"Mad Men" premiere recap: Beginning of the end with "Severance"

"Mad Men" is back, and it's got a question to ask us: "Is that all there is?"

That's what's poised in the Peggy Lee song playing Sunday as the AMC series returned with "Severance," the first of its seven final episodes. And it's what Don, Peggy, and the rest of our favorite Sterling Cooper characters seem to be grappling with.

Here are the most important things we learned as "Mad Men" begins the end of its era:

1. Don is back to his old tricks - and haunted by the past.

Don Draper is going full Don Draper once again: Now divorced from Megan, he's got an answering machine full of messages and different girls on his arm every night. But, he keeps thinking of one old flame - Rachel Menken (the Jewish department store client from season 1). He dreams that she's modeling a fur coat at an office casting and later has sex with a sex with a diner waitress behind the restaurant who he thinks he's seen before (and kind of resembles her). But then when he tries to track Rachel down, he finds out she died of leukemia.

He tries to pay his respects at Rachel's shiva, but her sister is hesitant to let him in. "Oh, I know who you are," she tells him (and not in a good way). "She lived the life she wanted to live," she goes on, affirming that the children Don sees in the apartment are Rachel's. "She had everything."

2. Peggy and Joan take on the guys (and each other).

The duo take an excruciating meeting with three McCann-Erickson account men in hopes of getting a department store introduction for their Topaz pantyhose account, but are instead subjected to sexually-charged jokes by the gents. And both of them react to the harassment differently -- Peggy plasters on a smile and pushes the meeting on, while Joan (who receives the brunt of the jeering) can barely contain her disgust.

Afterwards, in the elevator, Joan fumes that she wants to "burn this place down," while Peggy is just happy they got the "yes" despite what they went through. She also tries to put the blame on Joan, saying she brings on those sorts of comments by dressing the way she does. Joan fires back, furious, and Peggy reveals her own jealousies: "You're filthy rich. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do."

3. Ken gets the boot (but not quite).

Ken Cosgrove's father-in-law retires from Dow Chemical, which prompts his wife to urge him to leave his job too so he can write his book and live the life that makes him happy. The next day he goes into work and is fired by McCann-Erikson, Sterling Cooper's new parent company, as Roger looks on. He's ordered to hand over all his accounts to Pete, and while he acknowledges the turn of events as "spooky," he won't need that severance from the firm - he gets hired as Dow's new head of advertising, and vows that they'll be seeing much more of him, but as a client ("And I hate to tell you, I'm very hard to please," he warns).

4. Peggy has a date.

After initially resisting, Peggy agrees to be set up with the brother-in-law of one of her underlings, Mathis. Her date, Stevie, is cute and they end up hitting it off - so much so that after a few drinks they're spontaneously planning a romantic getaway to Paris, only to realize she can't find her passport (it later turns up at the office - an apt metaphor for her career-obsessed life). But despite putting the brakes on the trip, they seem to really like each other, and Peggy refuses to sleep with him because she thinks he could be more than just a fling.

5. Don returns to the diner.

We end with Don at the diner, and that same Peggy Lee song. He tells the waitress about Rachel, and she suggests that maybe he dreamed about her all the time, but just remembered this dream. "When people die, everything gets mixed up," she tells him. "Someone dies, you just want to make sense of it, but you can't."

Bonus: Roger's mustache. Because it deserved its own spot on this list, possibly its own spin-off series and definitely its own parody Twitter account (if that hasn't happened yet, get on it, Internet).

Tell us: What did you think of "Severance"?