"Mad Men" Season Premiere Recap: There's A Lot Lower To Go From Here

The end is nigh for Mad Men and fans are all rooting for good – well, suitable – endings for Don Draper, Pete Campbell, Joan Hollway and the rest of the Sterling Cooper crew. Including, of course, the queen of all queens, Peggy Olson. In case you missed Sunday night’s season premiere, let us thoroughly spoil you in recapping what the episode set up.

If you just wanted to know what happeed to Don Draper after his utter fall from grace – and sobriety – last season, then you’re in for a long ride, because we have a lot of other characters to revisit first.

Last season closed on a newly empowered Peggy, literally and metaphorically wearing the pants and apparently on her way out of Sterling Cooper. In the season opening, we see her listening to Freddie Rumsen’s pitch for Accutron watches. Peggy is judging. Peggy is in charge. Except not quite, because she is now under the guidance of crusty ol' Lou Avery and “old-fashioned” doesn’t even begin to describe that guy. He dresses like Mr. Rogers, chuckles at his own corny jokes, and brags about his "peachy" weekend chopping firewood.

Meetings with him are more painful than a root canal to sit through and might be this season’s slowest scenes, but at least we see Peggy display some of that abundant SASS. Which she has plenty of room to do anyway - Pete and Ted are in Los Angeles, Bob Benson is in Detroit, and Don is still in Elba, leaving stressed-out, one-eyed Ken Cosgrove responsible for yelling at underlings.

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And Ken Cosgrove, artistic soul that he is, isn’t really adept at bossing people around.Ken's in Pete's old office now, and it's rubbed off on him. He's worried about corporate hierarchy and the power of perception, dumping a meeting with the new head of marketing at Butler Shoes on Joan because he's sure it's beneath him.

Joan, who is still being treated like, well, a girlie. In yet more chauvinistic news, Butler barely treats her like an adult human, much less a professional – because meetings with women are beneath him, obviously. But Joan has to figure out a way to wow him anyway, because he’s planning to pull the account from SCP and create an in-house marketing department. Joan is so accustomed to being either ignored or pawed-at that she misinterprets a college professor's quid pro quo intentions when he agrees to give her a tutorial in Business Marketing 101 (though maybe he was being intentionally ambiguous with his friendly remarks). Regardless, Joan gets the inside-baseball knowledge she needs to put Butler's marketing dept plans on hold indefinitely.

And in Don news – finally, we hear you groan, he and Megan are still together, sort of. They’re in a cross-country relationship, he I NY and she clawing at roles in NBC pilots on the West Coast. We catch up with him shaving in an airplane bathroom on his way west, then walking through the airport to Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group singing "I'm a Man." Disoriented for Don and detatched for Megan – that seems to be the mood of the reunion, as the two meet with her flamboyant agent Alan Silver (who reassures Don that his interest in Megan is purely professional, as if anyone had any doubts) and gives Megan the good news – she has a callback for something called Bracken’s World – which turns out to be a minor show, having run for a couple of seasons in the late 60s. It’s clear Meg has been seduced by the glamour of LA and Don seems to be on his way to losing her.

Someone else who’s all about LA now – our very own Pete Campbell, who, with a sweater tied around his shoulders and a trophy lady at his side, seems determined to live out the rest of his days in the sun.

Ted on the other hand is back in New York. The LA life wasn’t for him, apparently, so he’s embraced the NY life instead – catching up on work and being miserable with Peggy – strictly in a professional sense, because neither one seems to have anything going on privately.

Roger is also going through another period of boozy ennui, which in his case means palling around with some young hippies in a drug-fueled haze. If only his daughter would get off his back with her “forgiveness” and “peace” – she definitely seems to have moved on from last year.

Then it’s time for Don to go home, but guess who he runs into on the plane – Neve Campbell herself. In typical Don fashion, he does some flirting, while she explains that she was out west spreading her husband's ashes at Disneyland. The chance encounter ends with some more flirting, but it looks like the show isn’t done with Campbell’s character just yet – expect further appearances.