Season 2's slinky cool "The Jet Set" has been definitively dethroned as Mad Men's kookiest episode ever. We've gone from time out of mind to out of mind time.

Another entertaining Mad Men episode brought the immediate aftermath of the precipitous merger between Don Draper's and Ted Chaough's rival agencies. This was a transitional episode, which nonetheless ended in tears, with the sudden assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

After a long span of increasingly airless personal drama, followed by last week's intrusion of a major historical tragedy, the show got back to its advertising roots with a vengeance. In fact, the show may have re-booted itself, as it did at the end of Season 3. For once again, the old Sterling Cooper etc. is no more.

The Flood is a good episode of Mad Men, especially in a Season 6 off to an uneven start. It came at a good time, too, reassuring that our characters are not all irretrievably stuck in tedious personal melodramas. That, actually, they can be very appealing people.

Will Mad Men regain the acclaim that made it the best drama on television? Based on the response to To Have and To Hold, so far the answer would have to be no.

I'll place my China Beach order on Monday and, within a few days, will begin to wend my way through all 62 episodes. I know there were be moments, probably a lot of them, when I'll be angry at how "wrong" the show is about "my" Vietnam.