LOS ANGELES – Premiering April 5th on AMC, the normally secretive hit television show Mad Men has angered some critics and fans with leaked news that its final seven episodes will be set in the year 2061.
“Usually we’ve moved forward one or two years through the 1960’s,” said AMC spokesperson Carol Broadbent. “But now that the cat’s out of the bag, to hell with it – we’re going to the future!”
According to a leaked screener copy of the forthcoming season premiere, Mad Men will jump nearly a century into the future, chronicling the trials and tribulations of the advertisers at the firm of Sterling Cooper Draper Fujikawa Jianying MoonPerson XBot3000.
“A lot has changed for Don when we catch up to him in the mid-twenty-first century,” explained television critic Will Perkins, of the site Dork Shelf. “For example, he has once again adopted another man’s identity, made easier by his largely cyborg body which can fool the omnipresent biometric scanners of Post New York.”
Perkins continued, “Another small change that eagle-eyed viewers might notice is that Peggy Olsen, Roger Sterling, Pete Campbell, Joan, Betty, Megan, and Harry are all dead – most succumbing to old age, or in the Nanotech Uprising of 2030.”
However, several critics have been quick to praise the addition of a new protege for Don – Flurgulon (played by Kristen Connolly, House of Cards), an up-and-coming copywriter who yearns to break through the glass ceiling that mutants face in the world of advertising.
The season premiere follows Don and Flurgulon, as they lock horns with new client Verizon-Carl’s Jr.-Cryofreeze. Don must brainstorm a new marketing campaign to be forcibly injected into consumers, while casually indulging in his usual office diet of Whiskey+ and methamphetamines. Meanwhile, Don secretly worries that he is out of touch with the younger hipsters, androids, and anthropomorphic lizards that now inhabit the advertising world. Finally, Don will squander yet another opportunity to connect with his 107-year-old daughter, Sally Draper-MoonPerson.
While some early critics have hailed the unusually long time jump as “bold” and “certainly unexpected”, others have registered concern. “I mean, I’m curious how trading Mad Men’s 1960’s aesthetic for morpho-genetic splicing and temporal chronomancy is a logical move,” questioned Hitfix’s Alan Sepinwall. “But maybe Weiner is trying to demonstrate how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe this is all one big comment on how America will always be Don Draper, and vice versa.”
Sepinwall continued, “Or maybe Weiner has just been an insane 2001: A Space Odyssey fan this entire time, and we all missed it. But that’s impossible.”
Sepinwall added, “Right?”
As for Mad Men fans, most continue to hope the final episodes will finally reveal whatever happened to Salvatore.
