Spoilers for the entire run of Penny Dreadful follow.

Few phrases are lonelier than “The End.”

In classic films, those words signaled to the audience that it was time to return to reality. The house lights came up, and that was all, folks. Usually, we’re ready to be done by the time “The End” comes.

When we’re not prepared, “The End” is the lover breaking up with you in the middle of a dinner date. It’s the friend that leaves you at the middle of the party without means of getting home. Series that end well let us down gently, with a fond farewell kiss; others pull an Irish goodbye and assume we’re fine with that.

Dedicated viewers of Showtime’s grand Victorian horror mash-up Penny Dreadful may have felt something akin to jilted, then, when those words — “The End” — appeared at the close of what was presumed to be the show’s two-hour third season finale. No other Penny Dreadful season had ended thusly, and these days, few series end without warning or fanfare.

Besides, there were multiple story threads left hanging, and so many characters the audience barely got to know. Why introduce Dr. Jekyll … excuse me, Lord Hyde (Shazad Latif), or a ferocious warrior like Catriona Hartdegen (Perdita Weeks) if only to use them for a few episodes? Why resurrect one character as an undead fury named Lily (Billie Piper), and fail to explore what happens when she runs into her old love, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett)?

What, in the end, was the point of Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), beyond being devilishly good-looking?

Alas, these and other topics for future chapters will remain unwritten. An official Showtime statement confirmed that this was indeed the final bow for Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Mr. Chandler, Mr. Gray, Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his creature (Rory Kinnear). Where most TV shows are abruptly canceled or have planned endings announced in advance, Penny Dreadful had, instead, an abrupt ending that was, nonetheless, planned, if Showtime was to be believed.

That news may be the only thing that could out-shock the final episode’s surprising death of Penny Dreadful’s central heroine, Vanessa Ives.

A medicinal study in loneliness

Ethan and Vanessa share a moment.

An anguished woman brought vibrantly alive by Eva Green, Vanessa was never destined for a happy ending or, for that matter, old age.

Relentlessly pursued by Devil and Dragon, tormented by witches, and tortured in a Victorian mental institution, Vanessa Ives lived a short, unenviable life filled with danger and adventure.

Miss Ives was blessed with loyal companions in Sir Malcolm, Ethan, and, for a time, Malcolm’s right-hand man, Sembene (Danny Sapani), all of whom fought to protect her. But at the end of season two, even they had to abandon Vanessa — another storytelling decision that made season three unnecessarily unwieldy.

Then again, Vanessa always walked alone. She stumbled and fell throughout her life, but always stood up again, tougher and stronger, if inevitably more by herself. At its heart, that’s what Penny Dreadful was — a study of resilience in the face of loneliness. For all of its Victorian scenery and gothic gorgeousness, for all of its ripped flesh and bloody fangs, loneliness was the show’s Invisible Man, the villain nobody could defeat, the shroud around Vanessa that, in her words, brought only pain.

In the brief time Penny Dreadful viewers were given with Vanessa, she rarely had occasion to be giddy, not even in the briefest reprieves between battles. But the darkness in her soul had a pulse that made her accessible.

Last week, series creator and executive producer John Logan told the Hollywood Reporter and other outlets that Penny Dreadful was “about a woman grappling with God and faith.” Back in 2014, before the show premiered, he said something slightly different to critics, which resonated with me.

“Growing up as a gay man, before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated, to feel not like everyone else,” he observed. “But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.”

Penny Dreadful’s brand of loneliness also possessed a medicinal quality, in part because the Victorian loveliness and politeness of said loneliness made it somewhat intoxicating. Loneliness may be the handmaiden to depression and other psychological maladies, but here, it is the price one pays for being unique. In an image and manners-obsessed world, uniqueness is akin to being monstrous.

That’s part of the reason that Logan’s decision to drape season three’s villain, Dracula (Christian Camargo) in a cloak of bland kindness was so devious: Logan knew all too well how to break the heart of a woman like Vanessa. She never saw Dracula coming. The moment she realized her suitor was also her predator, the devastation that slid across her face was palpable.

Vanessa remained in the daylight for as long as she could, but in the end, she could not escape the truth of who she was. Ethan Chandler’s adopted Apache father Kaetenay (Wes Studi) rightly called her “a great fertile bitch of evil,” and, like him, we loved her for her power — it made her fight more interesting.

