One year ago this week, CBS canceled Zoo and broke my heart.

It’s almost as hard to describe exactly what Zoo meant to me as it is to describe what Zoo even was, period. But let’s give it a shot: The TV adaptation of James Patterson’s novel of the same name ran for three head-spinning seasons on CBS, quietly growing from a weirdo procedural drama about a global animal uprising to a completely, gloriously ludicrous dive into a post-apocalyptic world plagued by sterility and bloodthirsty hybrid beasts.

From its premiere in 2015 to its untimely death in 2017, every new episode of Zoo brought forth a new adventure that seemed determined to top the last. “Renegade zoologist” Jackson Oz (James Wolk) and his merry band of outcasts — including girl reporter Jamie (Kristen Connolly) and salty scientist Mitch (Billy Burke) — raced to save the planet from the animal virus. Together, they fought killer bees, bulletproof bears, kamikaze bats, and one particularly memorable sloth that caused earthquakes with its every languid yawn.

The series began as a decent enough distraction. But by the time its final credits rolled after a jumbo jet burst through a blockade that was holding a ferocious tidal wave of vampiric hellbeasts at bay — thus setting up a cataclysmic showdown that never came to be — Zoo had become a surreal goddamn masterpiece.

During season 3 in particular, as other, supposedly more “prestige” shows piled up on my DVR, Zoo became a top priority in my crowded TV viewing schedule. The real world was becoming ever more frightening, and television seemed to be following suit. But I could always count on Zoo to deliver consistently bananas entertainment with a hefty wink, and to keep my jaw dragging along the floor in astonished glee. Sure, other TV series might have boasted such things as subtle dialogue and narrative coherence. But did they ever tell a story about a 60-foot-long invisible snake? No, no they did not.

Suffice it to say, the moment when CBS canceled Zoo last October was devastating. Having become accustomed to a weekly dose of pure nonsense, I wasn’t ready to let go of my most precious TV weirdo.

So I didn’t.

Instead, I reached out to some of show’s creative team to get some post-cancelation anecdotes and quickly ended up with an avalanche of insight from many of the writers, producers, directors, and actors who made Zoo such a ridiculous joy to behold. Much to my delight, every single person I talked to couldn’t stop gushing about the pure fun of making a show so unhinged, so delightfully detached from both reality and decades’ worth of established storytelling conventions, as my beloved Zoo.

“[We thought] ‘let’s just throw out the playbook as much as possible,” recalled showrunner Josh Appelbaum, who co-created Zoo alongside his three producing partners Andre Nemec, Jeff Pinker, and Scott Rosenberg. Collectively, the team’s past credits comprise a vast and varied resumé, from Alias to October Road to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. But when it came to Zoo, Appelbaum said, they decided to purposefully flout all of those past projects’ “rules.”

“Our mantra was always, ‘What’s an idea that could ONLY be done on Zoo?’” said writer Nicole Philips, who joined the show in season three, when it flashed forward 10 (!) years to reveal a dystopian future. “I knew an idea had legs when I couldn’t pitch it without smiling and saying, ‘How cool would it be to do THAT?’”

So in that spirit, whether you watched and loved Zoo as I did, or (more likely) you have no idea what I’m talking about, please enjoy the following five behind-the-scenes tales about how one of television’s most charmingly unhinged thrill rides came together.

1) Zoo found its groove thanks to an elevator full of rats

It may seem weird to kick off this celebration of Zoo’s life with, y’know, an elevator full of rats. But we have to start somewhere, and according to co-creator and eventual showrunner Josh Appelbaum, Zoo really did hit a turning point several episodes into the series by stuffing an elevator full of (virtual) rodents and unleashing them into a hallway in a Shining-esque tidal wave of hissing misery.

But before this hyperbolic moment sold the Zoo team on the show’s potential for ridiculous greatness, the writers had been trying to toe a much more serious line, somehow prizing realism on a show that, again, revolves around an animal uprising. That meant they only used animals when they could get actual live creatures on set.

“In the first season, Jaws was a big reference point for us, and what was great about Jaws was the slow burn; you don’t see the shark until the end,” Appelbaum told me. “That’s what [we thought Zoo] should be.” As season one continued, however, the writers’ perspectives started to change. Eschewing CGI animals for live ones was proving more limiting and costly than expected, and the sheer fun of their source material’s “animal uprising” premise was getting lost in dreary stories about corporate espionage.

So for Zoo’s eighth episode — beautifully titled “The Cheese Stands Alone” — the series tried something a little different. It abandoned any semblance of realism and had its characters fight back a teeming horde of frantic rats with a flamethrower. According to Appelbaum, that’s when he knew they were onto something. “‘We should just be doing three scenes like that every episode,’” he recalled thinking at the time. “‘Why are we depriving the audience of rat elevators?!’”

And then came the clincher, courtesy of an unexpected and crucial source. “Eventually, it was James Patterson [pitching in as an executive producer] who said, ‘What the hell is it with this slow burn? What about a burn burn?’” Appelbaum said. “And he was fuckin’ right.”

And lo, Zoo decided to lean into its chaos and unleash some happily nonsensical hell.

2) A polar bear once let her jealousy compromise her Method acting

In season two, Zoo would set about phasing out live animals entirely in favor of using all CGI animals, all the time — the better to stage more outlandish setpieces. But before that policy went into full effect, the team tried to stage a polar bear ambush in the season two premiere, “The Day of the Beast.” As written, the scene involved filming a single polar bear, with the intent of digitally manipulating the animal into a bloodthirsty pack.

“I remember getting the script and thinking, ‘So I have to do a bear-mauling sequence on the heels of The Revenant. How am I going to do that?!” said the episode’s director Norman Buckley.

With some fastidious planning and careful choreography, Buckley and the crew eventually managed to get the bear to do almost everything they needed it to do — with one unexpected wrinkle.

“The polar bear was apparently a female who was very attached to the male trainer, and kind of thought he was her boyfriend,” actor Kristen Connolly, who played intrepid blogger-turned-billionaire spy Jamie, told me. “There were a lot of rules. You couldn’t look at the trainer directly. I think she [the bear] tolerates the man’s actual wife, but only barely.”

Thankfully, lots of patience and (as everyone involved emphasized) respect for the animal on behalf of the Zoo cast and crew ensured that everyone made it through the scene without exacerbating anyone’s jealousy issues. And even though it was moments like these that made the show’s switch to CGI ultimately feel quite practical, there was still at least one more real life animal star waiting to grace Zoo’s set …

3) The sloth yawn heard ‘round Zoo’s world

Just about everyone who watched or worked on Zoo can agree on at least one point. Like the elevator full of rats before it, “the sloth,” as actor James Wolk put it, “was a turning point.”

The creature in question appears in the fourth episode of season two. He spends most of his time hanging from a branch safely encased in a glass tank and appears to be nothing more than your typical slow-moving, adorable mammal. But the role he was playing was far more nefarious — and more blatantly ridiculous — than anything Zoo had attempted up to that point. You see, this sloth was no ordinary sloth, because this sloth’s yawn could cause earthquakes.

As Appelbaum tells it, the writers’ initial idea was to build this plotline around a howler monkey or a “gnarly fuckin’ hyena” — any animal whose already shrill voice could have mutated, within the Zoo universe, to become a devastating weapon. But at that point in the show’s run, the show was still trying to use real, live animals on set whenever possible, a hyena was unavailable, and the creative team decided to go in a bit of a different direction.

“We started pitching ideas about the slowest and quietest creatures on earth,” writer Matt Pitts said. “[Pitts’s co-writer] Melissa Glenn pitched a sloth and we all fell in love with the idea.”

Well, okay — not all of the writers’s room was immediately on board. “I was not a fan,” producer and writer Bryan Oh admitted, though he was laughing as he said so. “I just kept trying to picture what this would look like. A sloth?”

“That pitch sparked a massive amount of debate around the writers’ table,” said writer Carla Kettner. “There was a real philosophical split between Team-No-Effing-Way-Could-That-Happen and Team-Why-the-Hell-Not.”

In this battle — and, it would turn out, almost all subsequent ones — Team Why-The-Hell-Not won out. “It ultimately was better for the vibe of the show continuing on,” Oh conceded. “That sloth embraced what the show ultimately became.”

But the windfall of the sloth idea itself isn’t all there is to this iconic Zoo moment. At one point during the characters’ frantic search for the animal, they capture a four-star general (played by Peter Outerbridge) and interrogate him to find out the sloth’s whereabouts. When he refuses to answer, Jackson takes a breath, narrows his eyes, and fully backhand slaps the general across the face. “Where’s the sloth?” he seethes, straightening up with righteous fury.

Even after having seen everything that was then still to come, these three seconds comprise Zoo’s most perfect moment — and, as I learned while reporting this story, they weren’t even planned.

Shortly after the show’s cancelation, writer/producer Jay Faerber tweeted at Uproxx’s Brian Grubb (the only person on this godforsaken planet whose love for Zoo rivals mine) that Wolk’s slap was not, in fact, scripted. I later confirmed this fact with Pitts, but to truly understand the situation, I knew I had to talk to the slapper himself.

When I (politely) confronted Wolk on the phone about the possibility that he might have gone wildly off-book, he insisted I stay on the line while he thumbed through several old Zoo scripts to prove me wrong.

“That can’t be right…” he mused, audibly poring through years of outlandish twists and turns to pull this particular memory from the stack. His confusion was genuine; as Connolly put it, “Jimmy” improvising a slap, “out of all people,” was an unexpected twist.

