…but everyone tries to hang on.

I have heard a lot of complaints about this season of Mad Men, some of them valid and some not – I wouldn’t rank the sixth among the show’s greatest seasons, but it’s still one of the best things on TV – yet the one point people keep returning to is that it’s simply so damn frustrating. This used to be a show about successful people kicking ass (and being assholes); now, everyone is fighting tooth and nail just to keep what they have from crumbling.

This sense that both the show and the characters have run up against a brick wall is due in part to unavoidable historical circumstance – 1968 was nothing if not frustrating, and portraying it any other way would be dishonest – and partly to the nature of the protagonist (Anyone who thought Don Draper would react well to the hippie era hasn’t been paying attention). Lost, confused Don Draper isn’t nearly as fun as in-command Don Draper, but this is the path he and the show have always been on. The party has to end sometime, and Don can’t be lord of all he surveys forever. His malaise may be frustrating but it’s also honest.

Still, as compelling and bold as a season ruled by entropy may be in theory, it can get awfully hard to watch. Mad Men has always been a show about dissatisfaction, about people who have everything but still want more, but the ennui of earlier seasons has festered into something more pernicious. As Ken’s monologue about mutually assured destruction implies, it feels like everyone has their finger on a self-destruct button, waiting to blow themselves and everyone else away at a moment’s notice.

So, when Pete and his father-in-law run into each other at a cathouse, there’s no gentlemen’s agreement to hide the truth from their respective wives, as might have happened in an earlier season, when Pete hadn’t done quite so much to rub Mr. Trudy’s dad the wrong way. Instead, Mr. Trudy’s dad pulls his account with SCDP, and Pete tells Trudy that he caught her father with “a 200-pound Negro prostitute,” putting the final nail in the Campbell marriage’s coffin. Mutually assured destruction isn’t enough to stop the escalation, as Ken predicts, and everything gets blown to shreds.

Don’s meeting with Jaguar Herb, everyone’s least favorite car salesman, goes just as well. The already-strained relationship (done no favors by Jaguar Herb’s wife’s insufferable droning about puppies) takes a final hit when Herb, once again, starts to interfere with the creative process and Don – without Roger or Pete there to hold his leash – bites the hand that feeds one time too many, ending that lucrative arrangement and leaving SCDP without a car or Vick’s just as it’s about to go public. Whoops.

But, amid this poisonous atmosphere of self-annihilation, there are people trying to build things, and that’s what makes “Mutually Assured Destruction” easier to get down than most episodes this season. After weeks of failures and Pyrrhic victories, it’s nice to see a handful of people pull victory from the jaws of defeat. I loved seeing Roger pull in a major account – the first time he’s felt useful since, I don’t know, season one? Ever? I loved seeing Don and Ted Chaough, both sick of playing runner-up to the big boys, decide to merge their agencies almost on a whim. I loved Bert Cooper sashaying into Pete’s office to tell him their stock is worth $11 a share and then asking for spirits of elderflower. I loved Peggy confidently typing out the news of the merger: “For immediate release.” It’s moments like those – just watching smart people do good work – that made Mad Men so appealing to begin with, and it’s a shame (albeit a necessary one) that they have been so few and far between this year.