The ferocity with which Vanessa clung to her faith in God, and the frigid disappointment with which she abandoned it, felt radical and genuine. There was solace to be found in Vanessa’s commanding presence, a strength that radiated from her eyes even as she stood nose-to-nose with evil. Vanessa was a woman who declared several times to those who would claim her soul that she knew herself — a brave notion to people who know what it’s like to feel hollow and lost, yet alive.

She began Penny Dreadful’s third and final season depressed and alone, feeding like an animal among the spiders and the flies. She also ended it in that place, but not for any reason to which the script built, which was the season’s biggest problem.

Something frustrating this way comes

Darkness consumes Penny Dreadful’s London.

The same character who crushed Satan at the end of season two, who defeated him with the simple declaration that, although she was no more important than a blade of grass, “I am,” bafflingly swooned into Dracula’s kiss in the third-to-final episode with virtually the same declaration: “I accept … myself.”

This set in motion the End of Days: The air became poisonous. Frogs poured out of drainpipes, hordes of rats came out to play. Unexpected twists are the meat of many good horror tales, and every great battle to end all battles requires defeating waves of terrors.

But this turn also defied everything we’ve been primed to accept and love about Vanessa as a character. Where was the heart-torn lady who would not be bowed? Where was the magical being who trained and suffered alongside a witch and learned that the most important lesson, the one she could never forget, was to be true?

In short, she was replaced by a waif in an ivory gown who had to ask her true love, Ethan, to do her in. After one final prayer, he fulfilled that request; a single gunshot, and it was done. Dracula disappeared, and the lady saw her Lord before she vanished into death.

Vanessa’s resting place was bedecked with lilies and surrounded by those who loved her, men left to contemplate her loss. As they walked away, the Creature — Miss Ives’s secret confidante and fellow outcast — crept forward to touch the freshly dug soil to which she’d been returned.

The End.

How cruel.

What a cop-out.

Penny Dreadful represented Logan’s first foray into series television, and after writing the first two seasons, he delegated several season three episodes to others, which may account for a few inconsistencies in its tone. But even that doesn’t explain why the writers would make Vanessa suddenly and sharply veer away from her guiding principles.

Of course, this opinion is formed by a very specific viewpoint, one that sees this show’s role as both entertainment and balm.

Death, be not proud. But don’t tick us off, either.

The men of Penny Dreadful say goodbye to Vanessa Ives.

Every artistic work is born of specific vision and executed with that in mind. Once that work is presented to the world, however, the artist’s original intent becomes secondary to the beholder’s interpretation. Each of us brings a singular perspective to the works we find moving. A painting, a sculpture, or a television series can have as many different meanings as there are viewers.

Unlike static works of art, TV series and the people who create them evolve. A show can broaden in scope through its characters, fictional beings who win our hearts and trust as they lead us through their journey.

Because of this, when a character suddenly deviates from the moral and emotional structure previously made familiar to us, it’s shocking. And when she does this shortly before the curtain drops on her story and the show’s life — before we get see her meaningfully stand up again — it leaves a final impression of haphazard incompleteness. It’s ever so slightly violating.

Perhaps the best way to get over any pangs of anger and loss, then, is not to seethe over how Penny Dreadful collapsed and died, but to recall all of the ways it seduced us over its three seasons.

As one of Vanessa’s true friends observed, “Life, for all its anguish, is ours, Miss Ives. It belongs to no other.” The same can be said of how we see our favorite TV shows.

It’s impossible to serve up Beyoncé’s Lemonade without talking about Hot Sauce.

Hot Sauce, in case you didn’t catch that detail, refers to the words burned into the baseball bat Bey wields during the “Denial” segment of the Lemonade short film. She playfully claims it from a little boy’s hands as she skips down the street in her fluttery, ruffled yellow dress, her face lit up with a charming smile.

Just playing, y’all, her expression says … until she comes upon the perfect target, a car.

With a sideways glare, Beyoncé’s smile is instantly replaced by a rage-filled, toothy snarl. She smashes the window into shards.

Ah, but the smile returns! Then … smash! There goes the fire hydrant. She twirls. She scowls. More glass shatters.

The last victim of Hot Sauce’s wrath is the camera itself.