But several minutes of mumbling through sloth drafts later, Wolk was forced to admit the truth: not a single script he could find contained the sassy backhand slap that ultimately made it to air. The actor took a couple seconds to process this information — and then burst into incredulous, delighted laughter. “I guess I needed a reason for him to listen to me, right?” he said. “I mean, when you’re talkin’ sloth, you just gotta do what feels right.”

So, luckily for us all (except perhaps Outerbridge), that’s exactly what he did.

4) The One Where the Gang Fights an Invisible Snake

Once Zoo accepted that a sloth could send shockwaves through the earth and raised its plots stakes enough that certain humans would slap whoever they needed to if it meant saving the world from a savagely sleepy mammal, there was no longer any limit to Zoo’s lunacy. The second season ended with the gang rounding up a herd of mythical creatures including the earthquake-inducing sloth, an ice-breathing lizard, and a sabertooth tiger. (A sabertooth tiger that had somehow survived extinction all by its lonesome on some far-flung island, patiently waiting for an opportunity to save the world.)

But our intrepid heroes somehow still got outsmarted by a shadowy cabal of totally new human enemies who, in the very final minutes of the season, released a toxin that sterilized the entire planet. “Originally we wanted the gas to kill most of the population, but the network thought that was a little too grim,” revealed Faerber. And while this twist might sound impossibly huge, just remember: this was Zoo. As Faerber put it, “that was our compromise.”

I’ll admit that I was skeptical about how on Earth the show could possibly pull off the Children of Men-style turn. But I shouldn’t have doubted Zoo’s powers of persuasion. Deciding, as always, to go big rather than go home, the series revealed on its way out of the season that the next one would take place a full decade later.

Thanks to a combination of the show leaning into its own absurdity and the very real threat of a 2017 TV writers’ strike accelerating the show’s production to a level approaching hyperspeed, Zoo’s third and final season was without a doubt, the most entertaining season of any single TV show I watched in 2017.

In the not so-far-off future, Wolk’s character Jackson not only discovered an evil sister and a long lost song he never knew, but the fact that he could, if he concentrated real hard, control animals with his mind. Jamie the former blogger become a billionaire author slash undercover spy. A katana-wielding “croctopus” overtook an airplane’s controls, a flock of giant vultures dive-bombed New York City, and a blood sample from a rampaging hybrid rhino-mammoth grew into an unidentified fetus. Zoo was officially off the rails, and bless it.

Cleary, Zoo never lacked for imagination when it came to its creatures of the week. But when I asked the creative team to name their favorite animals and/or hybrids from their time on the show, the most popular answer (aside from the sloth) was the 60-foot-long Peruvian invisible snake, because read that phrase again: They wrote an episode about a 60-foot-long Peruvian invisible snake.

What’s more, the downfall of said snake came about when it made the mistake of swallowing Jamie whole, at which point she triumphantly sliced her way out with a sword.

“I found out about it before the script came out because our wardrobe team came to me and said, ‘What kind of shoes would you be most comfortable wearing climbing out of the snake next week?’” Connolly recalled. “And I was like ‘… what?’”

I’m happy to report that the resulting sequence is exactly as beautiful and silly as it sounds (alas it is not on YouTube). In the future, when aliens come asking for a peak example of human ingenuity, I will point them in the direction of Jamie slicing and smirking her way out of from the belly of an invisible serpent.

“I could work on television for a thousand years,” said Zoo season three writer Geoff Tock with a sense wonder, “and I’ll never get to pitch something like that again.”

5) The gravity-defying car stunt that proved impossible to beat

For my money, there was one scene in which the final season of Zoo topped itself for good, a scene that is forever burned in my memory for its ridiculous audacity. Halfway through the season, the world is in danger of being overrun by giant vulture hybrids whose favorite mode of attack is to throw themselves down at their prey with the precision of an Olympic high-diver. (Look, you’ve already read this far; just go with it.)

To avert disaster and lure the vultures away from the general populace, our heroes decide that there’s only one thing to do: They must trick the beasts into diving into an active volcano.

To achieve this, they throw a homing beacon into a Mustang and push it out the back of a plane — not realizing there’s a man hiding in the trunk. It’s a stunning moment whose only possible comparison point lies in the Fast and Furious franchise, if that franchise were to fully commit to releasing itself from the accepted bounds of time and space.

Look, I could sit here and explain every piece of that sentence, but rest assured: Knowing all the ins and outs of this Mustang/volcano/murderous bird sequence isn’t at all necessary to appreciate its bonkers brilliance. In fact, all you really need to know about how Zoo approached its storytelling is that this isn’t even a season-ending cliffhanger; it was the beginning of the episode.

“It was just like, ‘fuck it, that’s the opening of the show,’” laughed Appelbaum. “‘Let’s build the episode from there and see what happens.’”

As Tock’s writing partner for the episode, Gregory Wiedman, revealed, “the original idea was even crazier. The volcano erupting was going to be the first in a series of global events that was going to eventually terraform the planet to be more suitable for hybrids.” In fact, he added, “[it became] a general rule for any big, crazy story beat on Zoo [that] the first version was probably twice as nuts.”

So while it’s still hard for me to explain exactly why and how I loved Zoo as much as I did, I am compelled to tell you that these 3,000 words or so are merely the tip of the iceberg. I just hope you can understand that at the heart of my devotion to this weird and wonderful show is the fact that it was unafraid to embrace its most ridiculous self. In a TV world overflowing with bland franchises and self-serious meditations on humanity, it was a genuine joy to sit down every week to watch a completely ridiculous, unpredictable show have so much fun.

As Wolk told me with an audible grin in his voice: “When things got as wild as they were, it was like a constant mind blow. It was like, ‘Of course there’s going to be a car into a volcano followed by birds. Let’s do it.’”

The first three seasons of Zoo are currently available to stream and gape at in slack-jawed wonder on Netflix.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized one of Zoo’s fictional creatures. It was a katana-wielding “croctopod,” not a knife-wielding octopus.

The premiere of the Roseanne revival — 21 years after its initial finale and starring a Roseanne Barr, who now spreads right-wing conspiracy theories on Twitter — sparked several outrage cycles, massive ratings, congratulations from President Trump, and, eventually, a shocking cancellation following a racist tweet from Barr.

ABC’s announcement of the successful revival’s second season, which called Barr’s statement “abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values,” represents a huge shift from how the network has thus far characterized the show and its success. In fact, per ABC executives, the presidential election and Roseanne’s subsequent success has inspired the TV industry to consider a “heartland strategy” when approaching their programming.

“We had spent a lot of time looking for diverse voices in terms of people of color and people from different religions and even people with a different perspective on gender,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey told the New York Times in March. “But we had not been thinking nearly enough about economic diversity and some of the other cultural divisions within our own country.”

This falls in line with how some people, and especially conservatives, have talked about the Roseanne revival. The way this logic goes, Roseanne is one of the only shows on TV that dares talk about “economic diversity” and “cultural divisions,” political correctness or whatever be damned.

The weird thing about that line of reasoning, however, is that it’s not true. While Roseanne’s original run was indeed groundbreaking, in the years since, countless politically and socially relevant sitcoms have followed in its footsteps. Many of them are on the air right now; some are even already airing on ABC.

With the Roseanne revival no longer a going concern, we figured it’s a perfect time to spotlight some of the sitcoms it overshadowed in its brief, contentious run. Here are 11 great series either centered on working-class families or on underrepresented groups that find ways to dig into timely issues without becoming too treacly about it, and talk out tough political issues with true empathy.

One Day at a Time (Netflix)

One of the go-to ways to describe a sitcom that can deliver serious talk amid serious laughs is to compare it to anything Norman Lear has touched, so we have to start this list with the sitcom the 95-year-old legend is currently producing. One Day at a Time is a reboot of Lear’s 1975 sitcom about a single mother raising two kids with the help of her mother and (to a much lesser extent) nosy landlord. Netflix’s version keeps that basic premise but updates it to be about a Cuban-American family living in Los Angeles. The fantastic Justina Machado plays single mother and Army veteran Penelope, while the legendary Rita Moreno taps in as her theatrical mother Lydia.

The show touches on everything from Penelope’s PTSD and depression to the everyday racism her son encounters to her daughter coming out to Lydia grappling with the fact that her beloved homeland will never be what it once was. (And yes, it’s also very funny!) One Day at a Time is one of our favorite shows here at Vox dot com slash Culture, so if you don’t give it a shot, just know that you have disappointed us greatly.

Mom (CBS)

Before most of the shows on this list were even glimmers in their networks’ eyes, Mom, now in its fifth season, was busy becoming one of the best things ever made by its co-creator, Chuck Lorre (who, incidentally, did time as a writer and producer on Roseanne’s original run). Following Christy (Anna Faris), a single mother of two, and her own mother Bonnie (Allison Janney, winner of several Emmys for her work on the show) as they struggle to break free from addiction, Mom has a few very sitcom-y issues here and there — like how theoretically working-class women live in such a huge house — but it’s by and large a forthright depiction of the twin struggles of poverty and addiction, bolstered by co-creator Gemma Baker’s willingness to let the show sink its teeth into complicated social issues.

Black-ish (ABC)

As creator Kenya Barris has put it, Black-ish follows in the footsteps of the Lear model of weaving serious topics into the framework of an accessible network comedy. Now in its fourth season, the show has tackled everything from police brutality to postpartum depression to the consequences of the 2016 presidential election. The series even incorporates debates around class mobility, since it relies on the perspective and voiceover of patriarch Dre (Anthony Anderson) — who, like Barris, grew up in Compton and now lives in an upper-middle-class Los Angeles suburb.

In Roseanne’s third episode, the Conners slept through “all the [ABC] shows about black and Asian families” —presumably Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat, another entry on this list — which is a shame because Roseanne is lucky to share a night with it.

