I’ve now finished all four seasons! SPOILERS AHOY

* The back half of Season Four began with two of the series’ very best episodes. First there was the surprisingly innovative decision just to take the series’ two lead characters and have them talk to each other for an episode. Duck’s arrival added some emotional and physical pyrotechnics to the proceedings, but for the most part it was simply a pleasure to watch Don and Peggy hash out the depth of their relationship to one another, first angrily, then drunkenly, then with the genuine hand-holding tenderness that reduces me to a misty-eyed marshmallow anytime the show goes there. This episode was, in its way, the payoff for Peggy’s newfound openness with Don at the beginning of the season. And as much as a part of her resents it — not because she wants it any different, but because, well, would the possibility really have been that difficult to entertain — it’s also nice for Peggy to offer proof that Don can have a platonic, loving friendship with a woman other than the one whose husband’s life he stole. Seeing that glimmer of a good man when Peggy’s around is sort of like the audience reaping a reward Peggy earned through years of hard emotional, creative, and intellectual work. It connects us to her.

* Next up was an episode with the evocative title of “The Summer Man,” which wasn’t just one of the series’ best episodes but also one of its most…experimental? Tactile? Sensuous? I’m not sure I could sit here and tell you what really happened in it, necessarily; the more important thing was the parade of sensations it presented us with. Don’s new hobby of swimming, the sound and vision of his body swimming through the cool and pristine water of the pool, was contrasted with the slow-motion muted-sound shots of booze being poured into an endless succession of glasses as Don realizes he needs to dry out, at least in part. Don began keeping a journal, so you had his mellifluous baritone actually narrating the episode — a first — providing not just a rich and pleasant sound, but a series of ruthless insights into his life and the lives of those around him. “I bet she was thinking of that line all night,” he writes of his date’s farewell after she blows him in the back of a taxicab. Brutal. But hey, let’s talk about that blowjob, too, another example of the show understanding how crucial and sexy the initial stages of a hook-up are: Bethany smiling at Don as she unzips him, him smiling back as he realizes what’s up. Let’s talk about the summeriness of it all, too, particularly the shot of Don exiting the athletic club and watching young women and couples (to coin a phrase) go by dressed in their summer clothes. And let’s talk about the show soundtracking Don in all his glory with the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” which made me think of nothing so much as the writers having a eureka moment: “Holy shit—we can show Don walking around to ‘Satisfaction’!!!” Indeed they can! What an episode. I’m almost afraid to google for reviews.

* Just before we got to that episode and discovered what I like to call Conscious Don, I got to thinking about the challenge it must have presented to Jon Hamm and John Slattery in particular to play characters who are in a state of perpetual inebriation. After a while you no longer notice it, but when they go into someone’s office, and I mean pretty much every time they go into someone’s office, they drink. When they get home they drink. When a meeting ends they drink. Certainly when they go out to dinner they drink. Might the actors forget about this too, or do Hamm and Slattery always remember to play Don and Roger as self-possessed guys covering up a slight buzz?

* If I recall correctly there was another strong pair of episodes in there, basically a girl episode and a guy episode back to back. In the first, Peggy’s would-be boyfriend gives her guff about her gig, Joan has sex with Roger after they get mugged, Sally runs away from home and Betty comes to claim her, Faye whiffs on trying to soothe Sally, and Miss Blankenship dies. In the second, Don is nearly found out by the Defense Department, Pete has to take the bullet for Don by canceling the agency’s aviation gig, Lane confronts his father, and Roger learns both that Joan is pregnant and that Lucky Strike is leaving. I’m not sure that either of them stands out as cohesive units, but as a demonstration of how many balls the show can keep in the air within a short stretch of time, they’re tough to top.

* While the sequence with Lane’s stiff-upper-lip father and his Playboy Bunny girlfriend rang as false — okay, not false, but at the very least broad — as anything on the show since Peggy and Rizzo’s nude brainstorming session, the portrait it painted of Lane as an overgrown boy was one I really appreciated. I had already found myself returning repeatedly to the way he chose to explain to his wife what he liked about living in New York: “I’ve been here eight months and no one has asked me what school I went to.” That line’s obviously loaded with centuries of English class bias, but it also speaks to how fundamental his time as a schoolboy is to Lane’s conception of himself. And from the dutiful employee of PPO who resigned himself to transferring to Bombay in under 90 seconds, to the rebellious son who couldn’t wait for his father to disapprove of his new relationship, you see it repeatedly.

