It was written by series creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner and writer Semi Chellas, and directed by Scott Hornbacher.
Roger and Jane take LSD with a group of intellectuals, altering how they see the world and allowing them to speak honestly about their marriage.
The sequence where Roger and Jane take LSD was particularly celebrated for the visual excellence and performances by John Slattery and Peyton List.
The episode is split into three vignettes that take place almost entirely during a single day in a non-linear narrative following the lives of Peggy, Roger, and Don.
The episode begins with Peggy's day and a heated argument with her boyfriend Abe, over her preoccupation with work and the effect this has on their sex life.
Michael was born in a Nazi concentration camp and, after its liberation, Morris claimed him from a Swedish orphanage when he was 5 years old.
Roger is initially unimpressed with the drug but comes around after his consciousness begins to change with vivid audio-visual hallucinations.
Jane dolefully turns away Roger's final kiss after commenting that the divorce will "be expensive", and they linger together on the bed for a few moments longer.
The episode's finale is Don's day and the trip to Howard Johnson's Restaurant and Motor Lodge in Plattsburgh.
He spends hours looking for and waiting for her, calling Peggy (the other side of the conversation from the first part of the episode) as well as Megan's mother in Montreal.
Roger, full of enthusiasm, pops into the conference room and tells Don he has an announcement: "It's going to be a beautiful day!"
[2] Elisabeth Moss said the handjob Peggy gives a stranger in the theatre is a "moment of forgetting" after the frustrating Heinz pitch.
The hardest part was breaking it up for commercials so that the Peggy and the Roger stories would be in the same segment and you wouldn't come back and think you were in the middle of another episode.
We knew that Peggy's story was going to climax with that, and it was going to be their great moment of intimacy; he would distract her from her failure and bond with her in that strange way that people who feel separate do.
[2] The flashback scene between Don and Megan in the car was actually shot for the fourth season finale, "Tomorrowland", written and directed by Weiner, but was cut.
[5] The exterior scenes of the Howard Johnson's hotel were filmed in October 2011 at the Regency Inn and Suites in Baldwin Park, California.
Sepinwall characterized "Far Away Places" as "an episode that gave the feel of dropping acid even when everyone on camera was stone sober.
Matt Weiner, co-writer Semi Chellas, director Scott Hornbacher, and the actors combined to give us some of the most memorable moments the show has ever done.
Club gave it an A grade, compared it to previous "structurally daring" episodes like "Seven Twenty Three" and "The Jet Set", and praised the director for the "beautifully shot" episode and the "gorgeous image of [Roger] and Jane lying, heads touching, on the floor, admitting their marriage just isn't working", while noting that the enemy of the season is "the passage of time itself".
[1] Verne Gay of Newsday called it a good, but difficult, episode, saying, "the story lines were all parallel – it was even an anthology, with each story mirroring the next (bringing to mind that memorable scene when Roger, under the influence, is looking in the mirror and told to look away) ... the themes of male-female entanglement, and disentangle (and yes, hair, once again is a predominant metaphor.)
[10] Time magazine writer Nate Rawlings compared the episode to a David Lynch film and noted that all three "stories also shared the thematic connection of the struggle between professional and work life.
For all the claims that Don and others have made that the 'kids' increasingly hold the cards, the real truth (if we're telling it) is that older white guys like Bert and Roger never truly lost power, even if they began to hide behind the scenes while fresh young faces took the public glory.