Grown-ish (Freeform)

Freeform’s Black-ish spinoff follows in the tradition of A Different World by tagging along with the oldest Johnson kid — Yara Shahidi’s glam Zoey — as she heads to college. There, she finds herself surrounded by people and perspectives she never encountered growing up and is forced to reconsider her accepted truths and what she might want from life. It’s still working out some of its growing pains, but Grown-ish is a fizzy surprise of a show that has made a sincere effort to address #millennial issues, like how social media affects relationships, the nuances of sexuality, safe spaces, and the very real tension of class differences on a campus that insists everyone is on equal ground.

Speechless (ABC)

Another ABC comedy that is consistently crushing it, Speechless follows the DiMeo family working to make ends meet and support their eldest son J.J., whose nonverbal cerebral palsy necessitates the kind of care they can only barely afford. Created by Friends producer Scott Silveri, whose brother has cerebral palsy, Speechless is smart and quick, keeping the DiMeos grounded while letting them be, as they would be the first to admit, the most lovable dirtbags you’ll ever meet.

With a stellar cast including Minnie Driver as a fiercely protective mom and Micah Fowler as J.J. — who actively resists and resents the sort of saintly clichés usually associated with people in wheelchairs — Speechless is an underrated gem lurking right under ABC’s own nose.

Big Mouth (Netflix)

We’ll allow that putting an animated comedy about the hilarious horrors of puberty on this list might seem like a bit of a stretch, but y’know what? We’re gonna stand by it.

Big Mouth — which stars excellent comedy voices like John Mulaney, Nick Kroll, and Jenny Slate — was one of our favorite TV surprises of 2017. It manages to balance gross-out jokes with real compassion for how much it can suck to grow up and figure out what sex means to you in a world that’s alternately fascinated and disgusted by it. In between letting an anthropomorphized “hormone monster” wreak havoc, Big Mouth actually tells some of TV’s most compassionate (and always timely) stories about consent, exploration, learning how to set boundaries, and the radical power of just being honest about your feelings, no matter how dumb or small they might feel.

Bob’s Burgers (Fox)

This animated sitcom, consistently one of TV’s funniest shows, even now in its eighth season, might not be as forthrightly political as some of the shows on this list, but it makes up for that with being one of the few to be set on the ground floor of class conflict in America, without making a big deal about it. Bob and Linda Belcher and their three kids run the titular burger shop, which has its loyal customers but also seems to leave the family barely enough to live on. (They even live in the apartment above the shop.) And because a restaurant is a great way to have others in the community come through its doors, Bob’s Burgers is slyly smart about interactions between the rich, the middle class, and the poor in America — and all of the ways they can break down.

Fresh Off the Boat (ABC)

And lo, another ABC family sitcom appears on our list. This one, originally based on Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name, centers on a Chinese-American family adjusting to a move from Washington, DC, to a far more monochrome Florida suburb. Louis (Randall Park) runs a branch of a Cattleman’s Ranch barbecue restaurant, while Jessica (Constance Wu) juggles running the family and practicing real estate.

Not only is Fresh off the Boat a warm show, it’s also a deeply weird one that’s unafraid to have fun and let the Huangs indulge their quirkier habits (see: Jessica’s crime novel, and her son Evan’s vice hold on the neighborhood council). In the first season, that adjustment was a rocky one full of everyday racism. As the show’s gone on, it’s also tackled issues of citizenship and civic duty in a way that makes it clear some issues are relevant regardless of time period.

Superior Donuts (CBS)

Superior Donuts is unusual on this list for tacking subject matter TV almost always glosses over: gentrification. Based on the play of the same name by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts, the sitcom follows doughnut shop owner Arthur (Judd Hirsch) and his new young co-worker Franco (Jermaine Fowler), who’s certain that the shop can be saved from the wave of younger, richer people changing the face of the neighborhood with some better doughnuts and a better promotional strategy. The show doesn’t strain to incorporate issues, but its setting naturally suggests them, and its cast includes comedic heavy hitters like Katey Sagal, David Koechner, and Maz Jobrani. Sadly, the show was canceled after its second season.

Superstore (NBC)

One economic trend TV hasn’t kept up with nearly as much as it could have is the way most working-class jobs have shifted from the industrial sector to the commercial one, especially when it comes to jobs in the service and retail industries. That’s what makes Superstore, set in a St. Louis-area big-box store named Cloud 9, such a refreshing change of pace. Its characters clock in every day at a store that never seems like a place anybody enjoys working at or even shopping at. But how else will they get paid? With a surprisingly deep ensemble cast and a willingness to talk about issues other sitcoms get squeamish about, Superstore is one of TV’s best comedies.

The Middle (ABC)

What if we told you that all the things Roseanne does well when it comes to depicting the struggles of the white working-class in the formerly industrial Midwest were already being done just as well — and often better — on another ABC show for nine years? And was created by former Roseanne writers? And just wrapped its run as one of TV’s most underrated working-class sitcoms?

We’re describing The Middle, the warm and affectionate look at life in the lower-lower middle class, centered on the Heck family of Orson, Indiana, who are trying to make their ends stretch enough to almost meet their needs, and often failing at that task. The show has explored the struggles of having too little money all the time, of living a very traditional life in an America that’s changing rapidly, and of so many other things, and it’s got some of the best characters on TV, especially in middle daughter Sue Heck (the tremendous Eden Sher). Hell, it even stars one of Hollywood’s more prominent conservatives (Patricia Heaton), if that’s what you’re looking for in a TV show.

But The Middle was never as noisy as Roseanne (just as Heaton seems highly unlikely to get on Twitter and promote weird conspiracy theories). It’s not about shouting whatever you want, but instead, about navigating a world that doesn’t always seem to care how you’re doing, something it tackles with grace, humility, and respect. The Middle never got nearly the amount of attention it deserved, from viewers, from critics, or from awards voters. That it ended just as Roseanne was once again the focus of our culture’s collective attention is at once apt and more than a little sad.

Honorable mentions:

NBC’s The Carmichael Show, an insightful comedy that ran for three seasons with the help of producer Lear; Fox’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which mostly sticks to zany antics but occasionally makes room for heartfelt episodes centering on race and sexuality; The CW’s Jane the Virgin, which was only disqualified for not being a sitcom but is one of the best shows on TV about how the political is personal and vice versa, period.

Every week, some of Vox’s writers gather to discuss the latest episode of FX’s spy drama The Americans. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff, news editor Libby Nelson, and culture writer Caroline Framke offer their takes on “The Summit,” the eighth episode of the final season. Needless to say, spoilers follow!

Todd VanDerWerff: From the earliest days of The Americans, writer Joshua Brand has been the show’s ace in the hole. Whenever the series needs to ratchet up tension, while also turning the emotional and psychological screws on Philip and Elizabeth, Brand is there to write the episode.

He was the guy behind season one’s “Duty and Honor,” in which Philip learned he had another son. He was Emmy-nominated for his script for season three’s “Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” in which Elizabeth killed an innocent old woman, then had to sit with her as she died. And he wrote the fifth season’s best episode, “Dyatkovo,” in which Philip and Elizabeth settled some old scores, then decided to move back home.

So when Brand’s name popped up on “The Summit” — his only credited script for this final season, though, of course, he was in the writers’ room and helped plot out the season — I had high hopes the episode would be a special one. But it exceeded even those heightened expectations. This late in its run, it’s clear that The Americans is ending with a story that asks if Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage can be saved, above all else, and only then does it ask if Stan will catch on to them. If that’s the way the season crumbles, well, Brand’s who you want taking you into the final two episodes.

“The Summit” is filled with so many great moments and scenes — and so many great acting moments for Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys — that it’s almost impossible to start with any single one. But the very first scene in the episode, in which Philip reveals to Elizabeth that he’s been spying on her and informing Oleg of what she’s up to, is right up there with the best scenes the show has ever done. What’s more, I like that the episode brings Elizabeth around to Philip’s way of thinking, in wanting to ultimately protect Gorbachev, but she doesn’t forgive him. And maybe can’t ever forgive him.

Philip is right that he tried to tell Elizabeth multiple times what was happening. But Elizabeth is also right that if he had really wanted her to know, he could have found a way to tell her. (He loves to talk, she reminds us.) The two then spend the entire episode apart, until the very end, when they’re on the same page politically but never further apart personally. At this point, world peace seems more achievable than a Jennings detente.

Meanwhile, Stan is closing in, leaning on friends of Gregory (Elizabeth’s old lover from way back in season one) to see if they can recognize his neighbor from a photo of her, watching the Jennings household from his window, zeroing in, because he knows, even if he doesn’t have proof.

Folks, I somehow kept myself from skipping ahead to the next episode, but it was so hard, thanks to this episode’s master class in building tension. What were your preferred moments from this overstuffed treat?

This is an extraordinary episode for Elizabeth

Libby Nelson: Not to flaunt our screener privilege too much, but I think we both deserve the Order of Lenin for holding back from immediately moving on to episode nine, Todd. “The Summit” was so enthralling that I’m simultaneously dying to find out what happens next and a little devastated that when we do, there will be just one episode to go. Ever.

Although it’s hard to choose, two moments in particular will stick with me for a long time. One is Elizabeth’s struggle to burn Erica’s painting — a decision that clearly causes her more pain and remorse than several murders we’ve seen her commit. The second is the confrontation between Elizabeth and Jackson, a moment that would have been riveting and suspenseful in any case but became unforgettable when Jackson, against all odds, leaves the car alive.

