[Production note: Does it completely disorient you to watch a Thanksgiving episode in early May? And, to make it even more temporally upsetting, to watch a Thanksgiving episode on Mother's Day? Is it just us? Are we weak of constitution and fragile of mind? All we know is that we want some canned cranberry sauce right now, as these Rankings spill forth like so much rotten fruit from our overflowing mind-cornucopia. Shut up, it's late, we should be asleep. Next to a can of cranberry sauce. We're not letting that go until we get some.

Last week's Power Rankings can be found here.]

Don Draper (last week: 2)

Here's the thing about the weeks following those history-making, paradigm-shifting Rankings in which Don slips on the banana peel of Fate and momentarily stumbles into the second position: Order is always, always swiftly restored to the Draperverse; we're not sure what would happen if Our Hero weren't allowed to immediately scramble back to the top of the Power Pyramid, but we imagine that a theoretical second consecutive Monday morning of two-slottedness would involve so much grief-vomiting into a fedora that we'd require an intravenous drip of one part rye to three parts Four Loko just to get straight long enough to mash out a suicide note. (We take this show very seriously.) Thank Anna Draper in Heaven that the Creator (Matthew Weiner) allowed Don to scramble back to his feet after last week's existential knockout, even if he hasn't completely regained his footing (and probably never will).

"Is this the little girl I carried? / Is this the little boy at play? / I don't remember growing older / When did they?" — "Sunrise, Sunset," from Fiddler on the Roof

Having given us what we wanted all season, Mad Men decided to call our bluff and give us what we asked for. This episode was a throwback to earlier seasons in terms of pacing and plotlines, but it wasn't the white-carpeted thrill ride down an elevator shaft to hell we've now been conditioned to expect. As Pete Campbell found out the hard way, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is not considered Madison Avenue's cutting edge by the New York Times or anyone else important. And they're not being kept off the record because they're so out-there and revolutionary. No, SCDP has become a place where safe ideas land B- and C-list accounts. Rather than moving up the golden escalator from Menken's to Macy's, the agency has proceeded laterally toward Manischewitz.

When you watched Don Draper drop the needle on The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” during Sunday night’s episode of Mad Men, was your immediate reaction, “Holy crap, how much did that cost to license?” You were not alone. As you may recall, when Conan’s band played “Lovely Rita” on air during the last days of his Tonight Show run, a lot of people assumed it was a calculated budget-hit middle-finger to NBC. According to Questlove, who knows some stuff about playing walk-on music for late-night talk shows, the price tag for that blip of Beatles would be $500,000. He turned out to be wrong in that particular instance, because NBC had a blanket license with Apple Corps that made usage cheaper. But, obviously, getting The Beatles is never cheap. So what kind of cash are we talking about? Satiating inside-baseball curiosity, ArtsBeat dug around and got the numbers for Mad Men’s Beatles placement: For that bit of sitar magic, the show doled out a cool quarter of a million dollars. Nuts, right?

"Well let me tell you 'bout the way she looked / The way she'd act and the color of her hair / Her voice was soft and cool / Her eyes were clear and bright / But she's not there" — The Zombies, "She's Not There"

Michael Ginsberg pitches an Axe body spray commercial about how Chevalier cologne will make the chicks flock to you as if you were a rock star. A Chevalier exec with a swishy voice demands "chaos and the fun, that sort of adolescent joy" — a theme you might recognize from basically every ad campaign conducted since the '60s. Stan makes the observant point that a dreamy track by The Zombies won't evoke the same kind of carefree glee as The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night. Don has never kept up with music. His aesthetic fascism is mostly visual. The young people all roll their eyes at him behind his back as a result, but how much more would they roll their eyes if he actually tried to keep up with them?

