That’s correct. They can certainly quit if the want to. But for all intents and purposes they can’t work in advertising for the next four years. What is Don going to do, work in a garage? Joan going back to work as a secretary?
They have only piss poor options if they quit.
Joan’s tiny partnership share made her a millionaire, so she wouldn’t need to work (as Peggy snidely pointed out in the elevator). But if the money is apportioned over four years - which I don’t recall - that’s not as attractive for her.
Don and Roger, of course, are wealthy and don’t need to work (especially Roger). Their self-identity is too tied up into their job, though. Pete is screwed either way, of course.
Don and Roger could retire on what they own. Ted also likely could – we don’t know his finances but he was a partner at CGC who was Sterling Cooper’s “sister competitor” (i.e. company of the same size going after the same tier business) so it stands to reason that he’s comfortable if he needed to get out of the game and that he was making money in Don’s range for the last decade.
Pete would be harder off; he never had the wealth of the senior partners. Luckily, he seems keen on working with McCann. Joan is, of course, the worst off both because of the barriers of her gender and because getting a new job as an office manager would be a big step down for her.
I suppose that someone like Don could get a job like Ken has, heading the marketing for a company. That wouldn’t conflict with the non-compete (that we know of, shades of guessing what the SCDP partners agreement said) and would fit with his skill set.
This is approximately what happen at an agency I worked at. It was 1990 instead of 1970, but the basic pattern was the same.
Buy out the partners with the promise of big payouts and complete independence.
Gradually increase the reporting processes and limit the autonomy.
Assign profit targets which are just slightly beyond “reach goals” (i.e., the partners’ best case/blue sky projections) with reductions in payout if the partners can’t make them.
Break up and reassemble the teams with people in other offices in the name of synergy, but also breaking up the original employee allegiances. Somewhere during this process the old company name will disappear as the big company trumpets its “global resources.”
Wait for the partners to decide one by one that it isn’t worth it and quit before the payout period.
In my boss’ case (he was a partner, I was just a lackey) the final straw was when he realized that he had been traveling for 283 out of the previous 365 days and he was working more hours for the new regime than he did when he was trying to build the original company.
Don? No. But I hear good things about adman of the '70s, Dick Whitman. 
Didn’t the same contracts state that McCann would run SCP has an autonomous subsidiary for 4-5 yrs, or was that just something implied to Roger & never actually put in writing. Also each partner only sold 51% of their shares to McCann (barring Cutler who sold it all); what happens to the 49% they kept? Does McCann have to buy out that, or do they each now on a vary small share in McCann?
When I was watching that scene I was thinking “what is this…Game of Thrones?”
But I see that Martin based the Red Wedding in part on the Massacre of Glencoe,so I guess I wasn’t that far off 
For all that it didn’t get to the usual end, this was the Mad Men that I loved for five or so seasons, and that, as I’m now realizing, the professional critics (and probably lots of other folks savvier than I) did not really care about. Swashbuckling business deals? Check. “Creative” (in the Madison Avenue sense) genius? Well, I dunno what Peggy and, um, friend (people say GoT has a lot of characters!) were up to, but it was apparently something creative. Besides that, we had classic Mad Men Don Draper pitchery going on towards the end. Period details? Too many to list. I quite liked the gay couple moving into Diane–may we never see her again–Ruhr’s apartment, but they’re just one of many. Bad behaviour? Well, we’ve got Don and Roger, everyone’s favorite rakes, out drinking late on a work night, plus Roger revealing that he’s not learned the one about “don’t stick your dick in the crazy.”
Soap operatic nonsense? Not so much of that. Don did his best to drag his waitress back onto the scene, but was thankfully rebuffed by an answering service, and there was a weird thing with Pete and some guy who runs a private school, but I can forgive that because it gave us some of the most 'love to hate" Pete (and Trudy) Campbell smarminess we’ve seen in quite possibly years.
Deep, profound stuff I’m not bright enough to pick up on? I dunno, I"m not bright enough to pick up on that stuff. I think it was there, based on the one review I started to read, then got bored and/or annoyed with and told, metaphorically, to fuck off.
I’ve really not enjoyed most of the last “season” (by which I guess I mean half-season) or two (by which I think I mean half-season plus preceding full season, sigh). I’ve always been a bit baffled–for me, part of watching the shows I love any more is immediately hopping on several sites for reviews and discussion. (The SDMB is one, but it’s pretty much only “discussion”. OTOH, it’s low traffic enough that it’s the only place I bother to try to discuss some shows.) For this last bit of time that I’ve not had much love for Mad Men, these other places have, mostly in ways that have caused me to roll my eyes while curling my hand into a rough cylinder and moving it up and down in a dismissive fashion.
It took me to this particular episode, which I quite enjoyed despite getting distracted for part of it, and the reviews of it that had nothing really much at all to do with what I actually enjoyed about it, to realize that hey, what I used to like about Mad Men and what professional reviewers like about Mad Men is not really even remotely the same. And, for what it’s worth–what I like about Mad Men doesn’t matter much. Professional reviewers give out gold statues; I just watch the show and grumble about it on message boards. I suspect, but can’t say with any certainty, that it might’ve been more important to please both masters early on; while I don’t give out gold statues, I’m probably a heck of a lot more like the people with the magic boxes that make series live or die. But once you’ve got a bunch of gold statues and you’re a prestige series? Maybe not so important. Heck, I’ve been grumpy as hell for the last n seasons and I’m still watching out of a sense of obligation, having enjoyed the show for many years before it became my Sunday evening unpaid job.
Anyway, I’m happy I got this episode; it was fun. I’ll continue to soldier on until we get to the series finale. If we get more fun, well, that’ll be great.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned that this was a “Pete and the women” episode.
He had great scenes with Trudy, Peggy and Joan that reminded us that he’s not always a bumbling sleaze.
At the end of the half-season, we saw Don, Peggy and Pete established as a new ‘family’ dynamic (their dinner at Burger Chef) and they seem to have completely dropped it so far.
I guess “The north remembers”…
It was funny though.