Save me from gibberish terminal

While logged in to a remote ssh session, sometimes I do cat to the wrong file (a binary or a diretory) and the display converts to gibberish. The only way out is to close the terminal and open a new one, which frustrates me because usually there is a lot of state related to the current terminal already.

Update: while I received great answers, a little problem persists. See this follow-up question.

What can I do?

/usr/bin/reset might also do the trick.

Try "Reset" or "Reset and clear" from the the "Terminal" menu in the screenshot.

An old trick that works on almost any other Unix type system, too:

echo "^V^O"

That is: Type the word echo than a double quote character then press CTRL and type the kev v then press CTRL and type the key o (the letter not zero) then type another double quote character then press RETURN.

Try entering setterm -reset