Final Reflections on Season Four

Last Sunday’s episode ended with Don’s sudden engagement to Megan, his current secretary.  It wasn’t the strongest episode this season and had nowhere near the energy of the Season 3 finale.  But it was reasonably dramatic.

I’m puzzling over a contradiction.  On the one hand, Megan initiated a one-night-stand (if sex on his office couch even qualifies as “one night”) with Don at the end of Episode 11, making clear that she wasn’t expecting an actual romance to come of it.  Now, while I’ll take the writer’s word that some women do that kind of thing, I’m not sure they’re the same women that then ecstatically accept a marriage proposal on the morning after what for all intents and purposes was the second date.  The one girl I knew that cheerfully admitted (to me, at any rate) her fondness for recreational sex also said her standard for marriage was a lot higher.  Megan represents something of an alpha male’s fantasy figure:  one moment freely offering no-strings-attached sex, the next ready to settle down on his time-table.  The writers didn’t put much effort into developing her character.  She comes across a little like a Stepford girlfriend.

The writers didn’t really rise to the challenge of making Don’s falling in love very credible.  We’ve heard him sweet-talk women for four years now; how should it sound when he really means it?  In this case, pretty much the same.  When he actually pulled out the ring, I halfway thought I was watching some kind of dream sequence that wasn’t really happening.

But maybe that’s the point.  In context, Don’s sudden desire to marry Megan seems to be motivated by his positive assessment of her mothering skills on the one hand, and on the other his grief at the death of Anna, rather than a genuine connection to Megan herself.