The penultimate season of Mad Men starts in a few weeks, so it’s a great time to look back at some of the show’s definitive episodes. “The Wheel” is undoubtedly one of them. As A.V. Club writer Todd VanDerWerff writes, that pitch to Kodak is still incredible:
Somewhere in the middle of that pitch, though, he [Don] realizes the place he longs to go is the place he’s already talking about, even if he won’t allow himself to feel that for more than a millisecond. He’s trapped by time, as we all are, forced to live our lives in sequence, as the same, flawed people who never really realize the truth of who they really are at heart, which is wounded and beaten and fleeting. But also, possibly, kind and good and capable of something outside of themselves.