Don't listen to Matt Weiner. You get to decide what the Mad Men finale meant.

On Wednesday, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner gave what will purportedly be his one and only interview about the Mad Men finale. In conversation with writer A.M. Homes, Weiner offered his own take on the final scene — which implied that Don Draper created Coca-Cola's famed "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" ad — arguing that it casts the ultimate fate of Don Draper in a relatively hopeful light:

The quote has predictably resulted in a slew of articles positing that all of the ambiguities of Mad Men's finale have been settled. CBS News said the interview "explains" the series finale. The Hollywood Reporter argued that, based on Weiner's comments, the finale "shouldn't be read cynically" by viewers. "Everyone who saw the Mad Men finale has a theory about it," said The AV Club. "But the final authority on the subject is Matthew Weiner, who created the character and wrote the final episode that wrapped up his seven-season journey."

Interviews like this one tend to send both critics and fans into a tizzy, as they scrutinize each individual scrap of insight to determine what it all really means. This process begins anew any time an artist dares to build a little ambiguity into their work. Much has been written about TV shows like Lost that ask us to watch them like puzzles.

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But that frame is an unwieldy one for a series like Mad Men, which requires an entirely different set of analytical tools. Matt Weiner isn't the "final authority" on the Mad Men finale — the viewer is. He gave up that claim as soon as he locked down his final cut of the episode.

We've been through this before. Last year, Vox published a long story titled "Did Tony die at the end of The Sopranos? David Chase finally answers the question he wants fans to stop asking." Though the story was nearly 4,500 words long, the centerpiece was writer Martha Nochimson claiming that David Chase had finally "solved" the question of whether Tony Soprano died in the series finale's legendary cut to black.

Noachimson delayed the big reveal by reminding readers that whatever Chase said, he personally "believes that the art of entertaining is leaving the audience imagination to run wild." But after revealing that Chase purportedly said, "No. No he isn't [dead]," Nochimson instantly takes the idea and runs with it: "Fine. Tony's not dead. But what do we do with this bald fact?"

Of course, David Chase didn't actually decide to destroy the ambiguity of The Sopranos' ending. Later that day, Chase said Nochimson "misconstrued" his comment, adding, "To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer."

There's nothing unclear about the point Chase is making: The ambiguity is the ending. You can decide it means whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you're right. It just means you were willing to actively engage with the series, analyze what you saw, and decide on the interpretation that felt right to you. Even if he had put his hand on a stack of bibles and said, "Listen, it's a bald fact that Tony is alive," it wouldn't matter. The art stands alone.

These questions get even more complicated in the Mad Men situation. Though the ending is similarly ambiguous, Matt Weiner actually weighed in on the meaning of the final scene. It's fascinating to hear a creator offer his analysis of his own work — but whatever insights he can offer, Matt Weiner is not the person who gets the final say on what Mad Men actually means.

Vincent Kartheiser, who played Pete Campbell, once made a similar point about the way viewers responded to his character. “When people tell me that they hate [Pete] and they love Don Draper, it tells me a lot about who they are,” he said. “It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s a representation of the viewer. The way you choose to look at a Rothko and see what you see in it says so much more about you than it could about Rothko.”

The Mad Men finale leaves Pete Campbell on a note of familial triumph, reunited with his estranged wife Trudy, as they board a Lear jet to start a new life in Kansas. There's absolutely nothing about that final shot to suggest that Pete and Trudy Campbell will go on to anything but serene marital bliss — and there's no part of me that's buying it. Over the course of seven seasons, Pete Campbell has shown himself, time and time again, to be a sad sack incapable of any lasting happiness or satisfaction — the kind of person who can earn millions in a corporate deal and grumble about the hassle the tax hit is going to cause him. Pete claims he's learned his lesson, but some people are never going to be happy, and he's one of them.

That's my interpretation. Yours may well be different. That's the beauty of art — particularly something like a TV show, which allows viewers to develop sustained interpretations over many years. A creator can tell you what they intended to do, but that doesn't mean that's what they did. (For a particularly dramatic example of this in action, see a deeply misbegotten scene from last year's Game of Thrones, which was widely and correctly viewed as a rape by critics and viewers — despite the creators' insistence that the scene was supposed to be consensual.)

Even Weiner has acknowledged this. In another, less remarked-upon part of the finale interview, he admitted he didn't realize something fundamental about Don Draper until the very end of the series, when another writer pointed it out.

Despite his own, seemingly limiting take on the finale, Weiner is the kind of showrunner who traffics in unanswered questions — stories that can't be wrapped in a bow. In a pre-finale interview with Esquire, Weiner outlined what he believes separates Mad Men from most other TV shows:

That insight has an added resonance now that Mad Men is over. What happened to Diana, the waitress who served as the object of Don's obsession for most of Mad Men's final episodes? We don't know. We'll never know.

The brilliance of the Mad Men finale was the way it made viewers an active participant in determining the final message of Don Draper's journey. All we have to go on is the final shot of Don, meditating and smiling, before it cuts to the Coke commercial. Is this a hopeful message, or a cynical one? Did Don channel a genuine, emotional experience into something that could reach the rest of the world, or did he dilute a genuine, emotional experience for a Coca-Cola ad? Could it be that the impossibility of knowing for sure is the whole point?

I know what I think, but I don't have the definitive answer, because Mad Men pointedly lacks one. That's the real ending, no matter what anyone — including Matt Weiner — might say.