After watching the finale of Mad Men‘s third season on Sunday night, I feel embarrassed. How could I have honestly thought that Don Draper would leave 1963 crying over his dissolved marriage or whining in his office at Sterling Coo?

Someone at Roger Sterling’s daughter’s wedding said that we, America, recovered from FDR’s death by dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one, it was his implication, looked back. Don Draper once said there was no American history. There’s no history of Americans, you could say–as individuals we have no personal histories, nothing but where we are and where we’re going. North American Aviation. The Moon. The War in Vietnam. (Eventually, bell-bottoms.) Besides, you never saw yourself where you where anyway.

Sunday night, everyone expected tragedy–we expected a rerun of JFK getting shot, another one of our idols to come crashing down. He didn’t. Draper spent most of this season genuinely bored–sleepwalking through an affair, so bored at work he was convinced he could do everyone else’s job. By now, you know the story–it was like a great men on a mission movie, but, you know, on Madison Avenue. Don regained his sense of purpose. It’s a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, he could have only found after the lack engendered by JFK’s assassination. A moment of pervasive emptiness–what did we do?–we did something. America hates a vacuum. Last night Draper filled his vacuum with a torrid sense of urgency that will propel him–where else–into the future.