* “It’s like drinking a hundred bottles of whiskey while someone licks your tits.” Man, Midge sure makes heroin sound more appealing than Lou Reed did, and I don’t even have tits! Ah well. It was nice to see the first of Don Draper’s Great Brunettes of the 1960s reappear, if only for a sordid attempt to extract cash that was skeevy enough to make my arms itch. As I write this paragraph I realize that it was actually a rather well-played scene given how shopworn the fallen-idealist junkie thing could be. The contrast between her and her husband’s jocularity and their obvious desperation was an engaging detail from writers and actors alike.

* Speaking of pale brunettes, big Megan fan here, obviously. But that aside, I appreciate how the show slowly seeded her in, first with a standout role in Faye’s focus group about Pond’s cold cream, then by making her a tourist attraction for Peggy’s bohemian friends at the front desk, they by having her step in for the late Miss Blankenship, then by making her the control group for Faye’s failure to connect with Sally, then with a seemingly random shot of Don staring at her at the end of the day as she touches up her makeup to go out. You can certainly detect Matthew Weiner’s background with The Sopranos there — the best show ever at organically building up bit parts into major players. (Cf. Jaime Hernandez in Love and Rockets too.) And yeah, my initial reaction to their initial hookup was “Oh no!!!!”, a reaction that received some confirmation when Faye shows up at Don’s apartment later that night revealing that no, she had not in fact dumped him after all. But that wasn’t on Megan, who really legitimately seemed to be okay with things never going any further than that, even if it would be nice if they did. And I really really loved that they had her directly address her big teeth. She’s endearing and attractive and intriguing, with enough of a hint of potential “sees an opportunity and takes it” no-bullshit-ness that if she sticks around at the agency next season, she could make for a multidimensional foil for both Don and Peggy. And Joan! And Jane! So yes, thumbs up for Megan.

* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing warms the cockles of my heart like grown men cooperating and treating each other with kindness, especially when they have all sorts of incentives not to but do it anyway. So when Pete went out of his way to take the blame for North American Aviation dropping out, and when Don secretly paid for Pete’s share of the agency’s collateral with the bank, I all but audibly said “Awww.” When Don told Pete he could run the agency if Don had to skip out? My heart’s swelling even now. I think it’s not just that I value cooperation and kindness so much — it’s that the two of them started on such bad terms. They hated each other! So to see Don trust Pete like that, and Pete sacrifice for Don like that…I don’t know, it’s almost like it gives me hope for the world. People can change. And that’s a place where Mad Men differs from The Sopranos in a big way.

* The season’s final arc took the Season Three finale’s pulse-pounding heist storyline and stretched it out into a slow-motion trainwreck. Instead of a race against time, it was an attempt to arrest the agency’s downward momentum before they crashed into the bottom. It was a series of “oh-no”s. Oh no, the Defense Department! Oh no, Don’s sleeping with another co-worker! Oh no, Faye didn’t dump him after all! Oh no, the Lucky Strike asshole is about to tell Roger they’re leaving! Oh no, they’re going to lose two huge accounts at once! Oh no, Glo-coat’s dumping them too! Oh no, Betty’s gonna catch Sally with Glenn! Oh no, Betty’s gonna catch Sally with Glenn again! How many times can the bottom drop out of your stomach, you start to wonder. This has the effect of creating a genuine sense of dread where perhaps none need exist, too. I spent several episodes convinced that at any moment, Betty would truly beat Sally, or that one of the kids was gonna drown in that pool out in California, or that Faye was going to out Don in retaliation, or that Lee Garner Jr. was going to coerce sexual favors out of Roger, or or or or…It was grueling. Fitting, then, that rather than the spectacular saves that capped off the first three seasons, this ordeal was ended with Peggy and Ken securing a small account — a relatively minor turnaround for a comparatively spectacular downward spiral.

