At this point, we’re going to assume that you’ve seen the next to last episode of Season 5 of Mad Men — an intense hour of TV which centered around Lane Pryce’s devastating suicide, and was arguably the culmination of the season’s dramatic arc. “A Death Foretold” — a collaboration between New York Magazine TV columnist Matt Zoller Seitz, Deborah Lipp of Basket of Kisses, and Kevin B. Lee, IndieWire’s editor-in-chief — looks at the subtle foreshadowing and buildup to this pivotal moment, from tiny visual clues to conversations that you may have forgotten.
“It’s not meant to be comprehensive; we originally compiled a three-page list of death references, then realized if we put them all in one video it would have been as long as a Mad Men episode,” Zoller writes of the video essay. “But we hope it’ll offer the show’s fans another pretext (as if we need any) to pick apart the show’s narrative architecture and argue about whether a cigar is just a cigar.” Click through to watch it now, and let us know if you agree with their analysis in the comments.