As finales go, Mad Men’s was a good one. Mostly because, like any good closing chapter, it struck a balance. It didn’t just wrap things up, though it did do plenty of that. It also gave us room to think.

In storytelling, a measure of ambiguity is a gift. We think we want to know everything, but we don’t. There’s life in mystery.

From this perspective, the finale was brilliantly structured. Much of the work satisfied the need for closure by delivering characters to places they’d been seeking for seven seasons:

Peggy found a path to both personal satisfaction and professional success.

Pete found an escape from the New York ad world he always knew, deep down, was eating him alive.

Roger found a relationship with a woman who just might be his equal.

Joan found true professional independence.

Sally found her grown-up self, or at least the first signs of it.

Betty found the ability, finally, to assert herself and be heard, even if it did come at a terrible cost.

Then the march to closure stopped, or at least veered off course, with Don, the biggest loose end and the one left most untied.

Or so I thought.

Much to my surprise, every recap I’ve seen (too many to link but if you’re reading this you’ve no doubt read your share) has been in agreement that Don went on to make the iconic Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial that closes the series.

I don’t think that’s what happened. More accurately, I don’t think that would have happened.

In order to figure out what Don ultimately found, and what he did next, it’s important to remember what he was seeking. We could argue about the details but, mostly, Don was searching for the authentic self. For freedom from bullshit. For something honest, human, and real.

Advertising is many things, and some of them are good. But it is not, in the context of Mad Men, freedom from bullshit. To believe that Don’s final scene was the beginning of a path back to McCann Erickson and life at the top of the Big City Ad Game is to believe that what he really did in that moment was quit.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this interpretation — all of this is just that, interpreting — but everyone who holds it (including, seemingly, Jon Hamm himself) should understand the implication. Which is that Don Draper, a man whose quest for self consistently brought him to or near personal harm, decided none of it was important anymore, and that the way things were was actually really great.

For Don to find peace and connection among a bunch of strangers, after finally shedding his tethers, makes sense. For him to jump to a new life from there makes even more. For him to do these things and then decide he wants back in to the world that had driven him mad makes none at all.

Don ends the series as a (presumably still) well-off, highly accomplished, newly enlightened, still-fairly-young man. That man, having gone through what he went through, doesn’t go back. Maybe to New York and to his friends and family — maybe — but not to McCann Erickson. Not to the things he so desperately and deservedly tried to shake.

Of course, even if you buy that he didn’t go on to make the Coke ad, it’s still there. So what does it mean?

The answer goes all the way back to Season One, Episode One:

Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay. You are okay.

Film works as a medium because of the leaps and connections we make in our minds. The difference between comedy and tragedy isn’t what happens, it’s what happens next.

The Coke ad is a wink and a nod to Don’s genius and a confirmation that he, finally, is free. It’s the billboard on the side of the road, screaming with reassurance, that he is okay.

There would have been no way to conclude Mad Men without addressing both advertising and Don Draper’s relation to it. This is the central concern of the show and Weiner tackled it head-on by closing with Coke. To the extent that he had any obligation to wrap Don’s story up, this was it. Don is at peace with advertising, finally, because it’s no longer who he is.