'Mad Men' recap: Down Easter

Don sank onto the bed, beaten up by his loss of control. Bobby toddled into the room, his shirt underneath his little sweater heartbreakingly untucked. This kid kills me. He brought his daddy back from the brink with some wonderfully specific questions about Don's own father. ''What did your daddy look like?'' he peeped. ''Like me but bigger.'' Oh, Don, bring it in for a hug. After a delightfully innocent, impromptu therapy session, Bobby concluded that ''We have to get you a new daddy.'' Don, suddenly the little boy in the room, looked like he was going to puddle onto the floor when Bobby wobbled over and threw his arms him. Later in bed with Betty, he tried the whole routine of I'll tell you what you want to hear, you do whatever you want, but in the end he gifted her with a confession of his own. ''My father beat the hell out of me,'' he whispered, ''and all it made me do was fantasize about the day I could murder him.'' Betty, shocked that Don had cracked open a window onto his past, clammed up. ''I didn't know that,'' she said simply, and her rigid spine softened as she sank down to spoon her broken husband.

By this point, I felt like I'd been roundhoused for a while in the stomach, but the episode didn't end there. Instead we floated back to Easter Sunday, and the aftermath of a crueler confession. As kids in sherbet-colored outfits frolicked on the lawn collecting eggs, Peggy's nattily dressed boy beelined for an egg, only to get shoved aside by a bigger, greedier child. ''These kids,'' Peggy murmured to Father Gill, who she'd come to see as something of a trusted ally. ''For the little one,'' he said, dropping an egg in her palm. Peggy's face went all slack and ashy, stunned by what looked like a sense of betrayal. The only time we've ever seen her that surprised was when Pete punished her at the bar for the sin of feeling good about herself. She looked like she'd been stripped naked, stranded in front of the church where the congregation could all gawk and throw stones at her. In a different time, and on a different show, Joan would squeal up to the curb in some unapologetically racy convertible and whisk Peggy away to a brunch in Manhattan with Carrie and the girls.

Best line of the best night of Mad Men yet: Joan staring down at a passed-out Sally Draper clutching an empty cocktail glass like a doll on the office sofa: ''She's here on a Sunday, and I respect that,'' she told another secretary. ''But you know she's earning more than all of us.'' I know she was most likely referring to Peggy, but it's a much funnier scene if you imagine that she's coolly assessing Sally's commitment to the Sterling Cooper team.

What do you think? Was that not the GREATEST LAST FIVE MINUTES EVER? Was Father Gill being cruel giving Peggy that glowing egg, or was it merely an inappropriate, albeit well-intentioned, acknowledgment that he knew her secret? Did the night, shove and all, give you hope for Betty and Don's marriage? And when Pete stood up from the conference table and revealed his John McEnroe shorts, did you hide your eyes?

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