Philip had some extraordinary scenes, including the clearest rejection of the idea, brought back in Elizabeth’s confrontation with Claudia, that they are just following orders: “We do it, not them. It’s on us. All of it.” His every scene felt fraught, and by the time he bought that handsome but funereal suit, I was convinced that he was about to attempt suicide.

Still, “The Summit,” for my money, belonged to Elizabeth, and Keri Russell, and, as Stan’s source put it, her “incredible hair” (a description that must have confirmed Elizabeth’s identity beyond a doubt).

Which brings me to the one quibble I have with this extraordinary episode. I said last week that I feared Elizabeth was becoming too much of a monster, especially next to Philip’s all-American good guy. This week, though, her change of heart from unquestioning loyal soldier in an existential struggle to a freethinker who listens to the recording of Nestorenko and draws her own conclusions felt almost too neat. I believe that Elizabeth Jennings might react that way. But it all seemed to happen awfully fast, as if the imperatives of wrapping up the season were, for the first time, hurrying the story along.

Am I being unfair? Is Philip going to take Chekhov’s cyanide pill? And is anyone else resentful that we’re spending any time, this late in the game, trying to figure out what’s up with Renée?

Caroline Framke: Well, since we’ve only got two episodes left and everything is a mess, I’ll just go ahead and voice my “WHAT IF” suspicion about Ms. Renée. WHAT IF we got so many apparent red herrings about her being a sleeper agent that we’ve looped all the way back around to thinking she’s harmless, only for her to indeed be a sleeper agent meant to make sure that Stan doesn’t do exactly what Stan is now doing? What if we’ve been waiting so long for Stan to have a showdown with his neighbors, only for him to turn around and get blindsided by an operative right in his bedroom?!

Or I dunno, maybe she’s harmless. At this point, the prediction I feel safest making is that I won’t be expecting whatever we end up getting. But hey, this is my last Americans roundtable. (Sad face.) I might as well shoot my shot.

Which brings me to Elizabeth. I get where you’re coming from, Libby, but her turn in this episode really worked for me. That’s in part thanks to Brand and Russell’s commitment, because wow, does “The Summit” bring out the best in both of them. To give credit where it’s due to Russell in particular, three of this episode’s most memorable scenes — Elizabeth preparing to kill Erica, Elizabeth debating what to do with the painting, Elizabeth calculating the cost of letting a terrified Jackson leave her car alive — depend almost entirely on her face struggling to keep itself together.

There are a couple of other, crucial reasons why I buy Elizabeth’s ideological foundation making this tectonic shift. One is that this final season has made it painfully clear just how exhausted she is. This job has taken everything she’s got. It’s taking all she has just to stay upright — and it’s making her sloppy.

When I realized that her plan to bug the meeting was to seduce a congressional intern into becoming her personal State Department courier, I had to laugh through my horror. On the one hand, it worked. On the other, it was exactly the kind of blunt move that she would normally have rejected without a second thought. But with the summit hurtling toward her and few options left, Elizabeth has been taking some frankly stupid risks all season because what does she have to lose? If things go wrong, she always has that necklace.

But the main reason I believe Elizabeth would, in fact, make such a big move by episode’s end is that conversation she has with Claudia. She cashes in all the goodwill she’s stacked up over the years by insisting that Claudia share the real reason they want Nestorenko dead, and she’s clearly floored by the answer. Claudia isn’t just working to bring down Gorbachev outside the party’s wishes but has been using Elizabeth — one of the party’s most loyal and trusted foot soldiers — to do it. When Claudia admitted that part of the plan is to falsify Elizabeth’s reports to damn Nestorenko’s motivations, I knew it was over. Elizabeth has worked too hard for too long to let her work be twisted like this.

I also keep going back to the moment in that ferocious opening scene when Philip insists that he only told Oleg what Elizabeth was up to because he wanted her to “think … like a human being.” He might as well have slapped her; maybe she would have preferred it. Those harsh words rang in my head throughout this episode, as they did, I suspect, in Elizabeth’s.

But as much as this episode belongs to Elizabeth — and whew, episode nine is called “Jennings, Elizabeth,” so get ready for that — one image that will stick with me for a while is Philip’s drawn face blinking up at a Russian film he picked up at the video store in a fit of nostalgia. (It’s called The Garage, which, I see what you did there, The Americans.)

Again, this homesick indulgence is the kind of slip that neither Elizabeth nor Philip has tolerated for decades. But it speaks volumes about just how tired Philip is, how much he’s trying to remember the country he’s been fighting for, that he throws caution to the wind and watches it anyway (at the exact moment his FBI neighbor is trying to get a peek in, no less!). Philip has long been a tragic figure, but I swear Rhys has found a way to collapse his body by several inches; that’s how worn down he’s become.

Todd, I’m worried about our best line-dancing boy! Is he gonna be okay? Are any of us gonna be okay?!

Is Philip Jennings gonna be okay? (Probably not, but we can dream!)

Todd: I think probably Philip is a little paranoid if he’s so worried about renting a critically acclaimed foreign film that he has to put on a disguise and act like he’s renting porn. Then again, I get it. And his choice of film (which is about the clash between individuals and the larger organizations that try to police their behavior and critical of the Soviet leadership through metaphor — or so I’m led to believe, as I haven’t seen it) can only help boost that paranoia.

What this final season is making abundantly clear is that these two don’t really have a country anymore. The deeper we get into the season, the more clear it is that the real struggles are often within these giant bureaucracies or within the relationships that are their microcosms. Philip and Elizabeth are navigating a split within the Soviet Union, in the most obvious form of this, but even Stan is divided between his growing certainty that Philip and Elizabeth are the spies he’s been looking for and his desire to keep them as his friends.

Then again, maybe Philip and Elizabeth aren’t as great at their jobs as we think they are. Even Stavos knew that something was going on in the back office, and he made sure not to tell on his bosses. So when Philip goes to find comfort from his old employee, to assure himself that he’s a good person and a good friend and a good boss, he doesn’t get it. He just gets further confirmation that he’s a failure at everything.

Libby, I couldn’t help but think of the season one finale, “The Colonel,” which we talked about so much earlier this season, because the end of this episode mirrors that one in some ways. Elizabeth wants to meet with Oleg, which is theoretically the riskier play because his presence in the US has attracted substantial attention, while Philip is off to do the less risky thing by talking to Father Andrei. But we also know that the FBI is hot on the tail of a Russian Orthodox priest — and that’s probably Father Andrei, right? (I mean, probably there are other Russian Orthodox priests, and this show has never lacked for foiling the general rule of economy of characters, but I maintain my belief to the end.)

What’s kind of amazing about this season is how it just keeps stripping away more and more elements that don’t matter to its core story: Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, and whether they’re going to get out of this okay. And I have to admit … I’m not sure they will. Picture a grimacing emoji right here.

Libby: It’s a little astonishing that Stan is seemingly on the verge, in a whole bunch of different ways, of maybe, finally, actually finding out the truth about his neighbors, and it’s essentially the B-plot of “The Summit.”

And still, nothing about how this will all end feels inevitable yet.

Father Andrei has seen Elizabeth and Philip without their disguises or their alter egos — and it would seem fitting that getting married would turn out to be the most dangerous thing they ever did, the thing that finally blows their cover. But it would seem equally fitting for Oleg to be the fulcrum. And I can’t discount Stan’s long search through car registrations and the recurring motif of the garage. And Renée! (Here’s my half-baked theory: Renée is a second-generation agent like Paige, someone who will have no problem proving her all-American loyalty to the FBI. I know this doesn’t quite jibe with what Claudia told the Jenningses in season two, but do we really trust Claudia to tell the whole truth?)

We’ve also added two more to the list of characters who know or suspect the Jenningses’ true identities: Stavos and Jackson the intern. It’s not stunning that a longtime employee of the travel agency would suspect something more than selling cruise packages was going on (although it does make me long even more for the travel agency workplace comedy spinoff that Americans fans deserve).

Jackson, who after all gave classified information to Elizabeth, has good reason to keep quiet. But he joins a group I think of often: the people who encountered Philip and Elizabeth and lived to tell the tale but, I suspect, are never quite the same. I’d be very surprised if Young Hee or Martha or Pasha and his parents or even Kimmy reappear. It’s a testament to the world The Americans has created that I often find myself wondering, as you would about an elementary school acquaintance, whatever became of them.

But we’re not done yet, and I’ll save those musings for after the finale! Todd, who would you like to see come back?

Todd: I, too, sort of wish we could get a finale where Stan, having arrested Philip and Elizabeth, drags them to a gigantic VFW hall, then throws open the doors, and everyone they’ve ever wronged is there, and then everybody laughs and says, “You two crazy kids! All is forgiven!”

But I know we won’t get that. If there’s one thing The Americans has made clear over the years — and makes clear again and again in “The Summit” — it’s that spying is crushingly lonely work, a dark, laborious task that requires you to eventually push people away because the job requires it. Elizabeth and Young Hee were friends once. They’re not anymore. And if Stan ever pins down his neighbors, that relationship is probably dead too.

That’s what’s made this final season so crushing, so hard, so exhausting. Philip and Elizabeth used to have each other, a port in the storm of their lives. Now they don’t. Maybe they can find it again, but there are only two episodes left. I’m trying to be optimistic, but I’m not sure how smart that is.

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for May 6 through 12 is “Go Cubs,” the seventh episode of ABC’s Roseanne revival.

Are you tired of talking about the controversies and politics surrounding Roseanne yet? Well, strap in, because this conversation isn’t going away anytime soon.

