Seeing Mad Men through its ads: Every week, WIRED takes a look at the latest episode of Mad Men through the lens of the latest media campaign by the staff of the agency formerly known as Sterling Cooper & Partners.

For a column based on advertising, about a show based in advertising, the final episode of Mad Men presented something of a problem: Until its final moments, it was an episode of Mad Men with no ads at all. Yes, Ken Cosgrove hired Joan to help produce an in-house industrial film for his wing of DuPont, which Joan hired Peggy to write, but there were no specifics offered, and at any rate the utilitarian nature of industrials would have meant that the hopes and fears that are advertising’s stock in trade were irrelevant there. Instead, those hopes and fears played out exclusively in the real world. Betty’s death and her children’s future; the end of Joan’s relationship and the start of her business; various versions of domestic bliss featuring Pete and Trudy, Roger and Marie, and the crown prince of crowdpleasers, Peggy and Stan; the specter of parental abandonment and the promise of new lives and new loves; and, of course, Don Draper’s rock bottom---these were the drivers of this show’s last hour. Not until a meditative Don rose from that rock bottom with a smile on his face and a smash cut to Coca-Cola’s seismic “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial did the selling of products with a message people want to hear take up so much as a second of screentime.

What happened next? That is a matter of considerable debate. If we view it in light of Mad Men’s characterization of advertising history, it’s the ad where the industry has its Carousel moment: having traveled around and around, it goes “back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.” Over the course of the decade the show chronicled, ads migrated from promises of comfort, security, and luxury to counterculture-tinged, irony-driven paeans to youth. In Madison Avenue’s version of the Hegelian Dialectic, thesis and antithesis led to this soft-drink synthesis, in which hippies celebrate their unique vision of the home and hearth they spent the past ten years supplanting.

It’s a welcome message, I suppose. It’s certainly a charming ad. It’s even an enjoyable song, if you don’t mind its appropriately sugary sweetness. On the whole it’s a preferable cultural platform to the stultifying conservatism and conformity of the earlier era in terms of who it includes. But it includes them as consumers, not citizens; as a target market, not members of the human family. It’s glurge, a mawkishly and manipulatively sentimental song-and-dance that contains within itself the negation of the uplift it purports to convey. “I’d like to teach the world to sing” is undone the second the purchase of a Coke is required for the lesson to begin. It’s a chorus for capital.

How, then, are we to take the ad as the culmination of this episode, of this series, of the stories of all its characters? It’s a rimshot, a trombone flourish, the punchline of a seven-season shaggy dog joke. The engine of commerce churns on regardless of the hard-fought happiness secured by Peggy, Pete, Joan, and Stan, or even the fallen-into-bass-ackwards variety Roger wound up with. “There’s more to life than work,” Stan says. Sure, but the latter will find a way to monetize the former. “You can put this behind you. It’ll get easier as you move forward,” Don says to his ersatz niece Stephanie, a summary of a life of leaving things behind that has obviously failed. “Oh, Dick, I don’t think you’re right about that,” she replies, correctly. Yet both total independence and necessary connection can be smushed together to sell stuff.

The true kick in the gut, though? Don Draper may yet have been the man to do the selling. It’s not entirely clear whether, in the show’s version of our world, the “Hilltop” ad was Don’s doing. On my first viewing I saw it as a sort of deflation of Don’s final enlightened smile, as well as a riposte to the episode’s many personal triumphs, as described above. Only when I saw the emerging Twitter consensus did the connection between’s Don om-induced grin at the commune and the similarly communal ad finally click. This would certainly be a grimly comic capstone to Don Draper’s long journey, which at last saw him completely empty of hope and refilled with a momentary happiness he winds up using to create the World’s Greatest Commercial. (And the joke is when he awoke his body was covered in Coke fizz.)

But I remain agnostic about whether Don made the ad, as I believe the show intends. At any rate, it’s largely immaterial. We’ve spent seven seasons watching Don grow, shrink, succeed, fail, move forward, stagger back, and generally struggle with his inability to fill the void inside him with things pulled in from outside, whether that’s money, sex, love, wanderlust, creativity, or industrial quantities of alcohol. There’s no reason, really, to assume the struggle would end when the show does — that Don’s grin marks, for certain, the beginning of a more grounded, more centered new life completely separate from the old one.

What’s more, an uncomfortable overlap between his current self and his ad-man past would in no way wipe out the losses and gains he experiences here. Don’s grief over Betty’s diagnosis and his subsequent realization that his absence from his children’s life is, to them, “normal life” is real. So is his litany of unforgivable sins, recited in the sardonic lilt that should be familiar to anyone who’s taken a similar vebal inventory of their failings and found the results to be a crippling psychological wound: “I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name and made nothing of it.” Don once told Peggy that despite seemingly having it all, he’s still gripped with a terrible worry: “That I’ve never did anything, and I don’t have anyone.” Crumpled by the payphones at the retreat, he’s realized his worry has come true. I envy anyone who doesn’t find this story, this show, completely devastating.

But it’s not just his collapse that remains real, but his catharsis as well. Sitting in the encounter group, he listens to a man named Leonard, a square in every respect, describe a life that’s very much like the ideal all-American one Don himself had at first tried to create before going on to constantly undermine and eventually destroy it. This, Leonard hasn’t done; it doesn’t matter. “I’ve never been interesting to anybody,” he says. “I work in an office---people walk right by me. I know they don’t see me. And I go home and I watch my wife and my kids---you know, they don’t look up when I sit down. It’s like no one cares that I’m gone. They should love me. Maybe they do, but I don’t even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you, then you realize they’re trying and you don’t even know what it is.” He describes a dream that sounds like an ad, about living in a refrigerator, thrilling to the smiling faces he sees when people open its door and the light switches on until he realizes they’re not looking for him at all and the door swings shut. At this, Don stands, walks over, kneels down, and embraces the man, a total stranger, as they cry. In this moment he realizes there are many ways to Have It All, and that so long as you see this as your goal, they all leave you with nothing.

But there’s a silver lining, one that is the moral of Mad Men’s story. If external success of whatever sort ultimately can’t give you anything, it also can't take anything away. These things possess only the value you assign to them. They’re an empty glass bottle you can fill with the beverage of your choice. That’s the real thing.