Skeeter Davis's The End of the World played under the closing credits of Mad Men 3.12 tonight, and it came pretty close to that in many, but not all, ways...

We knew it would be coming. But the logical time was the Season 3 finale - which will be on next week. Instead, Mad Men surprised us with a kick in the heart tonight, which started as a cold day with no heat in the offices of Sterling Cooper, proceeded to too much heat being pumped out, and soon showed us the television in Harry's office, which told us it was November 22, 1963.

It was painful to see those news clips again - worse than painful, as it always is, but also always instructive. Don's says everything will be fine, but of course it won't. In many crucial ways, our country has still not recovered from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I know that some of the tears I quietly shed as I watched the funeral of Teddy Kennedy this summer were for JFK.

And, yet, incredibly but not surprisingly, that wasn't the worst of it for Don. The assassination and the emotional cauldron it creates makes Betty realize she no longer loves him. Significantly, it's not just what Betty found out about Don's assumed identity - in a crucial scene the night before assassination, she still looks with love at Don as he takes care of their baby in the middle of the night. But after the assassination and Don's reaction to it, Betty gives Henry an incandescent smile that's the happiest we've seen from her in the three years of the series. Another brilliant performance from January Jones, and Jon Hamm, too.

What will become of Don now? What does the finale have left to tell us? If I could imagine that Mad Men could continue without Don, I'd almost see suicide as his next move.

But maybe not. Don still has some reserves of strength. People land on their feet in strange ways on Mad Men. The same terrible end of November that split Don and Betty have pulled Pete and Trudy closer.

What an episode. I'm looking forward to watching Dexter now - I could use a breather from the angst - a contest of serial killers would be relaxing.

But what an episode ... in addition to all of its other superlatives, it may well be the best fiction ever on the screen about the impact of November 22, 1963 on a stratum of Americans, influential and otherwise...

And I'll be back here next week, after I've seen the Mad Men finale.

Listen to a little of Skeeter Davis's The End of the World