* If you take the two previous items and combine them, you have some sense of why I’m also so happy that Don and Betty’s final scene of the season worked out the way it did. I wasn’t sure what I was more afraid of, that Betty would snap in some profound and even dangerous way, or that Don would try to sleep with her again. Instead they shared a drink after Don procured both a bottle and a genuine laugh from Betty, and Betty reacted to the news of Don’s engagement with a congratulations that, while not happy, at least didn’t sound like she was lying through her teeth. This season Betty emerged as one of the show’s most fascinating characters, taking her shady Season One shrink’s diagnosis that she has the emotional life of a child and running as hard and as fast with it as she could. Consumed with the same kind of rage that troubles her daughter, insisting on seeing a child psychiatrist, driven into paroxysms of life-altering jealousy when Sally befriends the kid she herself once inappropriately confided in, and overall refusing to take yes for an answer from anyone. Not to repeat myself again, but January Jones is absolutely perfect in this role, a Hitchcock blonde playing Jimmy Stewart’s Vertigo role. My hope for Betty is that now that Don’s moved on, she can find a way to do so too.

* So there you have it: Mad Men! I’ll take your recommendations for things to read/watch/listen to about it in the comments, if you’d be so kind…

Today I finished Season Four, Disc Two. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* Heh, every time I start one of these posts there’s a moment of trepidation. There’s always so much to talk about!

* So, the supporting-cast bloodbath I worried about last time around wasn’t quite as bad as I feared. Ken Cosgrove appears to be returning, which actually solves a bit of a mystery for me — though I don’t know who played who, I did figure out that three of the names in the opening credits track to Ken, Paul, and Harry, and for those first few episodes I couldn’t figure out why two of those three actors were still listed even though Harry was the only character at the agency. I must say that he appears to have weathered his abandonment by Roger, Bert, Lane, Don, Peggy, Joan, and Pete a lot better than I would have. This goes double since he had recently been promoted over Pete when the exodus went down, so he had to have taken his exclusion as a commentary on his character or loyalty rather than a matter of dollars and cents. I’ll be interested to see if his ability to take a bite out of the shit sandwich Pete made a point of serving him upon his return to the fold means he can actually swallow the whole thing.

* Also returning, if only for a while: Allison the secretary. Her ill-fated dalliance with Don was an instructive storyline for two reasons. First, holy moses was it sexy. Their breathy, clothes-on quickie was all about desire and arousal in the moment, the simple physical acts necessary for the act of fucking, and the smiling newfound intimacy of two acquaintances after the fact, that sense of a shared knowledge, of pleasure experienced together. I’m really having a hard time thinking of a show that’s been this thoughtful and thorough in exploring what makes sex sexy.

* Second, it was our clearest demonstration to date of the negative potential of Draper Unbound. It’s not that Don’s cruel, per se. I mean, he can be — the way he mocked poor alcoholic Duck Phillips and that simultaneously hapless and overbearing cousin who interviewed for the copywriting gig in the award-show episode is proof enough of that. But he’s not a sociopath. When his bad behavior is brought to his attention, his remorse is real. The point is that it has to be brought to his attention. He’s clueless on his own! So in a moment of drunken lust he has sex with his secretary. Then, because he is aware on a conceptual level that that is a thing that can cause problems and is probably a Bad Idea, he cuts off any kind of collegial relationship with her whatsoever. But he never makes an effort to think ahead of the problem, to try to ease her out of the idea of a potential ongoing relationship with him, to make her feel comfortable working for him again (let alone to not have sex with her in the first place). Even when her misery becomes too obvious to ignore, he still whiffs on obvious partial solutions like personally writing her a very nice letter of recommendation. Problems pretty much literally need to be thrown in his face for him to really understand that they’re problems at all, and that he’s responsible for them.

* So he’s stumbling from one crisis to the next now: He makes dates for when it’s his turn to have the kids, and thus Sally is left alone by the babysitter for enough time to chop off her own hair. He gets drunk off booze and his own reputation, and thus unwittingly plagiarizes some doofus’s crap copy while showing off for a client. He gets deep enough into his own drinking habit to have a full-fledged lost weekend, miss out on a scheduled visit with the kids, infuriate his increasingly unhinged ex, presumably embarrass himself in front of the award-winning advertising person he slept with earlier in the weekend, and unwittingly reveal his real name to some random waitress he took home. Draper Unbound is more like Draper Unmoored.

* Related: It takes a village to raise Don Draper. In the season premiere, I was struck by the directness with which Peggy Olson told Don that everyone at the agency just wants to please him. Besides being the outright articulation of three seasons’ worth of subtext, it also served a plot purpose in that it spoke to the more intimate, casual, and free-wheeling nature of the new agency, an agency where Don’s improvisatory genius is built right into the DNA, both in its name and partnership structure and in the fact that it was his fast thinking that made its creation possible in the first place.

