‘Mad Men’ season premiere recap: Don Draper is back in business and turning mortal at 40 Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/televis

Joan had the baby.

And the new ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is still in business, though Lane admitted to Joan, when he wasn’t doing a really creepy thing with a strange woman’s picture, that money is a problem.

Welcome to Memorial Day Weekend 1966, the landing point and launching pad for season five of AMC’s “Mad Men,” which returned Sunday night after a 17-month absence occasioned by the show's own off-screen live-or-die cliffhanger.

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In the end it lived, and it looks like it’s going to live for two seasons beyond this one.

Groovy, as we said in 1966. Who’d have ever thought we’d care this much about a bunch of ad executives?

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Anyhow, Don (Jon Hamm) has not only married his secretary/babysitter Megan (Jessica Pare), but he still wants to grab her every five minutes. In hallways, in his office, wherever.

Don’s always seen lots of sex as a solution, not a problem, but there may also be something else at work here.

He’s turning 40, and while he never says it bothers him, he’s a guy who understands the hourglass and the sand.

So does show creator Matt Weiner.

Toward the end of Sunday’s wonderful opening scene, Don asks his 10-year-old son Bobby how old Daddy will be when Bobby is 40.

“You’ll be dead,” Bobby says.

Don himself would be happy to let 40 slip quietly by, except Megan throws him a surprise party and invites his colleagues.

Don wants a surprise party about as much as he wants to be neutered. But he weathers the party with hail-fellow joviality even when Megan announces she has had enough alcohol to give him his present, a sultry French love song that ends with a discreet version of a lap dance.

Later, Megan asks Don to admit he loved the party.

He tells her he’s going to bed and she should not waste money like this again. It’s the tone he used to use with Betty (January Jones), his unlamented ex.

Megan is visibly crushed. The next day they’re at work, she gets so depressed she leaves early.

Don follows and finds her cleaning up the party debris. They argue. She strips down to her black underwear and orders him not to even look at her.

As if. Need we detail what happens next?

So that’s how Don spends his 40th birthday weekend.

Meanwhile, Joan (Christina Hendricks) spends the weekend like she has spent every other recent weekend, beseeching the gods to let her get more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted sleep.

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