We are being told that Don is having an affair with Sylvia. Presumably this affair has some relation to the perversions he experienced as a child. That's a good start but it is insufficient. Why—specifically—Sylvia? Who is she? What, precisely, is she offering that Don simply can't get enough of? How does that particular character interact with whatever is going on in Don Draper's head?

This is not a new challenge. What made Don Draper's two affairs so powerful in the first season was the sense that both Rachel and Midge were doing something for him. Rachel and Don connected on mutual feeling of being a pariah. Midge was window into a world of nonconformity that has always intrigued Don—the representation of a path that an identity thief, running from a dysfunctional family might, himself, have taken.

And each of these characters were actual people. Rachel had a father and a sister and expectations emanating from each of those. She had her own thoughts on Judaism and Israel, ad ultimately, on what constituted cowardice and what didn't. Midge inhabited the falling world of the Beatnicks. And you had some real sense of that world—you got to see her friends, you got to go to Jazz clubs with them, and finally, you got to see her in love with someone else.

What other world does Sylvia represent, beyond OPP? Who is she independent of Don? What are the grounds on which they relate? Why did she agree to begin their affair again? Why does she like Don? Is it because he is the most interesting man alive? Right now, all I am watching is the latest vagina Don Draper happened to trip over.

That is depressing. Mad Men's greatest strength was always the humanity it gave to women. You still see some of that in the interactions between Peggy and Joan. But this season has been mostly about making an argument, rather than telling a story. Whole arcs are initiated and then dropped. There are a flurry of characters, interesting in their own right, whose shine comes and goes. There's no focus beyond a kind of creeping amorality. (I think that's the argument.) Sally Draper's friend from the last episode wasn't so much a character as a demigod of chaos summoned up solely to fuck up Sally Draper even more.

For those of us who once cared about Don, the big reveal lacked any emotional power. Here is a dude so low that he would bang his friend's wife while his own wife was upstairs, and go off on a drug binge while his house was robbed and his kids were held hostage. There's no sympathy left. He's a dirt bag. And I am fine watching dirt bags. But tell me something new about this particular dirt bag. Show me something about him that I did not know or suspect—something beyond, "Hey you know that dirt bag, really is just a dirtbag." There needs to be something more.