As I made my way through Mad Men’s seven seasons, I often questioned why I rooted for Don Draper. He is selfish, callous and at times candid to a fault. He goes through spells where he commits adultery about as often as I use the bathroom. He often hotboxes his office with secondhand cigarette smoke by noon. He has that “bad boy” charm, and gets away with it because he creates brilliant advertisements that earn his firm millions of dollars.

But for all my qualms about Don, I also saw a compassionate side throughout the remarkable 92-episode run. And that empathy, that solicitude, stays with him to the very end. For one, Don’s egalitarianism sets him apart from many other men in his business who fail to see their female or black colleagues as equals. Don also shows remorse in the wake of his poor judgment – the only problem is that he keeps on doing it. He tries to find refuge from his troubled past in alcohol and women because he sees no other way. Nobody would debate Don is deeply flawed; he tries to be better, even if he sometimes fails.

At the end of Mad Men, Don meditates cross-legged on a grassy meadow near a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. With his eyes closed, it reminds me of the opening scene of the pilot, when Don – as clean-shaven there as he is in the last scene of the show – sits alone at a table next to a bar in a crowded restaurant amidst a haze of smoke, scribbling furiously on a napkin, face furrowed in that now-familiar Don Draper expression of concentration.

In both the first and last scenes, Don is conceptualizing a new advertisement. We learn this about the final scene from what follows it: the iconic 1971 “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” commercial, which the show insinuated that Don himself created. As it becomes clear that Don’s enlightenment as he meditates is his conceivement of perhaps the greatest advertisement ever made, what becomes even clearer is that Don always was – and will always be – an advertising man. He understands that advertisements are just iterations of the fact that there’s some sort of emptiness inside everyone that needs filling, and the best ads must subliminally fill that void by drawing a link between that emptiness and the product itself. Whether or not a new Ford or a Lucky Strike cigarette or Belle Jolie lipstick can actually fill the void is beside the point – nobody was better at making you think those products could than Don Draper.