100 Ways Mad Men Might End

Because one of them has to be right (maybe).

Mad Men Finale Predictions

This Sunday, Mad Men comes to an end after seven seasons, a decade of on-screen time, and a half-century of nostalgia. We made one bold guess for how Matthew Weiner's existential drama would end right after the series' penultimate episode aired. But since when is one enough? Below, we offer 100 totally plausible finale predictions. Because anything could happen to Don Draper, in theory.

1. Don goes to Disneyland on a whim. He is on the "It's a Small World After All" ride. The final shot is the entirety of the ride, a full 15 minutes.

2. Slow fade to black as Don carves a turkey alone on Thanksgiving, 1970.

3. Don pitches Betty on cancer treatment: "It's toasted." She refuses. He pitches her on a cigarette: "It's toasted." She refuses. He pitches her on a piece of toast: "It's toasted."

4. From the guy who runs McCann WorldWide's Twitter feed: "In 1984, a TANDY TRS-80 desktop computer will malfunction and destroy all our files between 1968 and 1984. Don's records will be lost."

5. Don delivers a baby, then has a heart attack immediately after. All life is cyclical.

6. Peggy and Pete's lovechild, given up for adoption as a newborn in 1960, returns ... from the future, where he is doing business as Jean-Claude Van Damme, who turns 55 this year.

7. Don drives back to New York, scoops up Betty and the kids, and finds refuge in an organic commune near Woodstock, determined to fight the lung cancer holistically, leaving Henry Francis on his knees on the front lawn sobbing. Sterling has another heart attack while opening the day's second pack of cigarettes at lunch. Harry Crane goes on to become the CEO of Paramount. Pete is seen boarding a Lear Jet with his estranged wife. Joan is seen setting up a home office in that rich guy's house.

8. Last shots: Don walks into the office. He takes off his hat. He changes his shirt—we know he wasn't home last night—then lays on the couch and takes a nap.

9. It's present day, and a group of young McCann creatives are in a room. They come up with an idea for a new Nikon: The Time Machine. They need old photos for the pitch, so they go to the archive room and pull out a photo album that says "Sterling Cooper, 1962" on the spine. They open it to a photo of Don and pull the image out.

10. Still furiously trying to tie up every loose end, Matthew Weiner makes the last episode about Don, his lover Suzanne from Season Three, and Jim Cutler.

11. Tired of all the mansplaining, Joan convinces Peggy a way to start a fem-centric ad agency that destroys McCann-Erickson in a moment of alt history bliss. There is no mention of Don Draper.

12. Don meets a new woman; Peggy comes up with a new slogan; Roger drinks too much; Sally balances grief over her mother's death with feelings for a new boy. Just another episode of Mad Men!

13. Roger Sterling in a hotel room singing, "Zou Bisou Bisou." In drag.

14. Or maybe ruined Roger Sterling and Don Draper wear women's clothing and move into an female-only apartment complex to start new lives as... bosom buddies.

15. Don watches Peggy and Stan hook-up from outside a window. Love, man.

16. Or, better yet: At a huge banquet honoring Peggy Olsen Rizzo's pioneering work in the advertising business, she steps outside to the streets of Manhattan for a forbidden cigarette. She sees a man walking down the street, clearly a tourist, with an I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt and a brood of grandkids fattened in the heartland. She runs to him—not easy, because she's pushing 75—and says "Don? Don Draper?" And he pushes his sunglasses down his nose, gives her That Look, and says, "My name is Dick Whitman. I have no idea what you're talking about."


17. The finale's title is "Person to Person," which can only mean that the show ends with Don making an operator-assisted phone call as the mellow sounds of saxophonist Houston Person's October 1970 album Person to Person! plays him off.

18. Don thinks up the idea for Alcoholics Anonymous, discovers someone invented it 40 years prior, then hits the bar.

19. Though Don went out into the heartland to cleanse himself, it didn't work out that way. He has seen things a man should never see—and so comes back as Mobil's "Mr. Dirt."

20. Don goes to the movies. (Five Easy Pieces, to be exact.)

21. Don turns out to be D.B. Cooper, which is to say he hijacks a plane and parachutes out of it somewhere over Oregon with 200 grand in a bag, never to be heard from again. Weiner reduces all seven seasons of Mad Men to an elaborate practical joke.

22. The "finale" consists entirely of an interview with Matthew Weiner, who explains the characters' motivations, insists that he really likes Betty, and reveals that the "Woo Woo" commercial is actually a pilot for his next creative venture.