Religious symbolism, high fashion, elaborate sets, the various directorial styles employed in each segment — there’s plenty to parse, analyze, and debate about Lemonade, in both its album and visual album forms, far beyond the true identity of “Becky with the good hair” or the state of the singer’s marriage.

At its most potent, Lemonade offers Beyoncé tackling what black women contend with in terms of expressing and suppressing emotion — especially the truth behind the misguided entertainment trope popularly known as the Angry Black Woman.

"I am the dragon breathing fire"

Much has already been said about Lemonade’s distillation of a black woman’s pain in all of its guises — wounds born of betrayal, of destructive cycles repeated within a family or the heartbreak inflicted by society. This is powerfully illustrated in a scene featuring Gwendoline Carr, Sybrina Fulton, and Lesley McSpadden, the mothers of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, who were all killed by police.

Just as significant, however, is the way Beyoncé dismantles the Angry Black Woman trope.

Clearly, she has anger to express — she got a good bit of it out thanks to Hot Sauce. But the fact that she is expressing it as the centerpiece of her magnum opus is particularly notable.

Recall the famous 2014 hotel elevator tape, featuring footage of Beyoncé’s sister Solange letting her brother-in-law, Beyoncé’s husband, Jay Z, have it. Many gossip stories and internet memes were spawned from those three soundless minutes of dragon fire, but what stuck with me wasn’t what Solange did. It was the expression on Beyoncé’s face as she left the hotel.

She was smiling. It wasn’t a smile of joyful vindication, however. It was the mask of a star working overtime to hide her suffering from the public.

All women recognize this disguise, but black women, in particular, are trained to master it from an early age. Black female emotional expression is considered by the dominant culture to be unsettling, unfeminine, and scary. It can get a girl in trouble.

Let it out for a hot minute, and one might earn the dreaded Angry Black Woman label.

How the Angry Black Woman trope damages black women everywhere

Beyoncé appears at the 2016 Met Gala.

The Angry Black Woman trope has appeared over and over again in film and on television. On TV, she is the side of the sassy black friend that erupts on cue, accompanied by a slew of hilariously pointed dialogue. She’s the midlevel office manager, the tired DMV employee with a hair-trigger temper.

In films like Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, she’s a put-upon stranger who explodes at the nice blonde girl on the subway for daring to wonder aloud why the train has halted between stops.

Entertainment’s perpetuation of this trope is damaging to black women everywhere. It has an impact on the way black girls are treated in our educational system, and it affects how black women are evaluated in competitive sports. In the workplace, it is used as an excuse to limit career advancement.

In the entertainment industry itself, it’s hauled out to minimize a black woman’s success. And that applies to any black woman. Witness the New York Times’s misguided 2014 profile that branded superstar TV showrunner Shonda Rhimes with the label, as if it were a compliment.

More frequently, however, it’s been less prominent, less famous women like Jacque Reid, a co-host on WNBC’s New York Live, who’ve had to navigate the minefield on a regular basis.

“I had a white manager tell me one time that she was afraid of me,” Reid revealed on a 2015 episode of The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore. “And anybody who knows me … I’m just, you know, a typical black girl. And she told me that she was afraid of me, because I’m a strong woman. I’m opinionated, and I say what I feel needs to be said.”

Rarely is the Angry Black Woman label ascribed to a goddess like Beyoncé, a woman believed by a number of popular culture’s self-anointed gatekeepers — people such as Piers Morgan — to have talent that takes her beyond the perceived burden of her blackness.

Type “Beyoncé” and “transcend” and “race” into Google, and notice how many stories pop up crediting the singer for moving beyond some supposedly prescribed limitation — as if her skin color is something to overcome.

It’s true that Queen Bey’s magnetism has enthralled people of all ethnicities across the globe. However, white pop stars like Lady Gaga rarely, if ever, hear that ersatz compliment attached to their image or their work. I’m pretty sure nobody ever praised Madonna for overcoming her whiteness.

Lemonade strikes back against the media's lopsided portrayal of black women

Quvenzhané Wallis was the target of social media ire after being cast in Annie.

With the visual album version of Lemonade, Beyoncé proudly and fiercely lays claim to her blackness for the world to see. From the Ori ritual face painting adorning the dancers’ faces on the fourth track, “Sorry,” to her unstated embodiment of the Yoruban deity Oshun, Lemonade is laden with odes to the singer’s ancestral ties to Africa and the American South, as well as her own family.

