Last Sunday the estrangement between Don and Peggy dissolved in a slow dance to the musing drone of Frank Sinatra memorializing himself in “My Way,” preparing to mount Pegasus and soar into the moon. Peggy rested her head on Don’s shoulder and he affectionately, paternally pressed his lips against the top of her hair. It was one of Mad Men’s few gestures of tender gallantry over these many seasons of surly malice and floating angst that was unaccompanied by a thorn prick of irony or unease: a grace note in a season dominated so far by Ginsberg’s gift-boxed nipple. I can’t say I savored its sweetness as much as nearly everyone else going swoony in my Twitter timeline. I found Don’s “Shall we dance?” invitation and the mid-shot staging (the slow camera pullback at the fade) corny and contrived, worthy of Nora Ephron at her most catering, a sentimental cherry the scene didn’t need. Still, it was deeply satisfying to see Don and Peggy reunited in late-night, lunar-module, mind-combing collaborative partnership, casting us back to one of Mad Men’s richest episodes, “The Suitcase” (season four).*

From a writer’s perspective, no series, indeed no film that I can think of, has outdone Mad Men in showing what the creative process is really like in its problem solving and puzzle cracking—the trial and error, the ruminative pondering, the verbal doodling, the hazy spaces and pauses while the subconscious percolates. The product idea seems to work, its pieces fit, the whole thing flows, the tagline ties it up in a neat ribbon bow, it’s what the client wants and expects, and yet—a worrying whisper in the ghostly attic keeps nagging that this isn’t the way to go, there’s something better being missed, a hidden key to the treasure chest. Peggy’s original concept for fast-food chain Burger Chef was shown from the perspective of a mother carting her kids in the family car, which everyone went for at the meeting and seemed ready to be put to bed until, alone with Don, she asked what he thought and he vaguely floated the idea that it might work better from a child’s perspective. That’s the lens through which Don often views a campaign, his troubled childhood providing the film projector in his head. Peggy dismisses the suggestion, accusing of Don undermining her by insinuating this sliver of doubt, but his vague, floating question mark becomes the hook on which her own doubt begins to hang because she knows Don isn’t head-gaming, he’s picking up a bat-squeak of something amiss in the proposal. His negative capability is a vasty province.

It’s Peggy—who now lights her cigarettes with Don’s purposeful dispatch—who makes the breakthrough in their brainstorming session, prompted by two little words that help push through the door. Peggy runs through some possible scenarios that would make Mom’s trip to Burger Chef—“she burned the roast, she dented the fender”—“Keep going,” Don says, as much therapist at that moment as ad man, prodding her stream of consciousness forward—“she backed over the dog…,” until Peggy dynamites the logjam:

“Does this family exist anymore? Are there people who smile at each other and eat dinner instead of watching TV?

“What if there was a place where you could go where there was no TV, and you could break bread, and whoever you were sitting with was family?”

She hands Don the tear-stained handkerchief he had handed to her and says, “That’s it.” That’s what they’ve was searching for.

As as closing tableau, we see Don, Peggy, and Pete (in his recurring role as aging Eddie Haskell) dining at a Burger Chef that is so beautifully shiny, lit, and beatific that it looks like a roadside chapel full of happy consumers, haven in a heartless world. Such historical irony it enshrines, a neon pastoral under invisible siege. As Driftglass observes in "Bob Benson's Loveless Erector Set":