"They hadn't done it before" isn't an argument against. And they most certainly have inserted characters into historical events before, albeit not to this scale.

If someone else is doing a better job of raising your children, it would be awfully selfish to jam yourself into their lives in a destructive way.

And that "national consciousness" just happened to have visuals that perfectly matched in small details Don's experience at the retreat?

Sounds a lot like life.

Agreed. Felt like a weird inclusion with the other four.

Unless McCann had someone else at that exact retreat, the number of parallels between the commercial and Don's experience are far too numerous to mean anything other than he wrote the commercial.

People are free to have as many perspectives as they wish. Many of them will be wrong.

Why would there need to be one? The "I got an idea" ding was heavy-handed enough. Or apparently not, but it should have been.

There was no ambiguity.

Just the opposite. The idea that Don *didn't* go back to McCann and leverage his Buddhist experiences for a Coke ad is concocted whole cloth by viewers expecting an ambiguous ending because Sopranos ended that way.

It fascinates me that so many people are in denial over Don writing the Coke ad. The idea that the ending was ambiguous is coming from our expectation that it would be ambiguous given the past with different shows. It was about as explicit as it could possibly be without him popping up after the credits to say…