ABC’s new Roseanne revival has been controversial since the second it was announced, in large part due to the fact that Roseanne Barr became an outspoken right-wing conspiracy theorist in the 20 years since the show first went off the air. And once the show did finally start to air, it became clear with the premiere’s reveal that Roseanne voted for Donald Trump that this revival would, indeed, be more explicitly political than the original run.

That thread continued with “Go Cubs,” an episode devoted to Roseanne recoiling from her new Muslim neighbors before learning that, hey, they might just be people after all. It’s not a particularly new premise; in fact, NBC’s excellent and prematurely canceled sitcom The Carmichael Show did an episode with exactly the same plot more than two years ago. But given Barr’s own political views and Roseanne’s reigning spot in today’s pop culture zeitgeist, it became a lightning rod of controversy almost immediately.

At first, Roseanne spends her time spying on the neighbors, insisting to her sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) that their huge supply of fertilizer could mean they’re “a sleeper cell full of terrorists getting ready to blow up our neighborhood,” and suggesting that their wifi password would be “deathtoAmerica123.”

Once she’s finally forced to meet Samir (Alain Washnevsky) and Fatima (Anne Bedian) face to face, however, it’s harder for her to keep up the vitriol. A scene in which Roseanne has to ask them for their actual wifi password so her granddaughter can Skype her mother (who’s currently on a military tour in Afghanistan) drives home how badly Roseanne misjudged them with a series of blunt reveals. The neighbors’ outsize fertilizer collection came thanks to an Amazon misunderstanding; their password is “go Cubs” for their favorite baseball team; racist threats have caused their scared son to start wearing a bulletproof vest to sleep.

According to writer and producer Dave Caplan, the idea of Roseanne getting new Muslim neighbors came from Barr herself, who apparently wanted to show her character getting “a comeuppance for her own bias.” And lo, Roseanne does. She even gets to end the episode on a triumphant note by taking a racist checkout girl to task for assuming the worst of the neighbor she herself had unfairly profiled just a couple scenes before. So hey, all’s well that ends well, right?

Depending on whom you ask, the answer is a little more complicated. Almost immediately after the episode aired, the internet was awash in controversy — which, as per Barr, is exactly what the new Roseanne is going for.

As with just about every new Roseanne episode so far, the most interesting things about “Go Cubs” are courtesy of the extratextual conversation surrounding it. And as LA Times critic Lorraine Ali pointed out, “America’s pullout from the Iran nuclear accord was announced hours before Roseanne aired. Not even Barr, the crafty master of controversy, could have planned such a serendipitous coupling.”

But the episode also highlighted a consistent disconnect of the Roseanne revival — one that the show may not even be aware it has.

This revival shows Roseanne learning tolerance — but only when her biases affect someone she personally knows

When it came to light that Roseanne would be a Trump supporter in the revival, the reaction was swift and even outraged. When Roseanne originally aired in the ’90s, the character was a feminist who valued the most compassionate kind of tough love. That character, detractors have argued, wouldn’t have evolved to the point where she could cast a vote for someone like Trump. Even former writers for the original series were surprised, with one anonymous person telling BuzzFeed that they “don’t recognize that character” and that the Roseanne they wrote for wouldn’t have cared about having Muslim neighbors.

There is, I think, one key line of “Go Cubs” that addresses this concern. When Roseanne insists that her fear of the new Muslims next door is logical because of all the horrors she’s seen on “the news,” Jackie cuts in with searing disdain that Fox News doesn’t count. If there is anything that could have radicalized Roseanne Conner, a poor white woman who prizes the right to say whatever she damn well wants, a hearty diet of Fox News is the most likely culprit.

But the most telling thing about the entire episode is something that I’m not convinced the show even realized it was doing.

As my colleague Todd VanDerWerff wrote when trying to untangle the many, many controversies surrounding the new revival, this disconnect between Roseanne’s apparent political beliefs and members of her family who will be hurt by Trump’s policies is a particular sticking point for those wary of the revival.

“How, for instance, can Roseanne be so supportive of her grandson’s choice to wear girls clothes to school when the president she so loves is actively trying to ban transgender troops?” he wrote. “How can Roseanne possibly say that the president isn’t racist, especially in light of how strenuously the character pushed back against racism on the original show?”

The thing is, as VanDerWerff then pointed out, there are plenty of Trump voters who find a way to compartmentalize their politics from the people they know and love. And on the flip side, it’s so much easier for someone to demonize an entire populace if they don’t interact with them on an everyday, personal level.

So this week, Roseanne learned that #NotAllMuslims are bad. But that moment when she overcomes her own biases to tell off that cashier by saying that Fatima is a better person than she’ll ever be isn’t exactly a cut-and-dried triumph. She’s not defending the honor of Muslims everywhere; she’s defending the honor of Fatima specifically, because she now knows that at least this Muslim is okay.

If Roseanne wants to live up to its purported mission statement of tackling today’s complex political climate head on, depicting Roseanne’s ability to dissociate her politics from her personal life is, in fact, a pretty important thing to do. It would just be more convincing if the show purposely engaged with that idea instead of accidentally stumbling into it.

Roseanne airs Tuesdays at 8 pm on ABC.

And lo, just as Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans were hitting the depression stage of their grieving process after Fox announced on Thursday that it had canceled the show after five seasons, an eleventh-hour savior swooped in: Late Friday night, NBC announced that it will pick up the beloved comedy for at least a sixth season, which will run 13 episodes.

“Ever since we sold this show to Fox I’ve regretted letting it get away, and it’s high time it came back to its rightful home,” said NBC Entertainment chair Robert Greenblatt, referring to the fact that NBCUniversal did, in fact, own the rights to Brooklyn Nine-Nine — making NBC the most likely network to save it. “[Creators] Mike Schur, Dan Goor, and [star] Andy Samberg grew up on NBC and we’re all thrilled that one of the smartest, funniest, and best cast comedies in a long time will take its place in our comedy line-up. I speak for everyone at NBC, here’s to the Nine-Nine!”

Fox also canceled its comedies The Mick and Last Man on Earth before announcing that it would be reviving Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing from the dead (which, to say the least, feels like something of a telling move in our brave new post-Roseanne revival world). But it was Brooklyn Nine Nine’s cancellation that drew the most visible outrage, with fans from Lin Manuel Miranda(!) to Mark Hamill(!!) to Guillermo Del Toro(?!) expressing their love for the show and hope that it could be saved.

But for now, they and all of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s fans can rest easy. Here’s to at least 13 more episodes of sharp jokes, loving friendship, and maybe one more Halloween heist directed by devoted fan and Oscar-winner Del Toro (hey, a girl can dream).

Every week, some of Vox’s writers gather to discuss the latest episode of FX’s spy drama The Americans. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff, news editor Libby Nelson, and culture writer Caroline Framke offer their takes on “Harvest,” the seventh episode of the final season. Needless to say, spoilers follow!

Todd VanDerWerff: It’s a beautifully, brilliantly tense moment: Stan Beeman, dots connecting in his head, infiltrates the Jennings household, while Philip and Elizabeth are away “working on a travel agency emergency.” He skulks around, poking in corners and pulling at threads that we know would have once led to something but don’t right now. And he finds nothing. He goes back home, comes into work the next day, and pulls up another lead.

Bear in mind that this is with a little over three episodes left in the entire series. At this point, you either admire The Americans’ commitment to being itself or you wonder if it’s squandering its opportunity for a big, flashy finish, like we might have seen on Breaking Bad or The Shield.

Now, it will come as no surprise that I’m in the first camp. If The Americans had suddenly turned into a pulp extravaganza, it would have felt cheap. But bringing Stan into the Jenningses’ inner sanctum and having him come up empty-handed is, like, next-level commitment to the show’s mission statement. I loved how frustrated I was by it.

But thinking back on it an hour or so later, having had time to stew over it, I’ve realized that what sets The Americans apart is its commitment to telling stories about relationships. Whether we’re watching Stan and Henry, or Stan and Philip, or Elizabeth and Erica the artist, we’re seeing stories about people who enter into relationships for transactional reasons — Henry wants a surrogate dad (even if he’d never say so), Philip needs to keep tabs on the FBI, Elizabeth needs intelligence — and find themselves with a “real” relationship anyway. Every relationship is a fake one, and every relationship is a real one. It’s just a matter of how you choose to look at it.

Does Stan back off because he doesn’t find any evidence? Or does he back off because, on some level, he doesn’t want to lose his friend? Or do the two feed into each other somehow? We’re close enough to the end — and Stan is close enough to finding out Philip and Elizabeth’s secret — that I feel fairly confident he will, eventually. But the show is making a larger point here about what makes our interpersonal dealings tick. It’s easy to remember the happy times when things are going well, but it will be just as easy for Stan to say, “I always suspected!” when he finds out his best friend was playing him all these years.

The truth is always in the middle. The end of a bad marriage doesn’t mean both halves of that couple weren’t happy at the wedding, just as a happy wedding doesn’t guarantee a bright future. We are always writing our own stories, and giving others the pen that they might write themselves in, and hoping they don’t abuse that privilege. Everybody on this show has abused that privilege, over and over again. But that doesn’t mean the happier moments aren’t real.

Enough of that, though. Let’s talk about cutting bodies apart with an ax!!!!

CUTTING BODIES APART WITH AN AX! (Also, more praise for Stan.)

Caroline Framke: With all due respect to poor Marilyn, I’m gonna pass. We can’t insert emojis into this recap, and the only reaction I can possibly conjure up to that is a frozen grimace.

Instead, I’m going to loop back to talk about Stan, who has finally listened to my pleas to get interesting already and inched so close to the truth that it’s a wonder Philip didn’t feel a draft on the back of his neck from Stan breathing down it.

