Hasta La Creative!

When we met Don Draper last season, he was lounging in paradise reading Dante’s Inferno: tough beach-reading but appropriate research for our adman antihero’s approaching torment. Throughout the sixth season, we watched Draper writhe in whatever circle of hell is reserved for those who mismanage their affairs so badly that their teenage daughter is able to witness them boffing the neighbor lady.

We know that the show’s seventh and final season will be about rising up out of the depths. The question before us: Just how painful can purgatory be, especially when there’s no booze to numb it?

We’ve jumped forward a couple months in time, to late January 1969, just in time for Nixon’s inauguration. Don is once again in an in-between state — cast out of Sterling Cooper & Partners but not fired, somewhat skeeved by his wife but not divorced.

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