Yowza. The only thing missing from "Mad Men's" season finale was the theme from "Rocky."

We were treated to the sight of Don Draper getting off the ropes, finally, after getting a big injection of his old smooth-but-smoldering fire back as he fights back and plots the course for the rest of his life. I'm guessing this episode, "Shut the Door, Have a Seat," will be popular with the fans, but crix may carp that it was a little too "Dallas" in terms of the tidy storytelling. The seg penned by Erin Levy and Matthew Weiner and helmed by Weiner (as he did for the previous season closers) seemed to offer much more in the way of conclusions and set a deliberate course for next season than past "Mad Men" finales. But I'm in the fan camp and can't complain. The lighter moments sprinkled throughout the episode offset some of the on-the-nose plot points - All in all, I loved this season. Sorry to see it end.

This episode was monumental for Don, natch. What the JFK assassination was to Betty, the jolt of  McCann-Erickson buying Putnam, Powell and Lowe (and Sterling Cooper) was to Don. (I kept thinking about Albert Brooks in "Lost in America," telling anyone who'll listen that he's a senior vice president at M-E.) All the hard knocks and hard lessons learned of the season came to a head in fueling his single-minded determination not to become a cog at what he considers "a sausage factory." It's also made clear by the flashbacks to his boyhood with his hot-headed father that he wants to do everything he can to avoid being beaten down by life, to literally getting killed by a kick in the head from a horse.

By the end of this episode, as Don moves into his new apartment, you realize that for the first time in years he's really making a fundamental change in his life. He's (mostly) let go of the ruse of Don Draper, he's letting go of his idyllic vision of the wife and family, even at the great cost of hurting his older children, and he's starting to actually think about how he treats other people.

From the start of this season, Don was backsliding into his old patterns of fooling around in varying degrees (the one-night stand with the stewardess, the deeper entanglement with Suzanne) and keeping everyone around him at arm's length. I thought it was interesting that we didn't see Don running back to Suzanne, or into another's arms even though nothing's really stopping him. He's pouring everything he's got into the new venture. As he told Bert, "I'm sick of being batted around like a ping pong ball. I want to work. I want to build something myself."

We’ve come a long way in 13 weeks. “Mad Men” covered an incredible amount of territory in its just-wrapped third season, weaving social, cultural and political issues of the day (mid-to-late 1963) into its tapestry of the lives, loves and ambitions of a wonderfully distinct group of characters. “Mad Men” creator/exec producer

Matthew Weiner was kind enough to spend an hour on the phone sharing his thoughts about the grand design of the season, though he was careful not to say a word about Sunday’s finale, which I hadn’t seen at the time we spoke (Nov. 5).

How did you wrap your arms around something as monumental as the Kennedy assassination?

We have an experience to measure it against. I think 9/11 is a very close experience – it’s very different kind of experience but I was definitely trying to recreate the sensation that we had on that day: The collective shock, the loss of faith in institutions.

That’s why I did the thing about the heating and the air conditioning going off in and Hildy saying ‘The building will take care of it.’ Right there it was a way to say that (Sterling Cooper) is an institution. Marriage is an institution, the wedding is an institution, work is an institution, family is an institution.

Dramatically I wanted to hit the audience by surprise. We were going to do it in (episode) 11 originally and then we had enough story to push it into 12. It was never going to be the last episode because I wanted it to hit the characters and the audience in the way that it did. The episode starts out as a regular episode and then it takes a left turn.

You telegraphed it through the glimpse of the invitation for Margaret’s wedding on Nov. 23.

It’s kind of a ‘Twilight Zone’ move. (Alerting the aud that) this is going to happen this year and these people don’t know it.

After a season of twists, turns, trysts and trips (Roma anyone?), we're in the home stretch for what should be a momentous third-season finale for "Mad Men" on Sunday night.

Yes, I know that Weiner is of the David Chase/"Sopranos" school where the big, big stuff usually happens in the penultimate episode. And certainly, the JFK assassination in last week's episode, "The Grown Ups," set a number of interesting things in motion. But it's folly to predict this show (remember, Roger Sterling actually turned down an opportunity for cheap-and-easy drunken sex just a few episodes ago) -- so why bother.

Watch this space on Sunday night for a Q&A with the maestro himself, Matthew Weiner. We had a nice long chat on Thursday morning about the big themes and the grand design of this season, though he said not a peep about the finale. I've been spoiled with advance screeners for episodes this season (usually landing on my desk on the Fridays) but not for the season finale. I'll watch it like a civilian and do my best to make sense of it before the bars close (L.A. time).

