Mad Men Finale Brings A Tumultuous Season Full-Circle

In the spirit of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, it seems to be a trend among television series these days to reserve season finales for the falling action after pouring all the excitement in penultimate installments, and now AMC's Mad Men is following suit.

It would have been hard to one-up the untimely suicide of Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) in last week's Mad Men episode, so the writers were wise enough not to try in the season finale. Instead, they turned to the failsafe topic of sex, particularly of the extracurricular variety. In the aftermath of Lane's death, everyone is grieving in his or her own way, with Don Draper (Jon Hamm) seeing visions of his dead brother, Roger Sterling (John Slattery) sinking his woes into his increasingly frequent sexual escapades with Megan's (Jessica Pare) mother (Julia Ormond), and Joan (Christina Hendricks) beating herself up for not engaging in an her own adulterous affair with Lane and thereby possibly saving his life with her … er … generosity.

Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) enjoys, quite possibly, his first vaguely sympathetic moment, in spite of the fact that he's made it his mission to destroy his own marriage and that of his commuting buddy throughout the season. And perhaps least astonishing is the way the episode closes, showing Don Draper up to his old philandering ways once he realizes that his wife has, once again, failed him by not being as in love with him as he is with himself.

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