Alan Sepinwall on Mad Men's finale

In the immediate aftermath of watching "Person to Person," I wanted to think that the ad was simply there to underline the genuineness of Don's moment of bliss by showing us what a phony version — produced by the agency and business he traveled thousands of miles to escape — looked like.

And that was mainly because I didn't want the entire series, and in particular Don's cross-country odyssey of self-discovery — during which he gradually shed himself of all the trappings of the life he built by stealing the real Don Draper's identity — to build to him learning nothing besides how to write a better tagline.

Even if that ultimately feels true to both him and the series.

We forge attachments with the characters of our favorite shows. We spend years watching their stories, and we want that time to feel well-spent. Sometimes, that means accepting them for who and what they are — embracing the monstrosity of a Tony Soprano or a Walter White, or accepting the deeply flawed natures of everyone and everything on "The Wire" — and appreciating how artfully their stories are told. Sometimes, though, we want to believe the best of them: that despite abundant evidence to the contrary, they can transcend their weaknesses and destructive patterns and become worthy of the time we put into them not just as a complex and interesting character on a TV show, but as someone worthy of this theoretical, entirely one-sided relationship we've built with them.

The Don Draper we spent 92 hours watching was frequently a terrible human being. He stole a dead man's identity, drove his own brother to suicide, repeatedly cheated on both his wives, abandoned all responsibility to work and/or family whenever the mood struck him, and walked all over Peggy like she was a wine-stained scrap of carpet. But the Don we watched also had his moments of trying to be better, and occasionally achieving that goal for a moment or two before backsliding into his bad habits. The Don who showed Peggy the new Samsonite idea at the end of "The Suitcase," or the one who told Sally the truth about his upbringing, or even the one who wished his Birdie luck at school a few weeks ago — that is the Don Draper, or the Dick Whitman, or the blend of the two, whom we wanted him to be. And his final hobo odyssey — particularly that wry grin on his face as he sat on the bus bench at the end of last week's episode, completely free of the burden of being Don Draper, master of the universe — seemed to be pointing him in that direction.

If Don really traversed this great land of ours, threw away all the sigils of Don Draper-hood, learned of Betty's impending death and the shaky future of their three children, and finally heard someone articulate his own deepest feelings of unlovability, and he came out the other side having only acquired the inspiration needed to buy his way back into McCann(**) and write that Coke ad — and cutting straight from the look of pure bliss on Don's face to the ad, without giving us hints of anything else he might do upon returning to New York, suggests that this is the only thing that ultimately matters to him — then that is a very cynical and dark take on a man I wanted better from. 

But it also seems like an honest take on who that man actually was, and what "Mad Men" has been about.

(Alan Sepinwall)