'Mad Men': Nine moments to ponder

Spoiler alert: This story contains numerous details from Sunday's episode, "The Forecast."

Mad Men tipped its hat to its past, while Don Draper scratched his head about the future in the AMC drama's fifth-to-last episode.

Here are some moments, large and small, from Sunday's episode, set in the summer of 1970.

• Don Draper gets berated, Part I.

Don (Jon Hamm) makes life difficult for his real estate agent, Melanie, oversleeping on the morning she is showing the penthouse that he had shared with ex-wife Megan. It doesn't help that the apartment has been stripped bare of furniture by Megan's vengeful mother and Don hasn't bothered to clean the carpet, which was stained with wine during a recent tryst.

"It looks like a sad person lives here," the agent says. "This place reeks of failure."

When she finally sells the place, Don, standing in the hallway, looks as if he has lost his mooring.

• Don is figuratively adrift at the office, where his work assignment – preparing a speech for Roger Sterling (John Slattery) detailing the ad firm's vision of the future – confounds him.

The brilliant ad man, who can spin a story out of just about anything, has writer's block, trying to get others to define the future for him. During a performance review, he asks Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) to talk about her dreams. His disillusion with his trade bubbles up when Peggy says she wants to "create something of lasting value."

"In advertising?" a bemused Don asks.

• Don gets berated, Part II.

Mousy ad man Mathis (Trevor Einhorn) finds his moxie and challenges Don. He took Don's advice on how to fix a relationship with a client he had offended. However, instead of smoothing things over, as Don had done with Lucky Strike's Lee Garner, the matter blows up in his face, costing him a cookie account. He says it worked for Don because Lee was in love with him.

Don disagrees. "Take responsibility for your failure. That account was handed to you and you made nothing of it because you have no character."

"You don't have any character," the brave (and now fired) Mathis fires back. "You're just handsome. Stop kidding yourself."

• Everyone's mean to Meredith.

Don's poor secretary (Stephanie Drake) gets it coming and going from Peggy and Mathis.

When Peggy barges in to tell Don he has to sign off on the cookie campaign, Meredith says, "He's very busy."

Peggy dismisses her. "Stay out of this!"

Later, when Mathis stops by to confront Don, he has two words for Meredith: "Get out!"

• Lou Avery is back.

Lou (Allan Havey), whose lack of passion and creativity drove Peggy crazy, is now in the firm's Los Angeles office. The best part is he's pursuing his real love, working Hollywood studios to get his cartoon produced.

The office secretary tells Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) that Lou is talking to Hanna-Barbera about his cartoon idea. "It's like Gomer Pyle, but he's a monkey."

Who wouldn't want to see that?

• Joan meets a guy.

While at the L.A. office, Joan starts a whirlwind romance with rich, retired and divorced real estate developer Richard (Bruce Greenwood).

When Richard follows her back to New York, it seems like there might be long-term possibility. However, when Joan admits she has a 4-year-old son, confessing to an earlier lie, Richard says he is done raising children and wants freedom.

The relationship seems nipped in the bud until Richard shows up at the office with a bouquet of roses, apologizing and asking if they can make things work.

Maybe Joan still has a chance at the satisfying, loving life she told Bob Benson she was holding out for.

• Betty meets a guy – again.

When Glen Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner), the little boy who once asked for a lock of Betty Draper's hair, stops by the Francis home to see her daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka), Betty (January Jones) doesn't recognize the 18-year-old, now mature, lean and sporting long sideburns.

"You look different," she tells Glen, with whom she had shared a sad, intimate conversation in Season 1.

"You look exactly the same," Glen responds, each taken by the other as a none-too-happy Sally looks on.

The big news is that Glen is heading to military service in Vietnam. Sally objects, worried about his safety and upset because of her anti-war beliefs.

Later, Glen returns to see Betty, with whom he is still smitten (When they shared that long-ago conversation, he told her he wished he were older.). When Betty rebuffs his advances, he makes it sound like he enlisted to please her, but then explains he did it to avoid having to deal with his stepfather's anger that he flunked out of college.

• Beauty rears its ugly head.

Sally, still fuming over the Betty-Glen mutual admiration society, can't take it any longer when her 17-year-old friend flirts with Don as he treats a group of girls to dinner before their multistate "teen tour." Don charms the teens.

Later, she chides her father for playing off his attractiveness, saying the criticism goes for Betty, too. "Anyone pays attention to either of you, and they always do, you just ooze everywhere," she says.

• The episode closes with The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, a fitting song for an episode so focused on beauty and appearances.