23. Don sits at a diner way out west. The door opens. In walks Jim Hobart. Blackout.

24. Wait, no, it's a crossover. An elderly Don walks into Holsten's confectionary, catches Tony Soprano's attention, and shuts theory-driven Sopranos fans up once and for all.

25. Don saves Christmas.

26. No matter what the ending is, Tom Junod starts his portion of the recap by saying, "Admit it, Anna: I was right."

27. My Struggle, by Dick Whitman.

28. Philip K. Dick Whitman.

29. "Daddy!"

30. Ken Cosgrove gets the last laugh. He squashes his former Sterling Cooper colleagues, earns the first eye transplant, and publishes a novel, The Beast that Dreamt of Stars, optioned for the big screen by Stanley Kubrick.

31. Don becomes a very successful porn star.

32. Bryan Batt fools Esquire and the rest of the Internet by returning as Sal, now out of the closet and Kitty-free.

33. A beat for beat retelling of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode "Walking Distance." Don, walking back from Oklahoma, stumbles into a small town that resembles scenes of his childhood in Illinois. Slowly, Don realizes that this is his hometown. He wanders through a park and witnesses his eight-year-old self riding a carousel. There, he confronts his abusive father, decides nostalgia is for losers, and retreats back to the "real world" to live the rest of his life.

34. Don joins Greenpeace.

35. Don moves to Indiana and takes the name Richard Wayne Gary Wayne.

Richard Wayne Gary Wayne

36. "Mr. Draper, you fell into coma right after the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. Welcome back—but you've missed one of most tumultuous decades of this nation's history!"

37. Don—always reading novels, always messing with typewriters—writes a book in his own name.

38. Don, hospitalized, jumps out of his room's window. The last shot is of his daughter looking with wide, mesmerized eyes out of the window—and upward. The audience wonders, Can Don fly? Or was that just in his imagination?

39. Don moves in next door to young Steve Jobs. They never talk.

40. We flash forward to 1984, where a bloated, dead-eyed Don Draper pitches Burger King on the "Herb" campaign, then forlornly throws himself out a nearby window.

41. Creepy Glen jumps out of a window.

42. Don arrives back in New York only to be lambasted by McCann-Erickson employees. He contemplates jumping out a window. Clarence Odbody, his guardian angel, appears. "Strange, isn't it?" Clarence says. "Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" Don snaps back and hugs his friends. Then Jim Hobart fires him.

43. Don thinks about committing suicide, decides against it, then someone pushes him.

44. Don wakes up in an inn in Vermont next to Mary Frann, tells her he had the strangest dream. She says, who are you?

45. Harry Crane gets what he deserves.

46. Don Draper and Bob Benson kiss, tentatively at first, but then ravenously...

47. Don goes to Europe, as explained in impeccable detail here.

48. Don chooses a life, a mission, an identity, a purpose beyond himself, permanence. He goes home to do whatever raising his two now-motherless children need him to do. Or he does the exact opposite of that.

49. Sally waves goodbye to a bereaved Henry Francis as she boards the plane bound for Berkeley.

50. Don invents the Internet.

51. Don tires of the open road and returns to New York, where he launches a small firm with Peggy.

52. Peggy? Still rocking those fuck-off shades when she's inducted into the AAF Hall of Fame for being the first female creative director.


53. After fixing the Coca-Cola machine in Oklahoma, Don fixes Peggy's stalled Coca-Cola campaign by giving her the idea for "Give the World a Coke." Then he walks into the ocean.

54. Or Don drunkenly suggests that Coke actually buys everyone in the world a Coke. He is laughed out of the room, but the slogan sticks.

55. OR Don creates the recipe for New Coke, puts it in a bottle, buries that bottle, then digs it up 1 hour later and shreds it to pieces. "No one will ever buy that."

56. Fine, Don stumbles on a premature scientific study that Coke may cause diabetes.

57. While sitting at a truck stop, Don scribbles "You Only Live Once" on a paper napkin, making the first letter of each word extra bold and capitalized.

58. The last 20 minutes runs all the way up to present day. Don dies in the early 90s but the show ends with Y2K.

59. Peggy inspires a decline in quality of American products by bringing drug store brand pantyhose to department stores. The last shots are an abstract sequence of factories, store windows, and trash.

60. Don goes back to the whorehouse where he was raised, which is still a whorehouse. He sleeps with a prostitute who is possibly the daughter of the prostitute who took his virginity. He has come full circle. In several senses of the phrase.