But this admirable openness about the staff’s desire to live up to Don’s reputation and expectations cuts both ways. Peggy, Pete, Allison, and Joan especially are willing to work extra hard to protect Don from himself, but this can have the effect of enabling him. With their safety net in place, he has yet to learn how badly a hard fall can hurt. I’ve got a feeling we’re headed in that direction, though. Allison’s defenestration was the first taste of that, and the Clio Award weekend the second. The last thing I saw at the end of Disc Two was Roger staring resentfully at Don as he traipsed down the hall, award in hand, then flashing back to the day Don first showed up for work after Roger (maaayyyybeeee) hired him during a liquid breakfast paid for by Don himself. If that’s any indication of what’s to come, those two brushes with disaster won’t be the last. Compare and contrast with Season One, where as I’ve noted before, Don’s work life was pretty much peachy. You’ve come a long way, baby.

* The show is going about the business of showing us Don’s vulnerable underbelly in some fairly non-obvious ways. Frankly I don’t even know if this is intentional, but I never find Don more pathetic than when he flashes that heavy-lidded half-smile at some woman when he’s on the make. In those moments, where he really opens up the charm firehose and drunkenly leans in to try and plant one on the girl Roger and Jane set him up with, or Anna’s collegiate niece, or Allison, or whoever he’s targeting, he’s revealed to be not some godlike avatar of success and confidence, but just some horny dude trying to seal the deal. It’s like seeing his hair messed up, only far more intimate.

* The show also makes its point about Don’s tumultuous life by juxtaposing his competence and incompetence in its most direct fashion yet. The buildup to the Clio Award doesn’t just feature all of the major characters explicitly expressing their anxiety and excitement, it includes the series’ single most endearing and adorable image yet: Don, Joan, and Roger sitting at the show, secretly holding hands under the table. You love these characters in that moment, because they love each other — they worked really hard on something, they want other people to like it, and they’re afraid that people won’t, and they’re clinging to each other in the face of all this. And then they win! Woo! Don is now the acknowledged master of his domain! …and then he breezes into this meeting with the Life cereal people, looking disheveled and stifling belches, comes within inches of destroying the whole relationship, embarrasses his coworkers, and only pulls the rabbit out of the hat with the help of unconscious plagiarism. From elation to “eeeeesh” in the space of two scenes. Brilliantly done.

* While we’re on the subject of excruciatingly awkward meetings, how ’bout a hand for Roger Sterling and his anticipatory reenactment of the “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers with the Honda reps? When he walked into that conference room and said he hadn’t been told about the meeting, “but then again I know how some people like surprises,” I nearly lost my shit. But beneath the black comedy, may I suggest that the show is suggesting that war can deeply screw up even a happy wanderer like Bonnie Prince Sterling?

* Let us return for a moment to the Mad Men Sexiness Highlight Reel: If it’s possible to have a full-on Tex Avery bugout over a line of dialogue, then that’s what happened to me in the flashback where Roger gives Joan a mink stole at the beginning of their hotel-room date, and she responds by telling him that every time she wears it, “I’ll think of everything that happened the night I got it.” AROOOOGAH! AROOOOGAH! There’s more delight packed into that one-line promise than in a lifetime of Christmas mornings.

* Also super-duper sexy, but problematic for that very reason? Peggy Olson’s nude-off with the obnoxious new art director. Now, I’ll admit that that kind of casual yet still very highly charged nudity is where my bread is buttered. (Boola, boola!) So it’s entirely possible that there exist dudes who would be more discomfited than aroused by that kind of situation — or if Rizzo’s eventual surrender and retreat behind the closed door of the hotel bathroom with the shower running is any indication, both discomfited and aroused, at any rate. But something about the scene didn’t ring true to me even when correcting for my own fetishes, because…well, let me put it this way. When a woman resolves to triumph in a particular battle of the sexes by taking her clothes off, that’s what we in the penis-having industry call a win-win situation. I get that Peggy’s spontaneous, confrontational nudism was a way to shut this asshole up, to make him realize that he’s not the free-thinker he imagines himself to be, and thus to gain the upper hand in their work relationship. And perhaps back then a woman taking charge of her sexuality outside the framework established by men — a woman who can “stare back,” to use Peggy’s phrase about the Playboy models Rizzo spent the evening ogling — really was the shock to the system Rizzo took it as. Certainly that’s implicit from the contrast with Hef’s fantasy factory. But for the modern viewer, and presumably for the modern writers and filmmakers too, it’s Peggy Olson-slash-Elisabeth Moss taking her clothes off on camera, and having a jolly good time doing it, too (which is admittedly very important). And as a guy, the last thing that made me was uncomfortable.