After years of shrugging off his travel agent neighbors coming home at 4 in the morning — which, c’mon Stan, you knew that and are only suspicious now? — he finally takes the time to consider that he’s spent years of his life getting conned. Even if he came up short, Stan’s now realizing that he may know nothing at all. That, more than anything, makes it feel like he might truly be on his way to knowing everything.

That sequence of Stan tiptoeing through the Jennings house was both completely frustrating and beautifully done. Noah Emmerich plays it perfectly, letting Stan’s wary eye pass over everything from the smiling photographs to Paige’s discarded cross necklace with admirable restraint, his suspicion teetering right on the edge of full-on alarm.

That he never finds anything almost doesn’t matter. The most significant part of this entire scene is the moment when Stan takes a breath and quietly breaks into the house. In an episode that includes a couple of uncharacteristic flashbacks — to William talking about an “all-American” spy couple on his deathbed, and Philip and Elizabeth renewing their vows in secret — this scene directly recalls Stan rifling through his neighbors’ garage in the pilot. He also found nothing then, but that was before he let the Jennings family become an extension of his own. Him questioning their motives and breaking into a home he’s come to know, and even cherish in times of crisis, means so much more now than it did then.

Stan’s tour of the house coming up empty paired with the disastrous Chicago mission also makes me appreciate just how good The Americans is at the art of the close call. No show is as devoted to delayed gratification as this one, nor does quite as masterful a job of finding drama in every dead end. Everyone is on the brink of discovery at all times, but the teases never feel cheap when they’re this meticulously plotted.

But I’ll admit it: For as tense as this episode was, I fully laughed out loud when I realized that the possible trigger for Philip and Elizabeth’s downfall could be poor Henry venting about how his parents probably love their travel agency more than him. Paige has had a hell of a season — culminating in this episode with her insisting to Elizabeth that this life is exactly what she wants — but here comes Henry Jennings, ready to fuck shit up!

Is it bizarre for you to see where each Jennings kid is at this point, Libby? Or does this feel about right?

Libby Nelson: They say there’s no zeal like a convert’s zeal, and Paige has now been a convert twice. But “Harvest” made it easy to see the line connecting her two lives. Paige wants to feel that she’s making a difference, but beyond that, she also wants to feel better than other people, privy to secret knowledge they don’t understand. She might have swapped out the Bible for Karl Marx, but she’s still able to feel like she’s been chosen to understand what’s really happening.

Elizabeth gives Paige the bare facts about the Chicago mission, but, as always, it’s an eerily sanitized version, as is her warning about the reality of life in the KGB. It almost seems as if she’s trying to goad Paige into committing, into proving that she’s more like her steadfast mother than she is her wishy-washy father. I didn’t know it was possible to make a sentence like “It’s time for you to apply for an internship at the State Department” sound menacing, but here we are.

But what parent could really want this life for their child? How can Elizabeth see what’s happened to Philip and want Paige to go down the same path? Which brings me to the qualm I have with this otherwise stellar season so far: In a show that’s studiously avoided having us root for (or against!) any of its major protagonists, and that has simultaneously skirted the biggest clichés of the antihero genre, Elizabeth is starting to seem … well, like a villain.

There is seemingly no line Elizabeth won’t cross, no number of people she isn’t willing to kill, no collateral damage too large, if the mission is at stake. (Meanwhile, Philip has some understandable qualms about hacking up a dead co-worker with an ax.) When Stan told Philip he was his best friend, I wondered, if push came to shove, if one could really kill the other, or destroy his family. Elizabeth, for me, sparks no such doubt; she’d do it without a second thought.

Elizabeth’s devotion to her cause is so total that it appears to have stolen some of her character’s complexity. Her evolving relationship with Erica is, I think, meant to provide a counterweight, but Elizabeth’s portrayal is starting to seem a bit like the airplane window she drew: all black and white with few shades of gray.

Or maybe I’m just being hopelessly bourgeois. What do you think, Todd?

Has Elizabeth passed the point of no return? And what questions won’t be resolved before the show’s end?

Todd: Wow, Libby, if there’s one thing you should have learned from The Americans, it’s to let go of your bourgeois attitudes and embrace the glorious spartan rigor of the Soviet lifestyle.

I think it’s interesting you say this, though, because I had the “Is Elizabeth becoming too much of a villain?” thought back around episode four, and then when she didn’t kill the child in episode five — and even seemed a little upset about leaving the kid to find his parents’ corpses — I felt as if the show were slowly starting to thaw her, to pull her back from the pure villain place she had been in toward some sort of antiheroic center.

For better or worse, Philip and Elizabeth are always better as spies, as parents, and as travel agents when they’re in it together, and the first half of season six seemed dedicated to showing just how much better by keeping them apart. Philip might have been having a grand time, but there was an emptiness to it that slowly came to the fore, while Elizabeth might have been an automaton.

That, I think, is why the Erica plot line has been so important to the season (and it’s genuinely one of my favorite things about a terrific season). When she tells Elizabeth that she has to bring all of herself to a drawing, to tap into something beyond herself to get at something primal and wild that exists almost outside of her, it feels like the show itself suggesting how easy it is to lose yourself in any role — mother or wife or spy or travel agent — to the exclusion of all the others. The art is a tether, keeping Elizabeth from completely shrinking into herself.

But so is Philip, and so are Paige and Henry. Say what you will about that incredibly awkward phone conversation with Henry in last week’s episode, but it was an attempt by a very lonely woman who thought she was about to die to reach out to one of the things that still reminded her of herself. And the slow, agonizing death of the Chicago illegal in this episode seemed another stark nod toward the stakes of this situation, designed to shake her out of her complacency.

I’ve always seen the cyanide capsule as an almost moral test Elizabeth will ultimately be given. Does she avoid arrest and capture because of her love for her work, or does she live because of her love for her spouse and children? Season six is asking us just how unshakable the bond between these people truly is. If Stan offers Philip a deal to attain citizenship and keep Paige and Henry none the wiser, so long as Philip turns on Elizabeth, does Philip take it? Just what is a marriage anyway, especially one built on coincidence and convenience? And what’s a family, for that matter?

It’s clear, by now, that the show isn’t going to have the rip-snorting climax a lot of people have expected, but let me ask you: Which loose ends do you hope it can tie up in the three hours remaining? And which do you think it has no chance of resolving satisfactorily? (For me, the answer to the latter question is the true identity and motives of Renee, though I would laugh if the answer was, “Oh, she’s just Stan’s wife.”)

Caroline: In order of urgency: Is Oleg going to make it back to the Soviet Union in one piece? Will Paige make it through even if her parents don’t? Will Henry become a semiprofessional tanner? Who’s gonna fire Mail Robot when the technological revolution comes?!

Honestly, when I sat down to think about this, there just weren’t many pressing things that haven’t been addressed already that came to mind — with one glaring exception.

The biggest question looming over this entire series has been whether Stan will discover the truth. As much as I would love that to finally happen, I think it either won’t happen or only once it’s too late. Like you said, Todd, it’s not in The Americans’ nature to provide satisfying answers to its biggest questions. If this slow, excruciating cat-and-mouse game ends with a conclusive bang, I think I might be more disappointed than not.

Libby: Okay, here’s my confession: I am secretly a little terrified that three weeks from now we’ll be sitting here saying, Wait, that’s it?

The Americans has built up tension exquisitely throughout its run, but it rarely releases it in the way you’d expect. The show rarely has a shocking twist, and yet it’s rarely predictable. I never would have guessed that Martha would survive, that Philip’s son would be turned back without ever meeting him, that Stan would still — three episodes from the end! — be in the dark.

There are too many loose ends to choose from. I suspect we won’t see any of Philip and Elizabeth’s marks from missions past again, even though I think about Martha and Young Hee often. (But who knows — Kimmy came back.) Nor do I think we’ll get another appearance from Philip’s son. From here on out, I’m assuming, it’s just our main protagonists.

I’m relatively confident in a satisfying end to Oleg’s story (which could be anything from a death at Elizabeth’s hands to a ministerial position in Gorbachev’s government, who knows). Paige has, I hope, so much future ahead of her that it’s unlikely to get any really conclusive ending. (Unless she dies. Which I’m not ruling out because I’m not ruling anything out.)

I have no idea whether Philip and Elizabeth will end the series together or not, on the same page or not, both still alive or not, but I’m certain that unfinished business will be concluded. Still, I’m confident we’ll get some kind of resolution there. As for Stan — well, while I hope you’re wrong, Caroline, given all the buildup we’ve seemingly had to this moment, it would be very Americans for Stan to never really find out the truth. And while my knee-jerk reaction right now is that such an ending would be very disappointing, it would be very Americans for that conclusion to feel satisfying regardless.

Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writers Constance Grady and Caroline Framke discuss “Other Women,” the fourth episode of the second season.

Caroline Framke: It feels like we say this every week, but for my money, this is one of the most disturbing episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale yet.

“Other Women” plunges June back into the cold grip of the Waterford household after she got tantalizingly close to escaping over the Canadian border. At first, she’s shackled in the Red Center basement as a punishment for stepping out of line and furious about it, having experienced a taste of freedom. At first, she resists Aunt Lydia’s wheedling requests for her to slip back into the scarlet robes of a Handmaid.

At first, she thinks resisting might be possible.

June’s slow, steady descent toward accepting that she just might live at rock bottom the rest of her days is, in Handmaid’s tradition, hard to watch. Being back in the Waterford house as everyone insists with a placid smile that they’re just so happy to have her back after she was “kidnapped” is as disorienting as it is infuriating. And June, knowing her pregnancy makes her as untouchable as she can be in Gilead, lets everyone know exactly how mad she is — until Aunt Lydia finally finds a way to break her.

