I hope that Don's fate isn't to jump out his office window, if only because the foreshadowing would have been too heavy-handed. I hope Matthew Weiner is just screwing with the audience.
The events of the last couple episodes are eerily reminiscent of my real life, insofar as I work for a very small division of a very big company and my office is being relocated to the corporate headquarters in six weeks. It's a little disheartening to see that for many in this fictional move it's a step back for them, and many just jump ship. I fear that my real-life experience will be similar...
What won't be similar is the very clear steps back for Joan. For a lot of them, actually. Shirley knew it was coming, as a black woman, and very subtly hinted to Roger that McCann Erickson has a corporate culture too racist to accept her. Joan hoped for the best but couldn't make a go of it; Don's a sexist too, but at least he had enough respect to step in where he felt someone like Joan was being harassed. Joan very quickly learned just how spiteful McCann Erickson can be; her and Ken Cosgrove can commiserate.
It's interesting to me that the production design of the McCann offices is very similar to the Sterling Cooper offices we saw in the first three seasons of the series. All that dark wood panelling. I think it represents a step back. Where Sterling Cooper's corporate culture changed over the years, becoming more accepting of women in particular, McCann is stuck in the dark ages (and the offices of McCann are quite literally dark and cloistered compared to SC&P's much airier, brighter, funkier offices). Joan was being sexually harassed wherever she turned, Shirley quit because she knew they wouldn't accept black people in that office, Peggy was assumed to have been part of the secretarial pool instead of a creative director, and Don... Don's expected to
work. It's been a long time that he's been able to actually grind out a lot of work, not since those early years of the show.
But everything's looking great for über-WASP Pete Campbell! And for Harry Crane, who has morphed into one of the sleaziest characters on the show, with an ever-growing ego. And to a lesser extent Ted Chaough, who doesn't really want to do this anymore and is just fine with being a drone, a cog in the machine. Ted knew as soon as Don quietly stood up and walked out of the Miller meeting that Don can't work as some cog: he doesn't know how.
