Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) and Roger Sterling (John Slattery) wait to see if their agency won a Clio.

By the time this season of Mad Men ends, the fifth episode, where Don maneuvers his agency into an account with Honda with the ability of the first three seasons, will seem like the exception rather than the rule.

With the sixth episode under its belt, clearly this season is about the hard fall of Don Draper.

In fact, contrasting the fifth-episode Draper with this one is pretty startling. In the last episode, Don was back in master-of-the-universe mode. He faked out a competitor while putting aside the alcohol and understanding his firm’s Japanese suitor.

In this episode, as he celebrated the master-of-the-universe skill of a Clio-award winning ad, Don was in his full-on pathetic side. His drunken pitch session with the Life cereal execs was particularly galling, resulting in him using the tag line of a buffoonish relative (Danny Strong) of Roger Sterling’s wife, a job applicant whom he rejected earlier in the day.

And it got worse — Don ended up sleeping with one woman, a female employee from a rival firm, then waking up with another, a waitress from a coffee shop.

The consequences were in some cases swift — the waitress calls him “Dick”, evidence of a massive slip on his part; Betty calls him out for missing a trip with the kids; Don is forced to hire the buffoon after being unable to negotiate a fee for his weak tag line.

In other cases, we may yet see other consequences down the road.

(Of course, seeing Duck Phillips (Mark Moses) heckle the emcee at the Clio ceremony seemed to give Don the sense that at least he doesn’t have it as bad as that guy.)

Flashbacks recalled Roger’s hiring of Don as a sort of fun-house mirror version of Don’s hiring of the relative. Fur-store employee Don was trying to find an opening with Roger, finally doing so toward the end of the episode when he tells, or perhaps convinces, Roger that he’d hired him during a drunken lunch.

As Don continues his descent, it’s obvious two other characters are making their moves upward — Pete has no problem dressing down Lane for hiring one-time rival Ken Cosgrove, and deservedly so. Meanwhile, Peggy, saddled with working with art director Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson), calls the sexist boor’s bluff when both are forced to work together in a hotel room to come up with ideas for a campaign for Vicks.

But as the two younger players see their careers going up, let’s go back to Don for a last thought. The titles of Mad Men have always in a way confused me — but now I’m seeing what they truly mean: This is a show about a man whose life, built around advertising, is slowly falling away from him. What’s interesting now is where in the fall of Don Draper we really are.