* That said, it’s been fun watching the writers and directors make the most of Peggy’s ever-growing comfort in being demonstratively herself, even if it happens where no one else can see. Between her headdesk moment when she finds out that Trudy Campbell is pregnant, and her Glenn Quagmire creeper routine when she peers over the divider to spy on Don after Allison’s blow-up, she’s an animated-gif machine. Switch on the subtitles and you can add her bit about how her boyfriend may not own her vagina, but he is renting it. And of course there’s her ability to speak truth to Draper, both positive (everyone’s there to please him) and negative (he’s got to fix his own mistake with the Life cereal situation). She’s a hoot.

* But perhaps the most revelatory character work so far this season — ironically, given her relative lack of screentime — is with Betty Draper. The big discovery here is that her problems don’t all stem from a combination of her victimization by Don and the limits placed on women by her time and place, or by her time and place as personified by her parents, i.e. a general culture-created patheticness. No, many of Betty’s problems stem from Betty herself. This person has an entitlement streak as wide as it is mean. What’s happening now is that she’s gotten everything she wanted. Now that she’s divorced, she can no longer fall back on blaming society for not allowing her to pursue what she wants in defiance of tradition. Now that she’s free from Don, she can no longer pin her problems on his philandering, secret-keeping, and emotional unavailability. Now she has the house, the money, and a doting husband — who genuinely seems like a decent dude, even! Henry repeatedly makes statements against his own interest, telling Betty that as much as she and he might hate him, Don is often right about things like the house and the kids. He talks her down off various ledges rather than reacting with Don-style rage that she’s unhappy to begin with. He seems to keep a protective eye out for the kids, especially Sally, recognizing the danger the mother-daughter relationship is in. And he seems crazy about Betty, both emotionally and physically. And guess what? The tiniest crack in the surface of this world still sends Betty into paroxysms of rage. That’s not on Don, or her dad, or her mom, or her brother, or Sally, or Henry, or society — it’s on her. And hey, good for the show for handling it this way. Making all of Betty’s problems the fault of men, or of Men, would infantilize her just as surely as those men/Men have done. (And they have, to be sure. But yeah, there’s more to it than that.)

* Finally, I just have one thing to say about Sally’s storyline: WHOA. Uh, I did not expect to see a ten-year-old girl masturbating as a major plot point on an American TV drama! Of course it was handled with the show’s charateristic intelligence, the balance between restraint and directness, the multifaceted commentary on individual characters and the characters who shaped them and the society that shaped all of them. But probably more importantly, and maybe more impressively, was that it was handled at all.

I wanted to bring up a few things I forgot to mention in my Season Three wrap-up, and to talk about the first episode of Season Four. SPOILER WARNING

* Lane: When I first started writing about Season Three, I quickly noticed how many people seemed so excited by my mentions of Lane Pryce that it was like he was an old friend who came back to town. Though he seemed like a nice guy as a character, a decent man forced into a semi-indecent job and punished with abuse for his reliability, I wasn’t quite sure what the fuss was about. Until the Season Three finale. A “Well, gentlemen, I suppose you’re fired” here, a “Very good, Happy Christmas!” there, and suddenly his decency was complemented by that most delicious of traits: vengeance! The good guy won that one, and I’d imagine won many viewers hearts as well.

* I also suspect that the show modeled that behavior by welcoming Lane into the Bert/Roger/Don fold in that episode. If they can put his name on the wall, so can we, right?

* Sal: Well, I guess we’ve learned the limits of Don’s tolerance. With a simple “you people” directed at poor blameless Sal, he revealed that while he would in no way ruin a guy for behavior that didn’t impact on him, he’d cut the guy loose in a heartbeat the moment he did. Outing or ostracizing Sal would be an unforgivable breach of decorum for Don, but in his view, so too is Sal allowing (“allowing”) what he is to affect Don in any way. Don’s tolerant of anyone, to a point. After that, he’s pitiless.

