resembled Pete, too.  It definitely didn't resemble Roger or Don or one of the other lead characters.  My second choice for The Jumper was Lane, that obnoxious, pretentious prick from England (in real life, the son of actor Richard Harris no less, never would have guessed).  Gotta give it to Lane, though.  He did the honorable thing: hung himself.  His first attempt, carbon monoxide poisoning via car exhaust, a more gentile and painless method by far, failed because he couldn't get the car started.  Silly bugger just couldn't do anything right.

So, nobody jumped.  We were misled.  Mr Smarmy's still out there somewhere.  Now that I think about it, he didn't really need to jump: his coworkers would have gladly thrown him out the window.

My favorite character was Joan.  She was no saint either, but it was great fun to watch her perform her velvet-hammer role, batting those beautiful eyes while demurely telling someone to piss off.  BTW, she was all padded up for the role; she's nowhere near that busty or butty.