61. In a fit of drunken jealousy Don kills Megan and dumps the body in the Pacific Ocean. The cops suspect it was the work of a Manson Family member. Don takes the kids and moves to Florence, Italy, where he marries a brunette who, luckily, doesn't mind his cheating and doesn't speak English. He hallucinates Megan's face everywhere he goes.

62. Peggy proposes to Don.

63. Glen is Don's son.

64. Roger is Glen's father.

65. Peggy is Don‽

66. At Betty's funeral, Henry Francis pulls Don aside. "There's someone who wants to meet you," he says. Don follows him to a limo in silence. They drive to the airport and then fly to California. Henry takes him to Governor's mansion. The man who greets him at the door is Ronald Reagan. Reagan and Don shake hands and smile. They understand each other perfectly.

67. Don floats away in a hot air balloon.

68. Mad Men ends like DeLillo's Mao II, where a reclusive author is hit by a car in a strange land and, without money or ID, dies anonymously, and gets the complete disappearance he has always craved.


69. Don flips through a Kodak slideshow, reciting his carousel speech like he's Howard Hughes.

70. Joan tells a young boy to stop staring at her chest.

71. Don gets hit by a plane while hang-gliding.

72. Megan has joined The Source family. Don joins her and leads the revolution in organic restaurants from within the cult.

73. Don starts a new life as a long haul driver. The Grateful Dead's "Truckin'" blasts as Don speeds down the highway, throwing his tie out the window. He then pulls over and gets out to pick it up. It flew off. He loves that tie.

74. Don changes his name to Nolan Bushnell, creates Atari and Chuck E. Cheese..

75. Roger coins the term "cis-gendered."

76. Don's hair has grown long. He's wearing a denim jacket and plaid shirt. He walks into Jann Wenner's San Francisco office and applies for a job at Rolling Stone.

77. The final episode depicts 45 years in McCann-Erickson history. Whatever happened to Don Draper? No one cares, apparently.

78. Don travels to Devil's Tower in Wyoming where he hitches a ride with 3-foot alien children, his true people.

79. To everyone's surprise, Low Winter Sun starts to play on their television.

80. Making his way back to New York, Don makes a pit stop at a Native American reserve. He hits serious peyote and experiences a fever dream that involves every woman to which he has ever made love.

81. Peggy shaves her head bald. No reason is given.

82. Glen sees Don hitchhiking. He does not stop to pick him up.

83. Don discovers a love-letter that Peggy wrote to him during Season 1.


84. Distraught over the Beatles' break-up, Don travels to the UK and convinces Ringo to move to Los Angeles. Together, they jump start the drummer's budding solo career. Spin-off: Don and Ringo Do America.

85. Don puts on lipstick and a wig and lets go a deep sigh of relief.

86. Don takes acid and films a primitive "vlog."

87. Don sits down to write the world's first think piece.

88. A neon light flickers on, proving that, all along, the show as intended to be called "Mad Women."

89. Don, driving drunk, is hit by another drunk driver.

90. Weiner dedicates the final hour to a Diana standalone, exploring her journey from Midwestern housewife to New York waitress. Because, screw you.

91. Don falls off a carousel; wakes up from a dream in which he's making the carousel pitch.

92. Mad Men's perspective switches from Don to his son Eugene. We see the 7-year-old grow into a television showrunner who decides to turn his father's life into a thinly-veiled drama on a struggling cable network.

93. Don goes on a killing spree. But it's all a dream. He's old, alone. He has this dream every night.

94. Peggy runs for political office.

95. Don moves to a new city, finds a new job, and sits at a new desk. Time-lapse photography depicts him aging into an old man. America, in unison, shouts BORRRINGGGG (this is not the audience reaction—it's an actual sound effect in the show).

96. Don meets Frank Sinatra. They don't like each other.

97. Bearded and horribly scarred, the real Don Draper takes on Dick "Don Draper" Whitman in a mano a mano fight to the death.

98. Everyone pops a quaalude and dances through the credits.

99. A series of "What If?" endings play out Clue-style. "...but here's what really happened." In the final timeline, Don never wrote the anti-cigarette tirade.

100. Another day, another year, another final dolly shot gradually pulling away from Don.

Predictions by John Hendrickson, Matt Patches, Tom Junod, Stephen Marche, Dave Holmes, Anna Peele, Jessie Kissinger, Nate Hopper, Jill Krasny, Mike Sager, and John Sellers.

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