* Sal’s departure from the show was one of the very few spoilers I’d stumbled across going into the series, couched in glimpsed headlines about Bryan Batt’s unhappiness with this, I believe. Seeing him in a cruising spot payphone telling his wife he loves her as our last glimpse of him was an appropriately heartbreaking goodbye for a character who was just a blast every time he was on screen. (Please don’t tell me if he comes back or not.)

* Speaking of departures, uhhhh, is Season Four the wholesale cast-change bloodbath it seems to be? Ken, Paul, Mr. Hooker, Kurt, Smitty, Allison, Lois the Lawnmower Woman, and all the other bit players at Sterling Cooper have been wished into the cornfield now? That’s harsh, man, and knowing what I know about AMC I have to wonder (and I mean have to wonder — I ain’t googling shit until the credits role on the Season Four finale) if costcutting was involved.

* My squeamishness about that aside, this was a fine start to things. The hilariously over-the-top swingin’ music cue when we first entered the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office was just the first sign that this is a faster, looser, more informal operation; see also the fishbowl conference rooms and offices, the lack of a table, Peggy and the new artist’s non-stop in-joking, the presence of guys like Pete and Harry among the bigwigs, and on and on.

* Another break from the past: The show’s most explicit sex scene yet, with a dollop of sadomasochism on top. Based on everything we know about powerful men’s predilections, this fetish makes a lot of sense for Don, but it’s still a place I didn’t think the show would ever go.

* In this episode we had yet another case of the show teaching both us and the characters what’s wrong and how to fix it all at the same time. After a taciturn Don gives an interview to the Ad Age guy that’s quickly used against him, it’s easy to interpret his blow-up at the bathing-suit company reps who don’t want a sexy ad as typical Don Draper petulance. That’s clearly how Pete and Roger see it, it’s how Peggy would see it based on her earlier confrontations with Don over the ham-fight PR stunt, it’s how we’ve been primed to see it, and it may even be how Don sees it…at first. But when he turns around, goes back into the conference room he just stormed out of, and orders them to leave, there’s suddenly a method to the madness. If business is hurting because Don is too aloof, because the gap between his outsized success and his cipher of a personality is too huge, then by god he’s going to narrow it by becoming the swaggering champion everyone already expects him to be. And click! Like that, a series of character and narrative developments stretching back to his early, tense relationships with Pete and Peggy, his unease around Roger, his failure with Conrad Hilton, the formation of the new agency, and the Ad Age debacle all snap into place, leading to this moment: Draper Unbound.

* Now, I can’t imagine this ending well for anyone, of course…or at least I couldn’t if Don’s work situation ever ended badly for him. But so far it hasn’t. At the end of Season One, he unexpectedly triumphed over Pete by calling his bluff. At the end of Season Two, he unexpectedly triumphed over Duck by calling his bluff. At the end of Season Three, he unexpectedly triumphed over PPL by calling their bluff. Maybe Superdon will crash and burn, but if the show really gets serious about it, if it has him truly damage or ruin his career, I’d actually be quite surprised. That’s just not a place they’ve been interested in going so far. (Again, please, no hints, no “keep watching”s!)

* One last carryover from Season Three: Pete and Peggy are getting along great, apparently, answering my question about how the revelation of their child together would affect things. Seems like they’re both perfectly happy to act like it never happened. Which, you know, is really fine. I’m sure the kid is much better off with Peggy’s sister than he’d be in a shotgun-wedding family consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Pete and Peggy Campbell, or with a resentful Peggy on her own. They managed to be civilized about it.

Just finished Season Three. SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS

* The Season Three finale was Mad Men‘s ultimate competence-fantasy moment, and kudos to T.J. Dietsch to tipping me off as to how and why: It’s a heist movie. Heist movies are always a competence fantasy, a narrative centered on pulling off a difficult job with efficiency and style, against authority, with a huge payoff. But in this episode, Mad Men goes even further. The usual beats are there: the “one last heist” set-up for guys like Bert and Roger; assembling the right team based on their specialties; watching the plan click into place as obstacles are overcome by equal parts hard work, moments inspiration (“Fire us”), and physical force; the efforts to conceal the planning, juxtaposed with the flamboyance of the successful execution’s aftermath. But the stuff that gets stolen by the men and women of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is incidental, of course. This heist’s target is talent. The best creative director, the best account men, the best copy writer, the best administrator, the best office manager. They use all their skills in order to be able to use all their skills. It’s a competence fantasy in which the item being stolen through their competence is their competence. It’s brilliant.

