In keeping with the show's obsession with duality, Mad Men's final season will also be split in two

In case it was not already clear, AMC is not especially keen on letting go of its hit dramas. So perhaps it was inevitable that the network has announced that—as with Breaking Bad before it—the goodbye to Mad Men will also be a long one. The L.A. Times broke the news that the seventh and final season will (like Don Draper, and so many of us, really) be split into two parts. Each half will consist of seven episodes, with the first batch, dubbed “The Beginning,” airing in spring 2014, and the second, “The End Of An Era,” airing in spring 2015.

While AMC’s Charlie Collier raved about how this decision promised to entice more viewers to the show the way Breaking Bad’s split did, presumably by giving fans more months to pester their friends into finally catching up, Matthew Weiner naturally couched it as a creative opportunity. “We plan to take advantage of this chance to have a more elaborate story told in two parts, which can resonate a little bit longer in the minds of our audience,” he said. So perhaps the first half will offer the sense of “culmination" and lack of farts that Weiner has long promised, and the second half will reveal the show was all an elaborate fantasy being fed into Don Draper’s brain, as he finally awakes from cryogenic sleep in the year 2669, ready to do battle with Bob Benson’s galactic army. Either way, we officially now have two more years of speculating about it.