But I’d like to back up a bit and talk about the thematic structure of this episode, which leans on, as its title promises, “Other Women.” In particular, it leans on the idea of other women acting as collaborators in their own oppression. Serena Joy comes roaring back into the mix with her barely restrained frustration that her Handmaid seems to be a defective, defiant model. The other Wives come over for a baby shower and coo over June’s swollen stomach as if June isn’t there. All the while, Aunt Lydia prowls around the edges, threatening retribution should June step out of line again.

And in a pointed move, the flashbacks in “Other Women” detail the ripple effects that June and Luke’s infidelity had on their lives and beyond, from Luke’s stung ex-wife confronting them to June’s eventual imprisonment as a Handmaid. (Adulterers don’t get to be Econowives.)

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about how all these other women come crashing together. At times, it’s stark and effective; at others, the blunt proclamations just feel overwrought. I understand why the show feels the need to examine women’s roles in Gilead, and why it has so far backed off from doing the same with the men. That Luke episode in season one was a near disaster; same goes for most attempts to make Nick even vaguely interesting.

But when all the transgressions are presented together in the same episode like this, part of me can’t help but wrinkle my nose and think, “Okay, but what about the men, though?” Many of these women deserve condemnation, but what about the sexist systems that thrust them into these mindsets in the first place? I’m just not convinced this show quite knows the answer at this point, despite this season’s obvious interest in untangling the bigger picture behind how Gilead came to be.

The USA-to-Gilead timeline is a little fuzzy around the edges

Todd VanDerWerff: One of the things I sometimes struggle with in this show is the timeline of how the US becomes Gilead, which is … fuzzy.

Yes, I get that governments can fall very quickly, and I get that they’re often replaced by horribly warped versions of themselves in the aftermath. And the idea of “attacks on Washington” leading to Gilead works well enough for a quick and dirty bit of world building in the novel.

But when you literalize that and put it on TV, everything gets fuzzier still. There were very few flashbacks this week, but in one, where Hannah was a tiny baby, I kept wondering just how far away Gilead was, and whether June and Luke could see its rise coming (even obliquely), and whether people in other corners of this world were learning the seemingly 700 intricate rituals that all Gilead residents seem to know on cue. This is not a major flaw, and it’s endemic enough to the premise that I’m usually willing to overlook it, but it’s definitely something that the show has to distract you from as much as it possibly can.

This makes it all the more intriguing that season two is hurtling straight at that weak point, forcing you to look at it as much as it dares. As a TV writer nerd, I kind of love this, because it’s something that either makes or breaks a show. Sometimes you end up with season three of Breaking Bad, which does everything it can to blow up its original premise and somehow still keeps ticking, and sometimes you end up with season two of Homeland, where the show eventually blinks. But either way, you’ve got somethin’.

All of this is to say that I think this season is going somewhere with its collision of these ideas of women turning against each other, rather than the extremely overt patriarchal system that keeps them all pinned in place. Look at that quick cutaway during the baby shower to the men who run Gilead, smirking and shooting and just generally being supremely smug and satisfied with themselves. I don’t think the show needs to say this because, well, all of the other characters (and us) know it.

That makes Serena Joy pivotal to whatever the show is doing, and Yvonne Strahovski reenters the story with a curdled fury this week that takes many forms. The scenes between Elisabeth Moss and Strahovski were among my favorites of season one, and by moving Lydia into the Waterford home (which, to be honest, might turn out to be a really shrewd storytelling choice), we’ll ideally get even more of these stratified nightmares.

In some ways, the central conflict of the show is June versus Offred, something the back half of “Other Women” makes very clear. To me, the episode suggested some new (if incredibly dark) avenues for this conflict to take, which is why I’m on board. But did either of you feel differently?

Caroline: I agree, even if only for that chilling final sequence.

After Aunt Lydia forces June to look at the Wall and face the consequences of her decisions — the hanging body of the kindly Muslim man who housed her, at least Aunt Lydia says — June officially decides it’s time to shut down. She tries her damnedest to empty herself of her personality to embrace being Offred, the polite breeding sow who never questions her station.

In the final moments of this episode, we see her stroll right past a confused Nick, slip out the front gate for her walk, and gaze placidly straight into the camera to the tune of Cat Power’s “Hate” (which, to give credit where it’s due, is one of the show’s best and least ostentatious song cues to date). “We’ve been sent good weather … we’ve been sent good weather,” her voiceover intones, over and over again. The infuriated June that’s always been roiling inside has finally snuffed herself out to become Offred.

This, to me, is one of the most truly horrifying moments The Handmaid’s Tale has ever offered. Yes, the show’s gone bigger and even bloodier, but this scene conveys the extent of just how crushed June’s spirit is with such startling clarity that it’s impossible not to look into her eyes and shudder at their blankness. Compared to the overtly traumatic scene in which Aunt Lydia bellows at a gasping June in front of the Wall, this moment is the model of restraint — and so much more effective for it.

The series is slowly shifting its filmmaking style back to its status quo

Constance Grady: I think what makes that final sequence work as well as it does is Elisabeth Moss’s performance in the episode’s first half. She’s always excelled at keeping a hard edge of rebellion hidden behind her eyes, but this week there was an almost feral quality to the way she smiled, and the way she spat out, “You know my fucking name,” at Aunt Lydia.

And the camerawork backed up Moss beautifully: There are lots of shots of her tilting her head up and baring her teeth, hollow-eyed, while her face is framed so that she looks as though she’s being caged. (Look at the placement of the banister railings around her face as she leans against it.) In her opening voiceover, June compares herself to a rat in a cage, and there’s a lot of nice, subtle work happening this week to carry that metaphor through the episode — which makes it all the more upsetting when that ferocious, feral energy drains away and we’re left with placid, passive Offred.

I’ll admit that the mechanics that lead us to that killer final moment give me pause. We’ve seen all kinds of torments visited upon June already, and we can assume there was more in the five years between the creation of Gilead and our introduction to June at the Waterford house. June went through extensive psychological conditioning at the Red Center already, but this is what it takes to push her over the edge?

I think the disconnect that’s tripping me up here comes from the show beginning to really develop its new, non-Atwoodian tone as it moves further and further away from the book. It’s getting more lyrical than it used to be, less stark and a little more baroque in its horror. Where the first season was all white backgrounds with the Handmaid reds screaming against them, the new Handmaid’s Tale is working with a bluer palette: all those lush floral tableaux like the ones at this week’s baby shower, with something twisted and traumatic lurking underneath.

The Handmaid’s Tale of last season would never have given us a scene like the one where Serena Joy creeps into June’s bedroom to whisper creepily to her belly, and it wouldn’t have given us that chilling “we’ve been sent good weather” ending either. Something that baroque isn’t in Atwood’s register, and it wasn’t in the show’s then, either. As a viewer, it’s taking me a beat to adjust the way I watch this show to accommodate the change.

But I think this new aesthetic mode is a strong direction for the show: It feels both horrifying and sustainable in a way that the starker trauma of last season wasn’t quite. I’m getting very interested to see where season two goes next.

Todd: I’m glad you brought up the camerawork, Constance, because I noticed that director Kari Skogland (who also directed last week’s “Baggage”) substantially backed off the wide shots that characterized the season’s first three episodes. Indeed, the episode slowly zeroes back in on the wide-angle close-ups that so defined the series in its early going, as June cracks under the strain of being once again in captivity.

This is probably a smart call in the short term. Season one started out aesthetically telling a story about one woman’s suffering that was meant as a kind of synecdoche of all women’s suffering. And as that season wore on, it lost that intimacy somewhat, as we were drawn into the perspectives of the show’s other women characters, but the camerawork was always rooting us, first and foremost, in the perspectives of those women. (It’s one of the reasons the episode focused on Nick didn’t really work — by constantly butting his own story up against the more claustrophobic filmmaking, his suffering massively lacked in comparison.)

The first few episodes of season two were less interested in the suffering of any women in particular and more interested in the hidden wires connecting everyone in Gilead, and even those who had escaped it. Pulling back into more frequent wide shots (like one in episode two that panned across the expanse of the Colonies before landing on the familiar close-up on Emily’s face) underlined how all of this was connected without suggesting the women were complicit in their own suffering. Season two has been far more interested in the ways that simply being alive makes you complicit in somebody’s oppression somewhere, and the wide shots were instrumental to that.

So it’s fascinating to watch the show slide back into its signature shot: the close-up on June. And yet there’s something different here. That final shot features June looking down at the camera in close-up, which should traditionally place her in a position of dominance or power over the viewer. Yet this is her moment of ultimate defeat, when she finally gives up her freedom in the name of raw survival.

There’s some compelling thematic interplay at work here — June has been beaten into submission, yes, and I don’t want to suggest she is making a “choice” here. But her own mind has framed it as such for her, and giving in is presented as a twisted victory. It’s one of the most horrific moments in the whole series for that reason.

I know there are plenty of people who watch this show who miss the stark terror of the first three episodes and the visual palette set up by Reed Morano. I sympathize at times. But the ways Handmaid’s Tale has varied that palette in season two are perhaps even more interesting to me, and I’m waiting to see where the show goes next.

Constance: It’s interesting that we’re just four episodes into this season, and we’ve already seen June at her apparent victory — covered in blood as she cuts off her ear tag and intoning “I’m free” in voiceover, at the end of the premiere — and now at her apparent nadir. It’s effective at setting up the June versus Offred conflict, but it does make me wonder how the rest of the season will find room to keep moving between those two poles without retreading the same ground again and again.