* But there’s another reason why it successfully hits my buttons. I’ve said before that my favorite thing to see depicted in fiction is competence, cooperation, and decency — in tandem. And that’s what this is. In order to pull this off, Don and Roger had to forgive one another and recognize one another’s indispensable talents. Don and Betty had to cease their incipient warfare. Don had to apologize to Peggy for mistreating her. Peggy had to come to terms with her gratitude to Don. Roger had to give Joan the respect she always wanted. Don and Roger had to assure Pete that he was valued as a worker and a person. Pete and Trudy had to come together on behalf of their shared future. (And based on the return of the Clearasil account, it sounds like they had to make amends with Trudy’s dad, too.) Bert had to acknowledge Harry’s vision and encourage him not to let it go to waste. Harry had to act like a man of vision in turn. Lane had to free himself from the abusive culture of PPL that had hamstrung him and his family for years. Don, Roger, and Bert had to acknowledge Lane’s talent, and his basic decency despite having been hired to be an overseer and hatchet man. Lane had to admit how much he admired the partners and enjoyed working with them despite their conflicts. In short, everyone had to be genuinely kind to and appreciative of everyone else. If you can think of a better feel-good moment in recent television memory than Don coming out of the bedroom in the new agency’s makeshift “office” to discover Bert, Roger, Lane, Peggy, Pete, Trudy, Joan, and Harry happily working, eating, and talking, I want you to program my DVR.

* But every rose has its thorn, and you don’t get much more direct than having Don dissolve his family in one room, then walk through the door to join his new work family in another room.

* If the first half of Season Three was Mad Men at its most Sopranos, the back half was Mad Men at its most Sirk. From Betty and Henry Francis’s fraught, unconsummated affair, to the newly suburban setting and “back to nature” purity (dancing around the maypole as Don’s fingers brush the grass; gathering outside to look at the eclipse) of Don and Suzanne Farrell’s affair, to lighting so lush and dramatic as to rise to the level of expressionism, Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic fingerprints were all over this. It gave these last half-dozen episodes a strong visual identity and cohesion.

* Indeed, this stretch contained a few episodes that are among the show’s tightest and most striking on an individual basis. Even in the moment — during the opening flashforward sequence in fact — I was floored by the structure and triple focus of the episode that starts with Don wounded, Peggy in bed with an unidentified man, and Betty glamorous and languid, then slowly reveals how they all got there.

** In Don’s case, I’m always a sucker for dramatically portentous strangers (cf. this past week’s episode of Boardwalk Empire), and thus loved the draft-dodging pot-smoking pill-popping couple he unwisely hooks up with.

** In Betty’s, I’m endlessly moved and fascinated by how her tightly wound way of life forces her to act out only in childlike, petulant ways, like buying a couch her decorator can’t stand.

** In Peggy’s, I’m still scratching my head over the erotic appeal of Duck Phillips, and wondering if he wasn’t simply a way to work out her issues with Don just as Pete warned her he was. Surely it was no coincidence that Don was forced by Bert to sign a contract in the same episode that featured the return of the guy over whom Don triumphed precisely because he didn’t have a contract.

*** Alas for Duck, Peggy’s sojourn as a Duckfucker appears to be coming to an end as she joins Sterling Cooper Draper Prce — you can sort of see it in her teary eyes when Don makes his last-ditch attempt to woo her in her apartment. I doubt Duck will take kindly to being duckolded like that.

** Plus, Bert showed the sharp teeth lurking beneath the Cheshire Cat grin by blackmailing Don with the unspoken specter of “Dick Whitman.” Surely this was the Emmy submission for something or other.

* Re: Suzanne—On a personal level, I must say that after the dyed distraction of Bobbi Barrett in Season Two, it’s nice to see Don picking up where he left off with Midge and Rachel in Season One and resuming his tour of the Great Brunettes of the Early ’60s. I got it bad, got it bad, got it bad, I’m hot for teacher.

* George Hearst in Deadwood, the Commodore in Boardwalk Empire, Conrad Hilton in Mad Men…Should I ever become a man of godlike wealth, influence, and power, please remind me that I need to go gray, lose my hair, and grow a mustache. Gotta watch out for those menacing mustache men! (Note to Weird Al: Please make “Pictures of Mustache Men” happen.)

