5 Epic Scenes That Saved the Mad Men Finale

Forget the commune silliness. These are the moments that resonated from the show's farewell

Well, that was…unexpected.

In Mad Men's penultimate episode last Sunday, creator Matthew Weiner had opened the door to that rarest of events: a series finale in which anything seemed possible—well, unless you seriously believed those silly Don Draper-as-D.B. Cooper theories (and if you did, you really didn't know the show—or Weiner—very well). And Sunday's actual finale delivered on that promise—for better and for worse. (Warning: there are finale spoilers aplenty ahead.)

In Sunday's finale, Weiner reintroduced some characters who had been long forgotten (Stephanie Horton, niece of the late Anna Draper), as well as others we'd worried we had already seen the last of (Joan was back, thank goodness!) and—sigh!—several new ones we could have done without (pretty much everyone in that commune).

And while Don Draper's final scenes were a bit of a letdown, the rest of Mad Men's finale was spectacular, thanks largely to five epic scenes that more...

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