But the tone this episode hits makes me think that the show has found a sustainable aesthetic mode in which to figure out the rest of its issues. As long as it keeps landing the horror, I’ll stick around for the ride.

The first four episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale season two are currently available to stream on Hulu.

Caroline Framke: Now this is more like it.

“Virtù e Fortuna” feels like the explosive jump-start that I was waiting for from season two of Westworld — or, at the very least, it finally feels like Westworld wants to give us something different.

That much is immediately clear from that 10-minute cold open, which brings us to a whole new park of high teas and jungle safaris that I shall henceforth refer to as “Colonialismworld.” (I’ll grant you that this isn’t nearly as catchy as “Westworld,” but I call ’em like I see ’em.)

At first, everything seems in order. A cocky British man and a cocky American woman bond over their mutual hotness and disdain for the little people before retreating indoors to tear each other’s clothes off. Once they have privacy, however, the woman (Grace) decides she wants to make sure that this man is, indeed, a human man — and shoots him point blank with something that, if he is human, will “only sting a bit.”

Luckily for him, he passes the test and the two embark on an intimate safari journey together, each straddling their own elephant while flanked by multiple Indian hosts. But once they get to their camp, Grace notices that the usual hosts aren’t there to greet and cook for them (the nerve!).

And lo, the inevitable other shoe drops.

Grace’s once-trusty guide turns on them, killing the Brit before she manages to shoot him in the face and tear away into the jungle beyond. That’s where things truly get sticky, as she gasps for air and finds herself face to face with a snarling tiger.

A TIGER. Look, I know other things happened in this episode. (Maeve links up with Armistice! Dolores/Wyatt finds her father! Teddy kinda maybe cracks!) But as far as I’m concerned, there is just no beating the sheer drama of a goddamn tiger chasing someone off a cliff before a smash to credits.

Not only was it stressful in a way that Westworld rarely achieves (it’s hard to care about death when death is so easily reversed), but it was just so unexpected that I couldn’t help but love it. Getting even just a glimpse at Colonialismworld managed to reignite my long-dormant interest in the human side of this equation; the people who choose that park are likely looking for a much different experience than those who lose themselves in Westworld.

Then again, I reserve the right to arch a skeptical eyebrow in this storyline’s direction in the future because the tail end of the episode shows the running woman washing up on the shore of Westworld at the feet of leering Native Americans — a population that the show has barely shown an interest in developing beyond their ability to scare the shit out of human guests and cowboy hosts alike.

But as Westworld gets more and more space to play out scenarios — and it should, given its recent renewal for a third season — I’m all for it taking these kinds of detours. What say you, Todd? Was this episode as solid as I thought it was? Or was I just thrilled about the Man in Black disappearing and/or distracted by the tiger?

This episode features a fascinating juxtaposition of a park based on colonialism and Westworld’s antagonistic relationship with Native Americans

Todd VanDerWerff: Well, Caroline, you’ve worked with me long enough to know that there are two things I love in this world: cold opens that exist primarily to serve world-building, character-building, or theme-building purposes rather than set up the story to come; and tigers.

Which is to say that, yes, for as much as I enjoyed this episode, I enjoyed the cold open even more. I loved our two humans warily circling each other to try to determine if one was a Host. I loved the tiger. I loved that the sequence starred new series regular Katja Herbers, of my late, lamented Manhattan.

But is it wrong that these might be the first human characters on Westworld I’ve truly connected with in … maybe ever? I mean, I guess I like William well enough, but the staff of Westworld/Delos is kind of interchangeable. I suppose that’s the point on a show like this — those who will replace us are so much more interesting than we could ever be because we are lazy in our position of privilege — but it took seeing these two to realize how much I’d been missing the feeling that the struggle between man and machine was at all a fight where both sides had something to offer.

There’s also something interesting here about how Grace goes from a section of the park based on British colonial rule of India to … being captured by Hosts designed to look like Native Americans once she swims over to Westworld. (Native Americans, of course, were dubbed for years “American Indians.”) Both Indians and Native Americans were subject to colonialist oppression, and even mass genocide in the case of the latter, and there’s something pointed in the way Westworld draws a link between them and then between them and the Hosts.

The idea that maybe the rich people of the near future just want to hang out in colonial-era India, secure in their power and privilege, while listening to a sitar version of “Seven Nation Army,” well, that’s almost a more powerful expression of what the show is trying to say about oppression and cycles of violence and so on than any of the long monologues it’s offered about the same.

The same goes for the way that Maeve’s group is instantly afraid of the Ghost Nation tribespeople. Yes, there are reasons (including Maeve’s flashback to her previous life), but there’s also an element of reading hostility into the tribe.

Then again, isn’t that what the Ghost Nation is literally programmed to do? I’m not always sure about how Westworld is using archetypes and stereotypes that have grown up around racial and gender roles in our storytelling. Sometimes the show handles these ideas gracefully. And sometimes it seems like it’s aware these things exist but isn’t quite sure how to navigate them and still tell an entertaining story without being needlessly exploitative.

Yet I couldn’t help thinking, during some of these scenes that the show is saying something about how when society breaks down into groups who have certain degrees of privilege and those who do not, that it can be very hard to fight against the stereotypes thrust upon you — all the more so when you have literal programming running through your circuits, telling you to behave like a scary, hostile Native American warrior straight out of a Western.

And that same battle between programmed role and desire for true individual freedom goes for the show’s women, which is something I know you have plenty to say about, Caroline, so I’ll toss it back to you.

Who run the (West)world? Women Hosts.

Caroline: It’s honestly pretty astonishing that I don’t describe my area of expertise as just, “LADIES, amirite?”

As far as Westworld is concerned this season, women are running the show — or, more specifically, the women Hosts. Maeve has enlisted several men in her mission to find her daughter and is leading the way with laser focus. Dolores is fashioning herself into the leader of a revolution, come hell or high water or total annihilation. Angela, once Westworld’s token hot host greeter, has reemerged this season as a sneering angel of death, complete with a bloody crown of thorns. Even peroxide-blonde bandit Armistice is back, and this time, she’s got a goddamn fire thrower.

After the season premiere, I said it felt like Westworld was actively reckoning with its own reception, especially as Maeve and Dolores rolled their eyes and took control from the men who once subjugated them. The show seemed to acknowledge the criticism that it once luxuriated in brutality against women by turning that dynamic on its head completely, letting Dolores and Maeve wreak their revenge in ways both psychological (Maeve commanding Westworld’s story writer to strip) and bloody (Dolores comma always).

This reversal is what I like to call a “Game of Thrones season six.” HBO’s other labyrinthine drama got a world of grief for its grim fifth season; I had to step away, that’s how exhausted I was by watching woman after woman go through trauma after trauma. But when it came back for season 6, Game of Thrones flipped the script on itself and lifted just about every woman who had been bruised into a position of incredible power. Did I always believe it? Nah. Did I love it? Of course.

Now, we’re only three episodes into this season, but “Virtù e Fortuna” confirms to me that Westworld might be trying to pull something similar here. Sure, Maeve is finding power in the embrace of motherhood, and Dolores only found hers when her personality was merged with that of a swaggering male villain. But both are undeniably becoming, as Dolores intoned in the premiere, less of what was originally scripted for them and more of themselves, whatever that may come to mean. Do I always believe it? Nah. Am I excited for it? Much to my own surprise, hell yes.

I think something that helps me get invested in Dolores and Maeve’s arcs specifically here is that “Virtù e Fortuna” affords each a moment to grapple with their own trauma in a way the show has rarely made room for in the past.

Maeve needs to take a moment to collect herself when their escape from the Native Americans reminds her of a storyline gone horribly wrong. Dolores, faced with the broken shell of her father, reverts back into rancher’s daughter mode in order to comfort him. And when he’s re-kidnapped, she makes it clear that while she’s determined to bring down the human order, she’s also determined to save the only family she’s got. (Not for nothing, Evan Rachel Wood is truly astonishing in that scene, as is Louis Herthum as a glitching Abernathy.)

Are you convinced by these triumphant “I am woman, hear me roar” second stages, Todd? And what’s up with Abernathy being some kind of key, anyway?

Todd: The Abernathy thing seems like an easy answer to me: Herthum turned out to be a much, much better actor than anybody quite expected, so they found a way to keep bringing him back, again and again. And I, for one, am all for it.

In the sense of the show pivoting to be more about its women, this also might have a resonance with the Grace-centric cold open. Really, the characters the show codes as fundamentally unknowable and mysterious and ultimately dangerous are all white men, usually humans. (Ask me later how Teddy plays into this dynamic, because I haven’t quite made up my mind yet.) Thus, Grace is the character we latch onto, while her British lover is the maybe-robot who winds up dead.

I posited before the season began that Westworld is trying to tell some sort of massive story about the nature of every oppressive society ever. That’s, of course, an impossible task for any one TV show — especially one as vague and elliptical as this one — but there are moments, like the meeting between Dolores and Maeve in last week’s episode, or Grace running away from the tiger, or Dolores’s discussion with her father this week, where it comes so close to telling that story on its own terms that I can’t help but keep watching, in hopes it will somehow clear the bar it’s set stratospherically high for itself.

But I think the show has also gotten better at lacing its philosophy with action this season. When Dolores emerged from the fort to start gunning down the forces of Delos, it was a hugely exciting moment, and I’m impressed with how good the show has gotten at turning on a dime to show violence as catharsis or slaughter, depending on whose perspective you take. That violence is always both is something not every TV show understands but Westworld does.

Or, put another way, sometimes you’re the tiger, and sometimes, you’re the person the tiger chases. The more the show circles the idea that it makes just as much sense to run as it does to pursue, the better it gets.