* Actually it’s a bit tough to know what to think of Connie from where I’m sitting. Perhaps the best way to think of him is as a Grant Morrison-style doppelganger/double/reflection of the hero. As his presumption to father-son dynamics would indicate, Connie is Don writ large. From similar diminished circumstances, he rose even higher than Don. From similar personal alienation, he has developed an even more impressive bulldozing business style, coupled with an even more charming personal style. And in a similar guise of being a straight shooter, he’s able to be even more capricious, self-indulgent, and cruel than Don at his moodiest and most mercurial. When Hilton calls Don on the carpet for not putting together an add campaign for the Hilton chain’s entirely imaginary hotel on the moon, that’s the moment when the by-golly gives way to something approaching terror that this madman has the kind of power he has. There but for the grace of God.

* However, we did learn in the finale that Hilton served one other purpose: teaching Don that he needs Roger. Gladhandler and heel though he might be, sometimes gladhandlers and heels are required! But more than that, presumably Roger would have seen Hilton’s capriciousness coming and put the brakes on. That’s required too.

* What I like best about that particular revelation, though, was that it was revealed to us at the same time Don articulated it to both himself and to Roger. The wheels click into place, and suddenly, “A-ha! So that’s what the writers were up to!” exists in a spot where there used to be only uncertainty.

* The show did it again several minutes later, when Don makes his pitch to Pete: He needs Pete not for his portfolio or his skills as an account man, but because he is, of all things, a forward thinker. Teenagers, aeronautics, “the Negro market” — beneath his bluster and petulance, Pete has basically seen the entire ’60s coming. But I never saw that he saw it, and I don’t think most of the people at Sterling Cooper saw it, and I’m not sure Pete himself saw it either, not until Don articulates it this way at this moment. It was another “A-ha!” Really, really smart writing.

* So how did we feel about Betty’s discovery of Don’s secret past and their marriage’s subsequent dissolution? I wonder if I’m focusing so much on the work stuff because, as was the case with the earlier episodes in the season, Don’s romantic and family life felt less essential to the story this season. Ironically, perhaps, given that he and Betty had a baby and then broke up, but there you have it. It also proceeded in pretty much the way I expected, lacking only a really thoroughgoing breakdown on Betty’s part upon the initial discovery: finding a key, finding the box, debating whether or not to tell, confronting Don, Don’s emotional collapse, an attempt to be honest and bridge the gap, a subsequent rejection, angry words leading to the unspoken threat of violence, the split, a slight rapprochement. Other than the gasp exhaled at the moment Betty opens the drawer, none of this came as a surprise.

* But it was impeccably executed, mind you. Jon Hamm’s an extraordinary physical actor, and made it so that watching him fumble and drop his cigarettes was somehow as bad as him pissing his pants. Later, his drunken, rageful confrontation with Betty over Henry Francis was a concise blast of all his money, class, sex, mother, and father issues right in her face. When he tells her she’s a whore, it’s an indictment of anyone and everyone he thinks just laid around collecting other people’s money rather than going out and making it themselves — Betty, Roger, Henry Francis, his dead mother.

* January Jones…you know, okay, I see what people’s problem with her is. She’s stiff. But whether or not that’s by choice, isn’t it perfect for Betty Draper? Even a Betty Draper in extremis? Whether we can thank the casting director or Jones herself, playing that role that way makes Betty a character unto herself rather than a type.

* I worry about Sally Draper. The loss of her grandfather, the assassination of JFK and his alleged killer, and her parents’ divorce, all at once. Authority’s crumbling all around her, and the instruction she does receive from it — Gene slagging her mom, her mom’s pretty messed up ideas about romance — aren’t going to help. Again, Kiernan Shipka’s a fine young actress, so I hope they go somewhere with all this.

* JFK. That was handled about as well as I can imagine anything handling it. The initial broadcasts, the cacophony of ringing telephones suddenly silenced, the huddled groups of whispering and crying people, the days spent staring in disbelief at the television, the narcissistic but totally understandable resentment of how one’s own plans have suddenly been upended…it was horrifying, heartbreaking, scary, and all too familiar.

* Two lines from that episode stand out: Don’s genuinely stunned and baffled “What?” when Betty tells him that Oswald has been shot, and a confused Bobby naively asking Don whether they’d be going to the President’s funeral. I teared up at that last one, because I know the truth about Don’s reassurance that everything’s going to be okay. It never was. It never is.