Remember how Don stuck out when he joined Midge’s beatnik friends? When he read Meditations on an Emergency in an effort to really understand? That doesn’t happen in this encounter with The Partying Youngs, for two reasons. Evan explains the first reason: This episode was directed by Slattery and is told from Sterling’s point of view, and Sterling never feels like an outsider. The second has to do with Don’s age. Don stuck out at parties when he was the same age as his beatnik peers because he had made different choices from his cohort. He doesn’t stick out anymore because he’s part of a different generation, and old-timers get judged according to different standards. (This is how Cooper could get the entire office to take off their shoes.) And when you get to that age, you stop wanting to be groovy; you want to be a child again.

You fight it, of course, and you try to defend the perimeters of adulthood. Don and Roger pitch to Carnation in a room wallpapered in giant ice cream cones as they guzzle chocolate milk, and they’re trying to define their enjoyment as adult: Carnation is for grown-ups. “Instant breakfast has a different target: adults,” says Roger to the Carnation executives. “They don’t eat cereal, they eat bacon and eggs,” Don agrees as he sucks down some more milk, proving his own distinction false. As if to drive the point home, Harry tells the (daddies) executives that Carnation “should have a presence in Saturday morning.” Their target market doesn’t watch the news, Harry implies, it watches cartoons. And Harry’s right: even when the men on “Mad Men” watch the news, they watch it as if it were a cartoon. Don’s feelings about the Chicago beatings are the feelings of a child. “Go for a swim,” says Megan to him over the phone. “It always makes you feel better.” She was right about that, it turns out, even if it almost killed him.

That said, this episode of “Baby Mad Men”offers diminishing returns. We’re gearing up for the end of the season and it’s hard to know what to make of an episode this near the finale that does so little so repetitively. “They’re just some pennies you pick up off the floor, stick in your pocket and you’re just going in a straight line to you-know-where,” Roger said in “The Doorway” at the beginning of this season. It’s a usefully incoherent sentence because it collapses two models—one picaresque, predicated on random events, disparate pennies, and one linear and continuous with a destination in mind. We took that as the show’s thesis statement, and it helped me provisionally accept the flat slurries we first encountered in Hawaii that have since eroded the sharp edges according to which we once understood these characters. Distinctions have been melting all season. Ted and Don, once clear opposites, are fast becoming twins—a point made with particular force in that shot where Peggy stands between their offices and watches them close their doors. Megan plays both herself and her blond counterpart (a.k.a. Betty) on her show; this week she was asked to play a third role—a hippie-Sylvia-Midge version of herself who happily “shares” Don with L.A.’s bizarro-Betty (who, with Mad Men’s customary subtlety, offers Don an “extra nipple”). But the biggest distinction that’s collapsing is the one between Roger and Don.

Remember that bait-and-switch in “The Doorway,” where we gazed up at Doctor Rosen through the eyes of a dying man? We assumed it was Don, but the dying gaze belongs to a different man. Don may be reading The Inferno, but the persistent drumbeat of death in “Mad Men” this season is about someone else. Evan, if the theory that this episode was about seeing the world from Roger Sterling’s point of view is true—and I think it is—then I suspect this season is about Roger’s death. That Slattery directed this episode where Roger’s lookalike Pfc. Dinkins shows up dead confirms, in my opinion, that Roger isn’t long for this world. He has a heart condition, there have been broken hearts and heart doctors everywhere, and the letter to “Sterling, Gleason and Pryce” doesn’t bode well for “Mad Men”’s most affable character. Joan’s expression as she folds the tiny clothes of her own curious child is mournful even before the news airs from Chicago. I have a bad feeling, given that all the dads are gone, that Kevin’s dad will be going soon, too.