Stop me if you've heard this one: Two iPhones walk into a bar. You say you've heard it? Like 3,000 times? And you can't stand that creepy John Malkovich iPhone commercial?

Have you heard the latest sexy Higgs Boson joke? Me neither. But I'm thrilled that during the July 4th holiday, while Joey Chestnut and the rest of us were involved in our own competitive eating contests and watching smiley-face fireworks, international physics nerds were busy celebrating some very different pyrotechnics. They were quaffing Champagne and delighting in the findings that after 48 years of hunting for it, the Higgs Boson, the particle field that gives all the other particles in the universe weight, if not mass, has been found. Bear with me here. Now I know why people write about …

Look! Up in the balcony! Wearing a deep tan, Cuban shirt, linen pants, and Florsheim shoes! It's Don Draper! Well, kinda, sorta, maybe. The actor Jon Hamm did appear at the Cannes Lions "Festival of Creativity" last week, and in his own modern man-wear, and loose, non-shellacked hair, looked much younger than Don ever has.

Capping a season with story lines that recently featured prostitution and suicide (and Peggy leaving!) all within the Sterling Cooper Draper nuclear family, "The Phantom," the season 5 finale, had much in the way of mushrooms and clouds to live up to. For the first 50 minutes, however, it felt repetitive and desultory, like "Groundhog Day" with a touch of "Marathon Man" (OK, Don, find a dentist already!). But the last six minutes were colossally great, even awe-inspiring. There were no huge surprises, but it built up the kind of masterly payoff that comes only from the expert synthesis of …

"Commissions and Fees," the aptly titled next-to-last episode of the season (gulp!), focuses on the fallout from acting on impulse. Shit sure happens when the bill comes due.

Jarring, sad, painful, "The Other Woman" was the best episode of the season by far, but also the most sickening. It deftly called into question the whole idea of ownership, and whether, like a curvy car, a sexy female employee is merely a commodity to be bought and sold for the right price.

Let's face it, kids, there's something about that Aqua Velva Man. Old Don Draper is back, and he's in rare form, snapping his fedora and romancing the Joan! How satisfying can an episode get?

Okay, bubelas. "Dark Shadows," the latest episode, certainly had a dark (and shadowy!) streak, in that it was all about competition, and the effects of jealousy. It was about working to get your mojo back, but still needing to poison the well of others who threaten you, even though you may have gotten "everything."

Last week's jaunty episode, "At the Codfish Ball," got its name from a Shirley Temple movie in which the pint-sized star struts her stuff. Whereas this week's opus, "Lady Lazarus," refers to a Sylvia Plath poem about suicide and the Holocaust. Hello, Mad Men!

Like the Heinz pitch that saved the day ("Some things never change,"), this episode was all about mothers and children, having multiple dinners, second childhoods, and dreams for the future. Unlike the sentimental beans campaign, however, which reenacts the same scene while tracing humanity in its march from brown goo to the moon, this particular dinner story results in disappointment, disillusionment, and the fury and sadness of being lied to --all very adult themes.