A wise soul once said, “Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination”, and with Mad Men wrapping up its final season last night that quote seems especially poignant. When a close up of a smiling Don Draper (Maybe Dick Whitman) cut to the famous “If I could buy the world a Coke” commercial many people felt cheated. Lifelong fans felt as if their whole viewing experience had been invalidated by a questionable ending, but that is just not the case.

Before we really get going, know that this is not going to be a recap of the final episode. Recapping episodes is a lot harder than it sounds, and there are people who do it so much better than me. If you want to check out some quality recaps go read Allan Sepinwall or Molly Lambert, they are worth it.

Now, there might be a post on this very website claiming that “Empire Strikes Back” is not the best Star Wars movie because the ending leaves something to be desired, and yes that is true, but television shows and movies are different. Mad Men is judged by different standards than a Star Wars movie. A movie has a limited amount of time to convey a story to the viewer, and if any of that time is wasted the feeling of being let down is warranted. However episodic television is a different monster. On television, there is an almost indefinite amount of time to tell a story, and the details of these stories matter more than the end point.

When the Coke ad danced across your screen, a fair response was “Great, Don Draper traveled across the country and he still just makes commercials and sells things. What a waste.” Everything you know about Don Draper helped you form that opinion, so the problem is it wasn’t a waste. Before the finale there were 91 hours of great television, which were consistently interesting, engaging and thought provoking. Each week viewers came back and tuned in to spend time with characters they felt connected to. The connection to these characters was never about what are they going to do next, but what are they doing right now. The current interactions and story were always more interesting than the overarching plot and finality of the series.

If you truly believed that Mad Men was a waste, you would have stopped watching seasons ago. You would have stopped caring about Peggy, Joan, Roger and Don. The slow burn of the past seasons would have turned you off while waiting for the next big plot twist that never came. The plot twist, just like in real life, is there really are no big plot twists. Yes things change, but they keep moving on.

What needs to be remembered about Mad Men is not how it ended, but everything that happened before the ending. The details were what made watching so enjoyable. Things like Peggy slowly growing and maturing into a an equal of anyone at the advertising agency, the stylistic changes of clean cut business men becoming bearded hippies or a character like Duck Phillips continuing to turn up like a bad penny.

In the end, we learned so much about these characters as they lived and grew throughout the 60’s, that this shared history is much more useful when trying to predict their future, than some happy ending montage could ever be. The journey of watching that history was the star of Mad Men and if you missed that you most likely ended up in the wrong place.