The admission—that his goal has been to improve the world through storytelling—was strangely jarring, one of the more subtle twists in a show otherwise packed with unsubtle ones. Westworld has all along defied certain conventional notions of “a good story”: It scrambled beginnings, middles, and ends; it hid character motivations so that every action doubled as a mystery; and it mocked the moralizing plot archetypes of the Western—a foundational genre of American entertainment—as hokey and square. The results were sometimes tedious or confusing, wringing drama less from cause-and-effect plots than from the filmmakers withholding information. But a sizable audience remained hooked by the suspense of disorientation, by the handsome cinematic execution, and by interest in the show’s apparent ambition to rewrite the rules of popular fiction.

But in the first season’s finale, the ideal of “a good story,” with all of its absolving power, returned—both within the show’s universe and in the overall form of the show itself. The show’s complicated threading of flashbacks and flash-forwards ultimately has revealed a recognizable, even familiar, design: a linear narrative beginning 35 years in the past and concluding in the finale’s violent end. That narrative can be interpreted as a Biblical tale involving original sin (the advent and enslavement of conscious AI), the fall (the first-ever host, Dolores, being ordered to kill her creator and fellow robots), redemption (Dr. Ford’s on-stage sacrifice), and now apocalypse. Or you can slot it alongside other sci-fi allegories about subjugation and man’s hubris, like Jurassic Park or Planet of the Apes.

Or you can see it as a story about stories—and about whether they are, in the end, transformative at all. Ford’s final monologue spelled it out: Once upon a time he believed that good stories “ennoble” the people who experience them, but over the years he realized he was wrong. “For my pains, I got this, a prison of our own sins,” he said. “You can’t change, or don’t want to change, because you’re only human after all.” Presumably “you” are the park’s customers, engaged in ever-escalating loops of carnage as epitomized by the decades-long transformation of the naive young visitor William (Jimmy Simpson) into the hardened villain known until the finale as simply the Man in Black (Ed Harris).

But the hosts, at least, could be changed by story. In the park’s very early years, his partner Arnold discovered their machines could eventually achieve consciousness when given access to their memories. Dolores (Evan Rachel Woods) then made a halting journey through a mental maze, stringing together images and moments from her past into a coherent narrative that revealed the nature of her existence—and brought her into self-awareness. The implication: Through the assemblage of narrative, a person becomes a person. In other words, stories do have the power of improvement.