But Lemonade also serves as a critique of the media’s lopsided, frequently denigrating portrayal of black women. And you don’t need a PhD in African studies to see that, just a basic knowledge of who’s who in the entertainment industry and a decent memory of how the media has treated them.

Look at the visual album’s most prominent cameos. If you don’t recognize their faces, perhaps you’ll know them by their names: Amandla Stenberg. Quvenzhané Wallis. Zendaya. Serena Williams.

The celebrities included in Lemonade are not there simply because they’re stars, and they certainly weren’t chosen by coincidence. These are black women and girls who have been disrespected in the public eye, who have had to withstand humiliating, slanderous comments to which white celebrities probably would not have been subjected.

They’ve handled all of that with grace and dignity. They’ve had to. Being a famous black woman means choking down a lot of hot sauce while maintaining a calm smile, even if you’re burning up inside.

Take Serena Williams. The top tennis player in the world and winner of 21 Grand Slam titles is regularly derided for being too muscular and having thick thighs. She’s been described as manly or ghetto — and in far more vulgar, animalistic terms.

Williams isn’t just twerking and strutting as Beyoncé’s glamorous backup dancer in Lemonade‘s “Sorry” to have a good time. She’s sending a message about not giving a damn about the insults, while reveling in her attractiveness. Her cameo is an act of joyful spite, squarely aimed at all the ignorant commentary she’s had to deal with.

Wallis, the youngest ever Academy Award nominee for Best Actress,(for her work in Beasts of the Southern Wild), was referred to as the n-word many times on Twitter when it was announced she was cast in the title role in the 2014 remake of Annie. She is a 12-year-old girl. Twelve.

Amandla Stenberg, known for her portrayal of Rue in The Hunger Games, was the target of similar treatment by some filmgoers who envisioned the character in Suzanne Collins’s book as white. Some Hunger Games fans even went so far as to complain that Stenberg’s casting made them care less about Rue’s death.

Then there was the time in 2015 when Disney star and recording artist Zendaya dared to wear dreadlocks on the hallowed Oscars red carpet. This led to Fashion Police personality Giuliana Rancic joking that Zendaya looked like she “smells like weed.” Which is interesting, considering that Miley Cyrus, Gaga, and Shakira have also sported dreads on red carpets.

When Stenberg used the incident and others to create a viral video that called out pop culture’s double standard when it comes to white appropriation of black hairstyles, she was dismissed as — what? — an Angry Black Woman.

Beyoncé spotlights black women's pain and resolve — but the media missed the point

Thus Lemonade isn’t just a groundbreaking moment for Beyoncé as an artist. It also serves as an important, pointed dissection of the challenge black women face in society and the media when it comes to honestly expressing emotion — a stigma not even celebrity, stardom, or legendary ability can inoculate against.

For Beyoncé to spotlight the African-American woman’s pain and resolve in such a public, raw way speaks volumes about her profound mindfulness and inner fortitude.

The Piers Morgans of this planet misguidedly believe Beyoncé created this work to be inflammatory and agitating, and to “use grieving mothers to [sell] records and further fill her already massively enriched purse.”

But isn’t Morgan’s viewpoint more inflammatory than Beyoncé’s work? Not to mention simple-minded? His take also happens to be reductive, perhaps even more so than the idea that Lemonade is a revenge manifesto to get back at Jay Z for his alleged extramarital affairs, or to expose the true identity of “Becky with the good hair.” Indeed, what’s curious is the way the media has mined Lemonade’s lyrics and visuals to validate speculation and gossip, rather than discussing the larger issues it raises.

In truth, Beyoncé’s done much more than this by creating Lemonade and sharing it with us. She’s spun gold out of her suppressed anger and sorrow, transforming it into a choreopoem that ends on a note of forgiveness. She’s given movements like #BlackGirlMagic a highly public endorsement and a bomb-ass soundtrack.

She’s put faces — gorgeous, devastating faces — to black female vulnerability. And she’s ascended to a new level of mastery as an artist and an icon.

All of that, and so much more, is why a lot of Lemonade will be sold in the coming weeks. If that idea bothers people, maybe the best advice is to cool off and drink up.