The ghosts of Rachel Menken, Don Draper’s season one paramour/breathtakingly classy department store heiress (not to mention the only woman, apart from his wives, who has ever actually broken up with Don) had been gathering thick and fast on the astral plain in the run-up to the premiere of Mad Men’s Season 7 swan song Sunday night. The show’s creator Matthew Weiner naturally brought her up in a recent discussion with New York Magazine’s Matt Zoller Seitz at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, comparing her story of assimilation to Don Draper’s, noting that both characters were “one generation away from living without plumbing.” She also, naturally, was a major topic of conversation between the showrunner and Tablet literary editor David Samuels in last week’s Q&A (it’s a tremendously quotable interview, but you should really read it yourself.) And then there she was, early in the episode last night, waltzing into Don’s dream in little more than a fur coat and a pair of heels, to tell him “you missed your flight,” whatever that means in the deep dark world of Weinerian symbolism.
This is Mad Men, so I wasn’t exactly expecting that all this Rachelmania presaged some sort of happy ending for Don and his lost love, in which they leave everything behind and retire to Boca to play mah-jongg on the beach for the rest of the 1970s. But I didn’t exactly predict that all these ghostly portents were indicating the presence of an actual ghost.