Oh Freddy. What a return! The man spends the first few minutes of Mad Men’s seventh season pitching the hell out of a watch commercial. He’s clear, concise, and delivers maybe the best pitch of his career. We’re now a little more familiar with a clean and concise Freddy — he quit the bottle years ago after that unfortunate pants-soiling incident. But it was the “best pitch of his career” thing that really threw us for a jolt last night.

Of course, by episode’s end we get the truth: Don Draper, on indefinite leave from SC&P, has been feeding Freddy ideas all over town. Even as he battle his bi-coastal demons, Don shows he’s still the best in the business. But after the first episode of the year, one is left to wonder the end game: how exactly does boosting Freddy’s profile get Don back into SC&P? Is that even his goal?

This was the kind of season premiere that Mad Men does really well. Not all the players are on the field, but all of the important ones are in the mix, and we quickly get a sense that not much has changed in the two months since Don was asked to take a break. We got our time stamp on the episode — Richard Nixon’s January 20, 1969, inauguration — and I still am unsure we’ll ever to see Don in the 1970s.

As we get close to the end (and mid-2015 won’t feel close by the time we get there), the most pressing question, of course, is what will happen to Don Draper. Like one of TV’s other recent great characters, Rust Cohle from True Detective, I’m not convinced Don has the constitution for suicide. We’ve seen the falling man in the opening credits for years now, but that has always struck me as more a symbolic fall than a literal one. And it’s safe to say Don has made that symbolic fall many times over the years and is likely in the middle of his latest, deepest free fall. As he walked onto the balcony in the last scene, Don looked as low as we’ve ever seen him — drunk, defeated, alone.

I sense that’s a theme we’ll see highlighted in the first several episodes, but I expect some kind of resurgence for Mr. Draper. The last episode of season 6 included a lot of honesty from Don: the post-pitch childhood story he told the Hershey execs; the family trip to that dilapidated whorehouse where he grew up. I think there’s still morality somewhere buried deep in Don even if he wonders aloud in the airplane if he’s broken. Surely, but not necessarily irrevocably.

A scene that struck me last night was when Don was on the red-eye back to New York. He passes up what is sure to be a successful rendezvous with a beautiful stranger (looking at you, Neve Campbell), and as soon as he verbally ditches her and things get awkward, he opens the airplane’s window blind and sees the light — blinding sunlight announcing a new day, perhaps?

It was nice to catch up with Pete in Los Angeles (nice pants!), Roger in the midst of a (drug-fueled?) binge of sexual awakening and parental turmoil, and Megan, who seems as successful and completely discontent as we’ve ever seen her. It’s great to see Joan being assertive and trying to clean up others’ messes, but I’m hoping we get to see some genuine advancement for her character this year. After all of these years serving others and sacrificing so much, Joan deserves to be rewarded with a full-time ad job at the firm — or an initial on the logo even?

And what of Peggy Olson. She’s struggling to figure out Lou, Don’s dreary replacement at SC&P, as well as how to be a slumlord. Her breakdown at the end of the episode was powerful: a woman who is so tired of getting the short end of the stick. I also expect that Peggy turns a corner here. My theory has always been that the show will end with Don working for Peggy; with everyone working for Peggy. The first episode of this season implies that she has a long way to go, but something tells me she’ll get there.