It turns out that I care inordinately about the last episode of Mad Men. I’m been wasting my few precious moments left on this planet talking with several experts about it it — most notably John-Paul Spiro and Julie Ponzi.

There are all kinds of insights that aren’t simply mine so that I can’t share yet. It turns out the show has lots to do with Jesus and the Jews, and Don’s envy for those who can believe in the former or live in genuine community as one of the latter.

But for now: It’s easy, to repeat, to see that it’s a conservative show. Attempting to live as unencumbered or self-invented individual leads to unhappiness and self-destruction. The compensations for the misery of our homelessness and of our insatiable longing for home are the joys of worthwhile work and relational love. Don may or may not have ended up a partial exception to these rule, but, if he is, it’s only by finally coming to terms with himself as a singularly undiverted (amd mostly unjoyful) exception to the rules that govern most human lives. Well, the smirk we see on the face of yoga Don might have been the joy of insight that’s at the foundation of his work of making deeply manipulative commercials, an insight about each of us being more than a consumer.

Skipping over Don, we can say that maybe the main thing about the last show is the display of the personal and relational “learning curves” of Pete and Peggy.

They were pretty clueless at the show’s beginning. And one result was their misbegotten little affair that led to Peggy’s giving up their baby to a family that’s not hers. Their love–hate relationship morphs finally into a real affection for each other.

They both end up in loving, fairly traditional relationships (it’s hard to see why Peggy and Stan won’t quickly get married and have kids) that don’t negate but complement or even fuel their personal success at work.

Pete has always been a fairly little man who’s longed to be admired for his fine deeds. He ends up the noble little knight choosing what’s required to protect his family, especially his wife Trudy, from all the predators (such as his “former self”) who threaten them. He’s assumed his family’s traditional “Campbell” imperative of being all about the clan, even if the clan has been reduced to the tiniest of nuclear families. Not only that, Pete’s unfailingly responsible and effective work has become legendary enough that he’s offered — (graciously) out of the blue — the job that corresponds to his most realistically noble ideals.

Peggy discovers by talking the possibility through that she’s really in love with a man who admires and respects her, and that’s she’s become accustomed to trusting his reliable judgments. Stan, who enters the show a clean-shaven jerk, is actually made more relationally sensitive (as opposed to more angry) through his encounter with the Sixties and its soft feminism — symbolized, of course, by his becoming ever-more scruffily hairy. Peggy’s past experience with men caused her to doubt or deny the possibility of loving or being loved. And she has a lot to do with transforming the man who’s becoming worthy of her.

Both Peggy and Don end up “in the family way” in two different forms — in one, the woman has worldly ambition, and in the other she doesn’t; one couple ends up flourishing at the cosmopolitan and rather ruthless McCann firm, the other (despite their aristocratic, Northeastern breeding) in the decent heartland of Kansas. (Don’s experience is that small-town Kansas ain’t really so good, but that’s for another day.) These are the two forms of the modern family — two possibilities — that ennoble the world in which we live. In neither case do you have the celebration of libertarian self-definition; you have instead the journey of discovery of who a person is by nature, of who he or she is and what he or she is supposed to do.

And I’ve already mentioned that Don’s daughter Sally– who seemed at more than one point to be as lost as he is — was redeemed by the clear-eyed toughness with which she assumed the responsibility of being mom to her dying mom and her brothers.