Betty Francis deserved better. And that’s the point, not just of her brutal cancer diagnosis, but of the character’s entire story on the show.

Mad Men is often as cruel to its characters as the world around them would have been (good-bye, Sal), and the sight of Betty wheezing her way up the college stairs signaled a heartbreaking but fitting fate for a woman of the Feminine Mystique generation. In an episode full of people trying desperate things to change their lives, Betty’s calm nihilism made her both an outlier and, for maybe the first time, the most rational person in the story. So often childish and petty and outright cruel, Betty grew up just in time to accept her own ending—something her ex-husband, and almost no one else on the show, has ever been able to do.

Betty’s story was just one part of a larger episode that was also about, among other things, private air travel and Oklahoma VFW halls; it was another way of signaling how hard it’s always been for women like Betty to have their stories told—and how hard it’s been for Mad Men itself to tell her story, really. After Don and Betty broke up at the end of Season 3 it often seemed that the show didn’t know what to do with Betty, a vestigial limb of suburban life on a show that had moved, like Don, fully into urban stories. Betty gained weight and lost it, flirted with a pre-teen, made inexplicably bad decisions, and after a while seemed to exist only as a foil for Sally and, occasionally, Don.

Her cancer diagnosis, in its cruel way, brought some meaning to that time in the wilderness. The show didn't know what to do with Betty because Betty didn't know what to do with Betty; her embrace of her own death sentence was the most significant acknowledgement we've ever gotten of how desperate her privileged housewife status really was. “Why was I ever going?” she replies when Henry asks why she’s bothering to continue taking classes. The psych degree was going to be pointless, but it was also going to bring her, for maybe the first time, some kind of fulfillment. The fact that she won’t get it seems about in-line with what the world has taught this woman to expect.

Meanwhile, out in a cornfield, there’s Don and his endless burning faith that there is something better, just out of reach. His latest plan, to cool his heels in a random Oklahoma motel and actually open up about his past, has been slapped down with the force of a phone book to the face. Handed a death sentence of his own in the form of the McCann merger, Don is responding with his usual technique of running away, now shedding even his car (to a younger, dumber version of Don) to improve his speed. She may not have finished her study of Freud, but Betty learned that fulfillment could only be found by looking inward; Don never did—perhaps out of fear that, by looking too far inside, he would find nothing there at all, an empty shell at the center of the dead man Dick Whitman had occupied.

And then there were Pete and Trudy, always depicted as the younger shadows of Don and Betty, falling back into each other's arms in a way the Drapers never could. Pete’s looking for salvation in Wichita, having no idea that somewhere in a nearby state, Don is there, finding nothing at all. Does that mean that Pete and Trudy’s Hail Mary pass at happiness is doomed to the same fate? It’s hard to say—like so many of the great Mad Men scenes, the meaning of the scene is up to you, more about your own experiences of love than whether or not Pete has actually stopped being a little shit. But Pete and Trudy, for better or for worse, found a way to find something new together. Don and Betty, by choice and by the fate of cancer cells, are both utterly on their own.

And the fact that Betty had no choice—that her fate is not random, exactly, given all the smoking, but still somehow arbitrary—is maddening, both from the perspective of history and how Mad Men has told Betty’s story. Many women on the show have been victims, particularly of Don’s selfishness, but few have suffered as often, and with so little apparent sympathy, as Betty. The final glimpse of her trudging up the stairs is touching, but also one more poke in the eye at a woman who, from the very beginning, as the nagging housewife who kept Don away from the bohemian Midge, never stood much of a chance. She doesn’t even get to have the final word in the episode: the last shot is of freewheelin’ Don, basking in the sun while Betty makes her plan to be buried in her blue chiffon. Betty Francis deserved more from the world, as so many women of her generation did. But Betty deserved better from Mad Men, too.

Correction, May 13: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Don Draper’s location in this episode. He is in Oklahoma, not Kansas.

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