Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce advertising agency.

"That was the most artful self-immolation I've ever seen." Account man or no, nihilistic comedian Roger Sterling still can't help but congratulate Don Draper for torching himself. After all, their boorish client Herb's idea — transforming Jaguar's advertising presence to target not connoisseurs but mere customers—was as bad for the brand as Herb himself is for one's desire not to have to take a shower every time he comes on screen. (The best part of the sequence: Herb's so dumb he doesn't even realize Don torched it on purpose.)

The grim fact, of course, is that given the number of actual self-immolations Roger could have witnessed by this stage of the Vietnam War, it's a hell of a compliment. From its title, "The Collaborators," on down, this episode spoke the language of war.

Don's deliberately awful pitch comes as news of the Tet Offensive — the massive, coordinated, ceasefire-breaking surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against South Vietnam and the United States — is omnipresent. Not quite omnipresent enough, however, to touch Don Draper. Busy navigating the demands of his client, his wife, and his mistress, Don is only dimly aware of the latest developments when he sits down to dinner with said mistress and her husband, Sylvia and Arnold Rosen; he knows it was a sneak attack, but that's about it.

"You know, we're losing the war," Dr. Rosen intones, imparting a hard truth. Nodding to their fellow patrons at the tony restaurant at which they've snagged a reservation, Don replies, "You wouldn't know it looking around here." This is the middle-aged elite, untouched by Vietnam. This is Jaguar's target demo.

Having been on the other side of both class and combat, Don's ambivalence about his current status runs deep, hence the presence of this episode's flashbacks. Watching through a keyhole as your pregnant mother fucks a pimp for room and board will give you some unpleasant feelings about instant, automatic gratification, no matter how often you indulge it yourself.

Sure enough, no sooner has Don finished his Bizarro-style backwards pitch for preserving Jaguar as a status symbol for the rich than he and Roger team up to explain to a flabbergasted Pete Campbell that all-carrot, no-stick has its cost. "And so we keep saying yes, no matter what, because we didn't say no to begin with," Don says, his voice dripping with contempt for the client who turned his friend Joan into an ersatz prostitute over his own protestations.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Sylvia Rosen (Linda Cardellini). Photo: Michael Yarish/AMC

A few scenes earlier he convinced a momentarily guilt-ridden Sylvia to sleep with him by reminding her that her nos always turn to yeses the moment he takes her dress off; a few scenes later he's collapsing at his front door, momentarily laid low by his own inability to stop giving himself everything he wants at all times. He may as well have been talking about himself.

Echoing him, Roger flashes back two wars to the Munich Conference, where a lack of insight into Adolf Hitler's character and the lingering fear of another Great War-style continent-wide bloodbath convinced the powers of Europe to feed the fascist fever and hand Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. "It means we gave the Germans whatever they wanted to make them happy, but it just made them want more." This is close to a thesis statement for the entire series; Don voiced it almost identically last season when he called happiness "the moment before you need more happiness."

Still fuming, Pete points out that Germany lost the war in the end. True enough, but sometimes the results on the ground don't matter as much as what happens in the head. The Tet Offensive was a military defeat for the Communists, but its ferocity, coordination, and ability to catch the mightiest military in the world flat-footed effectively destroyed the resolve of the American public to win the war, whatever that would have meant. Both Munich and Tet were matters of underestimation — of Hitler's sociopathy, of the NVA and VC's skill — and the cost was high.

Examples of that precise kind of strategic miscalculation were thick on the ground in this episode. Herb underestimated Don. Don underestimated his conscience. Pete underestimated Trudy, who responded in terms that any given character in Full Metal Jacket would love: “I'm drawing a 50-mile radius around this house, and if you so much as open your fly to urinate, I will destroy you.”

And though Ted Chaough tells Peggy that her friend Stan underestimated her when he blabbed about the internecine warfare at Heinz, it was really Peggy who underestimated Ted when she took him into her confidence. "This is how wars are won!" Ted shouts ebulliently, at last displaying a bit of the cutthroat smarm that distinguished his early appearances. He's not wrong.