Hasta La Creative!

It begins in an emergency. An urgent point-of-view shot shows an unfamiliar face performing CPR on an unknown patient acting as our eyes. We hear the thumping chest compressions and the screams of a familiar voice.

Have the smokes, the Old Fashioneds and the soul-hardening stress of a life spent lying finally caught up with Don Draper? Don’s death has been foreshadowed any number of times, but this seems far too soon to remove the hard-living anti-hero at the center of “Mad Men.” There are two seasons to go.

The abrupt change in setting to Hawaii should be a clear indication that Don is still very much in this world, but the gorgeous, languorous 10-minute sequence that opens the show’s sixth season is still too dreamy to ground anything. Don’s beach read is Dante’s “Inferno,” but maybe that’s the wrong flavor of afterlife. Perhaps it’s “Paradiso” we are in. Contributing to the unreal feel is Don’s silence as a rather pleasurable business trip plays out around him. Neither pot, nor poi, nor poking pulls any words from Don’s lips. It is only a late-night encounter with a drunk, pre-nuptial serviceman, whose idea of bar chat is musing on what a 50-caliber machine gun can do to a water buffalo, that fully brings us into the reality of December 1967.

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