Shocking news at Sterling Cooper on "Mad Men."

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Ever since “Mad Men” fans  noted that Margaret Sterling, Roger’s daughter, was set to get married on Nov. 23, 1963, we’d been sure that creator Matthew Weiner planned to tackle the assassination of President John F. Kennedy this season. But how? Other pivotal events in history have passed as background to the personal stories of Sterling Cooper and its staff. The JFK assassination, though, was so huge that America stopped in its tracks for days; the grown-ups (and that was the title of Sunday night’s “Mad Men”) sat numb in front of black-and-white TV pictures and the children hovered around the edges.

So, although Weiner had apparently told some interviewers he didn’t think he could add anything to the JFK story, many of us were expecting it to end Season 3. Instead, it hit us by surprise in the next-to-last episode, unfolding on television just as it did back then. The tragedy threw the marriage of Don and Betty Draper into more chaos; after Betty (at the end of the previous episode) had seemed accepting of Don’s lies, she apparently experienced a life’s-too-short epiphany and declared that she no longer loved Don or wanted to be married to him. Luckily, that creepy Henry had already offered her an out — although it’s unclear whether he’s prepared to take the three kids, too.

With everyone so miserable, you couldn’t possibly say it was a fun episode. Satisfactions were small — Carla sitting on the couch next to Betty to cry and smoke; Roger calling Joan when in need of someone to make sense of things; Pete and Trudy seemingly finding real common ground in the wake of what was, for Pete, a double tragedy. But the main feeling left by the episode complete mystification about how Matthew Weiner will leave us next week, when we’ll have nine months to wait before Season 4.

Want more? Here’s a good recap from my friend Alan Sepinwall in New Jersey, whose commenters are particularly astute about “Mad Men.”