Spoiler alert: this article contains spoilers for episode one of season seven of Mad Men

For many, season six of Man Men had the feeling of a party that went on too long and had become embarrassing for all involved. No one was planning to leave; we’d all invested too much for that, but we’d officially seen things about each other we wished we hadn’t and can’t ever take back.

The moment that stands out starkly in memory, like that scene you replay hungover the morning after that continues to make you cringe, is Don Draper capping off a multi-month alcoholic tailspin by breaking down in a pitch meeting to Hershey’s about growing up in a Pennsylvania whorehouse. “The closest I got to feeling wanted was from a girl who made me go through her john’s pockets. If I collected more than a dollar, she bought me a Hershey bar.” There was a time where the viewers were the only ones who really knew Don and now here he was exposing himself to aghast strangers at the office. He seemed old. He seemed lost. Worst of all, he seemed uncool.

In Time Zones, the superb first episode of season seven, which premiered last night on AMC, some of the squirm-inducing humiliation suffered last season is starting to feel like it had a purpose. It’s seemed clear for a while that show creator Matthew Weiner is aiming to explore in his key characters lives and in the narrative of their agency Sterling Cooper and Partners (SC&P), the private and personal disillusionment, deconstruction of self, and general disorientation brewing in American at large at end of the 60s.

We left off last season in November of 1968 and in the early weeks of 1969, where the show picks up, we’re already getting a sense of that ominous feeling that the free love, optimism, and openness of the 60s is over. There’s a storm coming and it’s time to salvage what you can from the past and prepare for the future. And the central characters in this episode – Peggy Olson, Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling and Don – are all managing the disorder in different ways.

The episode opens with a close up on the mug of Freddy Rumsen, the face of hope and redemption for absolutely no one. This is a man best known for peeing in his pants during a bender. But here he is, sober and trying to get back into the game, the fleshly pink corners of his mouth weirdly prominent as he narrates what it has to be said is an absolutely killer, cinematic, Draper-in-his-prime-like pitch for Accutron watches.

The tag line is, Accutron: it’s not a timepiece, it’s a conversation piece. As the camera pans out it becomes clear who Freddy is talking too, Ms Peggy Olsen. He’s become a freelance ideas man and is here at the agency pitching Peggy. This is encouraging. When we left her she was heartbroken, dumped twice, once justifiably (by Abe) and once cruelly (by her married boss Ted Chaough). Perhaps she’s been born anew since Nixon got elected.

Nope. Or, not yet. We soon see that she’s banging her head against the wall in constant creative collision with the new Don, Lou Avery, a real cog-in-the-wheel type. “I just want to give you my best,” Peggy tells him after insisting on reworking the Accutron pitch to accommodate a version of Freddy’s pitch. “I don’t know Peggy, I guess I’m immune to your charms,” he retorts. This guy is less interested in the romance of great ideas and more interested in making deadlines and going home on time, which is the vibe in general at the agency these days. As they’ve expanded – an office to work on Chevy in Detroit, Pete Campbell and Ted doing Sunkist out in California – they’ve lost something. Ken Cosgrove, still wearing his eye patch (hunting accident) complains he doesn’t even have time in the day “to take a shit” he’s so busy managing the many arms of this increasingly unwieldy monster. Ken’s always been the non-striver (relatively) in this bunch. His mania is a bad sign.

Only Joan seems to be on the ball at work. Ken dispatches her to meet with Butler Footwear, one of the firms biggest clients. Through a nauseating cloud of the usual chauvinism she manages to discover he’s planning to take his advertising in house but by the end of the episode has maneuvered to save the account.

We first see Joan’s baby daddy, Roger, asleep on the floor of a cigarette stained carpet, surrounded by passed out naked women, a ringing telephone covering his crotch. It’s his sometimes-estranged daughter calling, asking him to meet up for brunch. “That sounds nice. I’ll bring vodka,” he says. Roger has really taken to the bohemian lifestyle. He appears to be living in an ad hoc sex commune. By the end of the episode he’s boozed his way through an admittedly suspect attempt at reconnection from his daughter and passed out in a bed with his girlfriend and another (male) lover.

And then there’s Don. We first see him up close, shaving with an electric razor in an airport bathroom. He’s on his way out west to visit Megan, who has built a new life for herself in LA. There’s a slow motion montage set to the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m A Man” of Don leaving the airport, dapper and pulled together. We see Megan pull up in a sports car, wearing a scandalously short baby blue chiffon tunic, and for a moment it feels like a taste of the Don we used to know, the eternally cool customer.

But it’s soon clear he has not fully righted himself. “Are you sure you don’t want to move to a more populated area,” he says sternly after taking in the canyon view from Meghan’s new place and hearing the coyote howls echoing in the distance. Is it any wonder this young aspiring ingenue doesn’t want to sleep with this cautious old man? (They eventually do have sex but it’s disturbingly chaste and bad prom night-ish).

There’s a serenity to Don in his state of existential surrender, as if he’s made friend with his own confusion. At lunch at Canter’s in LA with Pete Campbell – dressed like a member of Vampire Weekend in a pastel Lacoste polo that matches Meghan’s dress and talking like the enthusiastic interloper he is (“I love the vibrations”) – Don seems as interested in the magic of the “Brooklyn Avenue” pastrami sandwich, which has the coleslaw inside the sandwich, as he is in anything else.

It’s only on his way home to New York, in conversation with another sad, wise, intelligently damaged hot brunette (played by Neve Campbell) that we glimpse the battle he’s waging. Her husband is deceased and she was in California to scatter his ashes. What did he die of? “He was thirsty,” she says hauntingly. “He died of thirst.” How would his wife react to the sight of this strange woman sleeping intimately on her husband’s shoulder on a plane? “She knows I’m a terrible husband,” he says. And then, “I really thought I could do it this time.”

Us too. But unlike much of last season, which felt at times masochistic in its desire to show Don failing, there’s, if not redemption, then at least a meaty kind of pathos in Don’s misery here. Back in New York, back in the apartment where Zou Bisou Bisou took place not so many years ago, it’s a bit of a post-apocalyptic scene. Don, on the sunken living room floor watching Nixon’s inauguration speech, battling literal cold winds seeping in from the balcony sliding glass door, which is broken and won’t close all the way.

In walks none other than Freddy Rumsen with a bag of sandwiches. Of course. That opening pitch sounded like classic Don Draper because it was classic Don Draper. He’s back, or some part of him is – the magic idea generating part, and he’s been sending Freddy out into the freelance marketplace to test out Don’s ideas. “You’re making quite a name for me out there,” Freddy summarizes, then encourages Don to bail on this “Cyrano de Bergerac routine” and get back in the game before it’s too late. “You don’t want to be damaged goods,” Freddy warns.

Too late. Don is already damaged goods. But then again he always has been, it’s just that fewer people knew it before. In season two, when Peggy was lying in that hospital bed comatose after giving up her and Pete’s child, Don famously told her: “Peggy, listen to me, get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” He said something similar to Lane Price after he catches him embezzling from the company in season five and demands his resignation. “I’ve started over a lot, Lane, this is the worst part.” Don’s greatest skill, on par only with his creative gifts, is his ability to pretend bad things never happened and to reinvent himself in the wake of them. One of the many wise ex-girlfriends, Faye Miller, who was as onto Don as anyone, famously said he liked only the beginnings of things. Well, it’s time for another new one.