But but but, as we find out toward the end of the season six premiere, Don is back to his old ways. He's having an affair with a neighbor. Who's also married. To the really nice doctor Don has become friends with. Such good friends that both the mistress and the doctor husband celebrated New Year's Eve with Don and Megan. Sigh.

But he's not the old Don—not entirely, anyway. He expresses guilt for his transgressions, something he never did when he cheated on Betty. When his mistress asks what his New Year's resolution is, he responds, "I want to stop doing this." She says, "I know," implying that he's expressed the desire to cut off the affair before. This guilt-wracked Don is different from first-season Don, who was so in denial about the fact that he already had a wife, he tells his mistress, "We should get married." Don's guilt shows he sees Megan as a person who's capable of being hurt. He never got there with Betty. So, progress?

Otherwise, Don seems in even worse shape than he was in the pre-Megan era. The season opens with the two of them on a trip to Hawaii, and as the episode follows them from the beach to the bedroom to the dinner table, Megan does all the talking and Don is silent. The first words we hear him speak (other than a voiceover of him reading Dante's Inferno at the very beginning) is at the hotel bar, where he's gone to escape in the middle of the night. It's not quite clear why Don's shutting Megan out. Maybe it's guilt over the affair, or perhaps he's jealous of her professional quasi-success. She has a minor but growing role on a soap opera, and one day she unexpectedly gets called in to work, leaving Don to his own devices. He gets so drunk he throws up at Roger's mother's funeral, in front of an aghast (and entirely sober) group of mourners.

The most dramatic sign of his unhappiness is the ad campaign he pitches to the Hawaiian resort: the image of a man who's leapt out of his clothes, with the tagline "Hawaii—the jumping-off point." It makes everyone in the room think of suicide. The baffled client stammers, "I think, and I think people might think, that he died."

Are we viewers supposed to think Don is headed for a similar fate? It seems too obvious, and yet... Ashley, what did you think of Don's lapse back into cheating and darkness? And what about the other parts of the episode?

Fetters: Yep, Don's cheating on Megan. I wish I were surprised.

Andy Greenwald at Grantland wrote a terrific piece this week asserting that what makes Mad Men great is its sense of dread, of tragic inevitability. Its drama doesn't come from will-they-or-won't-they arcs, he wrote, but rather from the agonizing wait for the other shoe to drop; in other words, Mad Men is a show about when, not a show about if.