Sally Draper finally said to her dad, Don, what all of us have been thinking for six seasons of "Mad Men." It came at the tail end of last Sunday's episode -- an episode already jammed with noteworthy scenes and dialogue.
After being left alone with her two little brothers in Don and Megan's apartment, Sally confronts a burglar during the night. The older black woman convinces Sally that she is her "grandmother," that she raised Don and that he invited her to his home. Sally is skeptical, but the lady still gets away with robbing the place.
"She said she knew you," Sally says to her father on the phone a day later. "I asked her everything I know and she had an answer for everything. Then I realized I don’t know anything about you."
Welcome to the club, Sally. No one on the show really knows anything about Don. But what we do know is that Sally Draper's transition into her teen years is a welcome step for the character played by Kiernan Shipka.
Half the time we can't even remember the names of Sally's two brothers or whether they are the same kids every week, but Sally is a mainstay, and how she copes with her fractured family going forward could prove interesting.
Will Sally become a hippie flower child of the 1970s, protesting the remaining years of the Vietnam War? Is there any hope that she can have any kind of meaningful relationship with her mother, Betty? Will she dig deeper into her father's secrets, and if so, how will Don react?
The phone call at the end of the May 19 episode was a great juxtaposition to the call Don took at the start of the episode from his latest mistress, Sylvia. That call ended with Don whipping his phone into the office cocktail cart. The call from Sally ended with Don stunned silent by his daughter.
"We really wanted to show that Sally Draper doesn't know anything about her father," show creator Matthew Weiner says in a behind-the-scenes video from AMC. "These children are not being parented at all. That phone call at the end was really supposed to codify the episode as this big mystery being answered, but not being answered at all."
For now, let's hope Sally keeps talking. Soon or later it won't render Don speechless -- or at least semi-mute as he's been all season -- and fans of "Mad Men" could be witness to a meaningful dialogue.