The Q&A will pop up right after the finale ends, or a little after 11 p.m. (L.A. time). Matt, as always, covers a wide range of territory -- he offers some particularly interesting insights into the foot fiasco from "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency."

Can you guess who he's talking about with this observation: "His use of silence is such an advanced concept of acting."

I don't know where to begin. I want to scream at you for ruining all of this...But then you tried to fix it, and there's no point. There's no point, Don.

A season of monumental changes for "Mad Men's" central players came to its near-conclusion with a storyline that grabbed those of us at home by the throat, shook us up and left us in mourning for the loss so profound, and yet still so hard to define, even 46 years on.

"Mad Men" is particularly involving for viewers because there's so much to choose from, between the stable of fantastically rendered characters and the period touches that can provoke so much thought about the way we lived then, and now. But there was no choosing in this episode. The JFK assassination is something we've all lived with as a part of our collective consciousness, in too many ways to detail here.

So, to borrow a phrase from the "Mad Men" blogger I admire most, Alan Sepinwall: Damn. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. This was an impossible assignment, very, very, very well done.

After my first viewing of this episode,"The Grown-Ups," I barely processed the developments for Betty and Don, Betty and Henry, Pete, Peggy and Roger. By the time the angelic, and so purely American, voice of Miss Skeeter Davis sang of heartbreak, with her 1962 hit "The End of the World," over the closing credits, I just felt incredible sadness -- not sobbing sad, but a kind of aching in my bones, no kidding. Because this was no dramatist's concoction. This all happened in the world as it was just six years before I was born.

For a week, after the cliffhanger ending of "The Color Blue" as Don was showered with applause, I've been imagining the fireworks that were sure to erupt when Betty finally confronted him with all the ammunition she gathered from the desk drawer. I was thinking of mega histrionics, screaming, furniture flying, glass breaking, binge drinking, etc.

I should've known better. When it really matters, this show is rarely predictable. That the showdown in "The Gypsy and the Hobo" between Betty and Don would come in whispers, in dimly lit rooms through gritted teeth -- fantastic. It was not at all what I expected but it was so right; kudos to scribes Marti Noxon, Cathryn Humphris and Matthew Weiner and helmer Jennifer Getzinger.

I've been hard on Betty this season, but she regained her humanity in this seg because she wasn't a screaming banshee. In fact, she was as good as Don could've hoped for -- much better than he deserved, what with his latest lover waiting in the car outside the house. The fact that Suzanne finally crawled away in the cold, dark night was just right too. A confrontation with Betty would've distracted from the real drama unfolding between a wife and husband coming to grips with the fact that she doesn't really know him, nor trust him, at all. "You're a very, very gifted storyteller," Betty tells him. And she knows his predilection for bailing when the going gets rough: "Are you thinking of what to say or are you just looking at that door?"

Betty was obviously considering staying a lot longer than a week in Philadelphia while she sorted out her future and her father's estate. Her exchange with the family lawyer was rough to hear on a human rights level -- the idea that a woman seeking a divorce in those days would basically be up a creek without a paddle -- but again, it rang true. The lawyer did give her sound advice. (Didn't it sound like he called her "Betsy"?)

For Don, I think that after the immediate W-T-F? shock of the confrontation with Betty (loved the scene when he staggers out from his den into the kitchen), he was still trying to work his best Don Draper mojo on her right up until the moment in the bedroom where she asks him about "Adam." Even as he was taking her through the story of his tortured parental experience, he didn't volunteer that he had a half-brother until she pressed him about the "boy in the pictures."

This is good news. It looks like the wheels are in motion on a deal between Warner Bros. TV and NBC on "Southland" that would pave the way for the police drama to move to TNT.

I'm told that NBC was playing hardball in the negotiations to parole the show, insisting on being paid out in full upfront (or very soon thereafter) for the six episodes it had ordered this season but, for reasons that have nothing to do with the pursuit of quality programming, chose not to air. The $$$ owed to NBC would've added huge amounts to the overhead costs on each episode, making it that much harder for John Wells Prods. and WBTV to make economic sense of a new deal for the show on a basic cable license fee.

Hopefully, for the sake of good TV, reason prevailed. I know for a fact "Southland" had high-level champions at the Peacock, and it can't be easy for them to see it go to another net. But if you love something...yada yada.

As my colleague Michael Schneider reports:

The saga of homeless cop drama "Southland" appeared one step closer to resolution on Friday.
According to a report by The Wrap, Warner Bros. TV and NBC had settled their differences on a deal that would end their relationship on the show -- and allow Warner Bros. TV to sell the series to another entity.

