In our
April cover story, Jon Hamm told
GQ's Brett Martin about the first time Matt Weiner described Mad Men's ending.
"He just kind of had this idea. This image," Hamm explained. "I said, 'That's very poetic. All right. But now we've got to get there.' It's one thing to say we're going to end in Topeka, buthow are we going to get to Topeka?"
Mad Men being the bank vault of information that it is—Weiner is famously strict about the secrecy of the show's details—we assumed Hamm was bringing up Kansas metaphorically. "It takes a certain kind of homebody to hear the final moment of the most important character he may ever play and think ‘Topeka,'" Martin writes. But in last night's episode—the second to last episode
ever—Don tells Sally in a phone conversation that he is… well, we'll let Don take it from here: "Well, I'm in Kansas right now. I'm going to take Route 35 and then over on 40, to 89, to the Grand Canyon." We looked at a map. This route takes him directly through…
Topeka.
Which is to say: Jon Hamm gave away a major plot point of the season's penultimate episode. In
January. To a major media source. And nobody noticed.