"Well I've heard your dirty stories about your last affair / And how you got in houses when you knew no one was there / If you want to find a lover gonna love till the end / Go on and find yourself a lover that can be your best friend" —The Lovin' Spoonful, "Bes' Friends"

Do you believe in magic, Glen Bishop? You'd better, because that's what it will take for Sally to ever make out with you. Sally and Glen are still phone friends even though Glen is now in boarding school, where you just know he is top dog when it comes to hazing. JK, you know he gets dicks drawn on his face by the lacrosse team every night. It's beginning to seem weird that Sally still has no friends besides Glen. You're telling me a super-hot blonde girl with new white patent go-go boots and access to a cool mod apartment in New York City has no friends besides a weird overconfident kid she lived next to in the suburbs for a few years? Even if she made the phone cord into a trip wire for Henry's mother and then got credit for saving her life, is a little bit of flattering attention really worth a long-distance phone relationship with Glen Bishop? He is not charming or cute and he has terrible game. Maybe Sally finds Glen's lack of game sweet after seeing what the prize is for winning Roger Sterling's.

"Can we go back to the days our love was strong? Can you tell me how a perfect love goes wrong? Can somebody tell me how to get things back the way they used to be? Oh God, give me the reason I'm down on bended knee." —Boyz II Men, "On Bended Knee"

Remember the leisurely pace of the early- to mid-'60s? Neither does anyone else, it was so fucking long ago. Everything now happens faster and more intensely. There's no time to dwell on the past on your Kodak carousel, lest you risk getting trapped in a wrinkle in time when you trip with your wife's psychiatrist. Any one of the events in last night's Mad Men would have made for a John Deere tractor accident-type talking point in a prior season; now we get them all at once, with a neat Pulp Fiction–style narrative trick reminding us that while Mars is an enormous planet, everything that occurs on it is happening at the same time.

[Production notes: How great was this episode? Feels like an instant all-timer, right up there with the suitcase, the tractor, and the Season 5 DVD outtakes of the makeup department entombing January Jones in the Fat Betty suit. Amazing. We should probably just quit right here. But we're not going to, because letting you down is an important part of our journey together. So as they say: Here goes nothing.

Last week's Power Rankings can be found here.]

1. Don Draper (last week: 1)

I don't quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. —From Texas sniper Charles Whitman's suicide note

Oh, Pete Campbell, you poor bastard. Crying in the elevator in front of Don and inspiring short stories by Dave Algonquin. All you wanted was to climb to the top of the glass-paneled mountain, and now that you're there all you want to do is jump off. The horror-movie tone of last week's episode spilled over into this one like blood slithering under a bed. The driver's education video that aroused Pete's tragic case of ephebophilia was Signal 30 (also the name of the episode), a shock crash-porn scare film from 1959 that shows real footage of car accidents and nightmarish mutilations while a passionless narrator intones that the victims could have avoided their fate. The California equivalent is graphically titled Red Asphalt, and was still shown in high school driver's ed classes last I checked. Nothing like a flickeringly lit dark room to give you ample time to perv on lithe young classmates and imagine that you are 16 with your whole life ahead of you instead of an adult whose defining choices have all been made. The cartoonishly innocent teenage girl Pete creepily crushes on (she gets drunk on vanilla extract and wears daisy sandals) is just making a little hallway small talk because they haven't yet invented cell phones for her to pretend to be on. She's too nice or simply young to shut him down properly, and too naive to know he will definitely check out her ass when she shuffles away down the hall.

"Our mothers all are junkies. Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, naturally we're punks!" —The Jets, West Side Story

Don has a fever! And the only cure is more ambiguous dream sequences! Reformed king slut Don's nocturnal run-in with a former mistress played by a mod Mädchen Amick (Shelly on Twin Peaks) brought a David Lynch feel to this excellent episode. I was curious about Andrea, the tropical-colors-favoring copywriter who supposedly freelanced for Sterling Coop circa 1960. So Peggy has a female predecessor? How many times exactly did Andrea "handle" Don's account? Certainly her level of over-familiarity with him in the elevator spoke of a longer hire, and I wondered if screwing Don is what ultimately terminated her employment. For every ex of Don's we've met, there have to be millions more lurking in midtown (not to mention the rest of the New York area — or Greater Los Angeles for that matter). Megan is too smart to believe that Don's constant cheating was Betty's fault, or that it was for lack of sexual satisfaction. Megan picked Don up when he was with Dr. Faye. As baller as that was, it did not speak that well of Don's prowess for long-term commitment or an ability to deny his ego gratification. What Megan fears is that Don will always want multiple women, will always lust for something different. The fairy tale that Ginzo pitched was Cinderella, but the psycho-sexual subtext of "Mystery Date" was all Bluebeard. What's under the bed? Who's tied up in the basement? You murdered all those other women in cold blood; I'm supposed to believe you won't do it to me?

