Mad Men's Creator Decided On A Major Character Death Three Seasons In Advance

This post contains spoilers for "Mad Men" season 7.

There is no shortage of tragedy on "Mad Men," a show that's fundamentally about unhappy people trying to fulfill social roles that don't quite fit them. But perhaps most tragic of all is the eleventh hour reveal that Betty (January Jones) has terminal lung cancer. 

The reveal makes sense, given the sheer amount of cigarettes Betty smokes over the course of the show, but it still stings. Not only is Betty still in her 30s when she's diagnosed, but she'd recently started to find herself. Indeed, she receives her fatal cancer diagnosis in the midst of returning to school to pursue a career in psychology. After spending the rest of the series struggling to see herself as more than a wife or a mother, Betty starts simply living her life on her own terms. She had a potentially inspiring, transformative journey ahead of her, but fate cut it short.

Showrunner Matthew Weiner had always somewhat intended for Betty to die by the time "Mad Men" drew to a close, but it was only after season 4 (which featured a long gap between seasons where the cast's contracts had to be renewed by AMC) that he fully committed to the idea. As he put while discussing the series as a whole with author A.M. Homes in 2015 (via Entertainment Weekly):

"[Betty's] mother had just died in the pilot, and I felt that this woman wasn't going to live long. We loved the idea of her realizing her purpose in life right when she ran out of time. [...] I think there's a lesson to be learned about the randomness of things, and also, she obviously had some predispositions and some fairly seriously cancer-causing behavior."

Part of what makes Betty's death so devastating is its juxtaposition with the way the show ends for Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), a woman who's about the same age. In her mid-30s, Joan decides to fully embrace her career, and she thrives as a result; by the series finale, she's a millionaire starting her own business, and there's little doubt it'll be successful. Joan ends up in a place that's drastically different from where she, the audience, or even Weiner himself thought she'd be a decade earlier. It's a riveting, inspiring journey. 

Unfortunately, it makes sense that "Mad Men" would deny such a journey to Betty. The choice served as tribute to the many women of Betty and Joan's generation who did not get a chance to thrive outside the household and were never allowed to realize their full potential. As inspiring as Joan's success is, and as much as it represents the changing gender norms of the '60s, Betty's arc reminded us that women like Joan were still outliers of their time. 

The other element of tragedy to Betty is that her death, a clear result of her smoking throughout her life, feels like a kind of cosmic punishment for her ex-husband, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), having worked on so many cigarette ads. Fans have long noted that three of the most important women in Don's life — Anna (Melinda Page Hamilton), Rachel (Maggie Siff), and Betty — die of cancer, the thing cigarettes are infamous for causing. It's a running theme that the show's male characters get away with more bad behavior than the female characters; the fact that it's mostly the women punished for smoking (instead of Don and his two packs a day) seems like a natural extension of that. 

As sad as it may be for Betty's life to be cut short, she still grows quite a bit over the course of "Mad Men." Throughout the series' first three seasons, she becomes clear-eyed about her relationship with Don before finally ending it on her own terms in season 3. And though it almost seems like the show is punishing Betty for leaving Don during the next two seasons (seasons 4 and 5 feature Betty at her most openly miserable), by season 6, it's clear she made the right choice. Her new husband, Henry (Christopher Stanley), isn't perfect but he clearly values her beyond her looks, and by season 7, even her daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) has grown disillusioned with Don and come to understand Betty better.

Perhaps Betty's shining moment is her reaction to her bad medical news. Instead of spending her final months desperately suffering through painful medical procedures that likely won't work, she chooses to continue her education even though she knows a career is no longer in the cards. She's found something she loves — learning for its own sake — and she'll be sticking to it to the bitter end.

Those closing moments of the show's penultimate episode, where we see Betty downplaying her exhaustion as she walks up the staircase to her college class, are devastating but admirable. Betty's life may be ending faster than she wanted, but she's chosen to go out with dignity. For one of the few times in the series, Betty knows exactly how she wants to handle a situation by the time "Mad Men" draws to a close, and she's not letting any of the men in her life undermine her choice.