That outlet is believed to be TNT, although no pact has been finalized yet. Warner Bros. TV has 13 episodes of "Southland" in the can -- including the six produced for NBC this fall before the Peacock pulled the plug.
NBC informed Warner Bros. TV two weeks ago that it would ax the John Wells Prods. skein, which had been set to bow this Friday, Oct. 23. at 9 p.m. NBC is airing "Dateline" in its place.
"Southland" stars Ben McKenzie and Michael Cudlitz as L.A. beat cops.

"I don't care about your marriage, or your work, or any of that. As long as I know you're with me."

Whoa, Don Draper. You'd better have a flak jacket on underneath that tuxedo because you're about to face incoming missiles from all sides: your wife, your lover and your professional family.

This was the rope-a-dope episode of "Mad Men," one that meandered along with great character bits until just about halfway through when ... wham! Betty hears the keys to Pandora's Desk rattling around in the dryer and she unlocks more of a mystery that she ever bargained for. I love the way this mammoth plot development was played so randomly -- what if she hadn't done laundry that morning? -- and without any hint (at least that I caught) that it was coming.

Leave to Don Draper to engender not one but two psycho femmes with cause to come after him with both guns blazing. I found the scenes between Don and his latest extramarital squeeze, school teacher Suzanne, to be kind of creepy, frankly. She's nuts, folks, and it's only a matter of time before it all spills out of her upstairs apartment and onto the sidewalks of Ossining and the halls of Sterling Cooper, for Betty and the neighbors and the office chipmunks to see.

At first as this episode unfolded I was having a little trouble buying the Suzanne-Don relationship, which we're seeing in full bloom for the first time in this seg, "The Color Blue," penned by Kater Gordon and Matthew Weiner and helmed by Michael Uppendahl. Suzanne's a budding feminist, artsy/craftsy type who's probably headed to Stonybrook or Haight-Ashbury in the next four years or so. What does she want with a married Mr. Establishment type (even one that handsome)? She oughta be dating Ken Cosgrove. But then I saw how they were hinting at her brewing discontent with the relationship and it made more sense.

This just in: It's true. Robin Veith will not be back for season four of "Mad Men." The assistant who was with Matt Weiner nearly a decade ago when he was writing the pilot on spec has decided to leave the nest. Robin's segs include some of "Mad Men's" best, including "The Wheel" (season one finale), "The New Girl," "A Night to Remember" and "The Mountain King." Good luck and godspeed to Robin.

Struggle seems to be the overriding theme of this seg of "Mad Men": The struggles of a changing society, the emotional struggles of men and women, of the powerful and the subservient and the classic id-superego struggle to balance impulse and reason. (As voiced by Harry Crane when he finds himself in a pickle: "I'm not going to panic and do something stupid like I usually do.")

There was a fair amount of plot movement to digest in "Wee Small Hours," even if at first blush it didn't seem so. Betty takes a big step forward with Henry Francis but then turns on a dime and jumps three steps back. (Run, Henry, run!)

Our beloved Salvatore gets battered and bruised, professionally and sexually, and we're left with a big hint that he's heading into the wilds at a moment when he's wounded and vulnerable.

Don's weird power tango with Conrad Hilton continues at a feverish pace, and I think his frustration with that relationship has a whole lot to do with how demanding he becomes of the coltish Miss Farrell later on. And we see that no one at Sterling Cooper is running hotter under the collar these days than Roger Sterling. He's reduced to yelling for recognition of what value he provides to the agency these days. (Roger: "What do you think accounts does besides limit your brilliance?" Don: "I'd tell you but I don't want to hurt your feelings.")

Perhaps most intriguing to me in this episode, penned by Dahvi Waller and Matthew Weiner and helmed by exec producer Scott Hornbacher, was the advancement of the Hilton-as-Don's-father-figure storyline. Where the heck is this going? Beats me, but I don't mind. I love watching Chelcie Ross work. The exchanges between those two after Don delivers his trademark killer sales pitch for the international Hilton campaign, when the batty cowboy is criticizing Don for not giving him "the moon," as he'd asked, was such a father-son encounter that they didn't even try to mask it.

"What do you want from me, love? Fine, your work is good," Connie says in a patronizing, fatherly tone. "But when I say I want the moon I expect the moon!"

Can you identify this Navy man?

Hint: He just gave $3 million to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which is building a rehabilitation facility for wounded U.S. military personnel at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Bigger hint: Plinko!

It's Bob Barker, who served in the Navy as an aviator during WWII. Kudos to him for such a generous gift.