[Production notes: This is the second week of the Power Rankings on Grantland. Let's see if we can all get out of here before 3,000 words, OK? As always, we make no guarantees as to the accuracy of transcribed dialogue, period detail, or phonetic transcriptions of ostensibly Cockney accents. Rankings are arbitrary — maddeningly so — and should not be the basis for cash wagers unless you are a crazy person.

Last week's Power Rankings can be found here.]

1. Don Draper (last week: 1)

"It was kind of like the first time I had sex with Mick Jagger. I just couldn’t get over the fact that it was Mick Jagger. He’s an incredible lover, by the way. Amazing at oral — he loved it. What a mouth!" —Super-groupie Pamela Des Barres

The Heinz executives want Mick Jagger to lounge in a splash of mouthwatering sauce, even though if they wait a couple of years, they can get a new jingle from John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey in a kiddie-pool-size sauce-splash when The Who Sell Out. So to the concert we go. In the apartment Don and Megan share, the new Drapers seem to be playing house. Megan is a would-be actress, so she acts like Laura Petrie kicking back in white capris on the ottoman, playing the "cool young wife" role to the minidressed hilt. She could just as easily be backstage at the Stones show all kitted up like Marianne Faithful, exaggerating her French accent to make time with Keith. Megan knows Don and Harry won't be able to get anywhere near the Stones, but she's smart enough not to harsh Don's mellow by telling him.

Back in June, Bill Simmons got out his frustration with The Killing's er, controversial finale. Give it a read before the show returns with its (generally better-reviewed) Season 2 premiere on Sunday and relive the outrage:

If I invited you to my house for dinner tonight, you would come over and expect me to serve you food. Right?

Well, imagine we were having drinks in my living room for two hours. You're looking at your watch. It's 8:30. You don't smell any food. You don't say anything. Another half hour passes. You're on your third drink. You're getting legitimately hungry. You still don't say anything. And then, a half hour later, I stand up as if I'm ready for you to leave. We have this exchange.

Read the whole piece here.

Here comes The Real All Americans! It’s a period piece, it’s a football show, it’s a racial-strife drama. It sounds very intense. Explains THR:

Based on Sally Jenkins’ book about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Real All Americans chronicles the school's storied football program created by U.S. cavalry officer Richard Henry Pratt, an abolitionist and early equal rights proponent who made a harrowing journey to the Dakota Territory in 1879 to recruit the school's first students ... Pratt’s football program had a stunning win-loss record (167-88-13) and produced a string of famous athletes and coaches – including Olympian Jim Thorpe and coach Glenn “Pop” Warner.

Mad Men's first episode after an interminably long hiatus was not, as it turned out, really a Don episode. Nor was it a Pete, Roger, Peggy, Joan, or even a Sally episode (it was especially not a Betty episode). Like any brand that wants you to buy its newest, most modern product, the focus of Mad Men's Season 5 opener was answering the question that has plagued audiences since Season 4 ended: "What is Megan Draper like?" And, turns out, she is a nut! A French nut! (Une noisette!) And we like it! The show opens with four strangers, reminiscent of our boys but bizarro, who turn out to be executives at rival Y&R water-bombing a civil rights protest happening below. The splash-back victims make their way upstairs to confront the ignorant bros, and the story makes its way to the paper soon afterward.

[Production notes: The Power Rankings have moved to Grantland! Very exciting. Unfortunately, the content will be in no way improved in the transition; expect the usual shoddy attention to accuracy, laziness of thought, and prurience of intent. Actually, that's not entirely true: There's now an upgraded, more elegant logo with a bigger DDFBTL bolt. Evolution! Also, please bear with us as we remember how to do this; the show's been off the air for 14 years, a time during which we did nothing but drink bargain whiskey directly from a giant plastic bottle with a built-in handle. But now it's back, and we are very, very excited to once again appropriate Matthew Weiner's hard work for our own nefarious purposes.

Season 4 Power Rankings can be found here. Ranks do not carry over from last season, except when they do.]

1. Don Draper

He went through with it.