“Girls” ended on Sunday night with the sounds of a baby suckling, as his mother warbled Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” in a gentle, off-key voice. Set your hot takes aflame. Wave them from the rooftops of Greenpoint. “Girls” has left New York for good.

For six years, the series, a boundary-cracking comedy created by Lena Dunham, then twenty-five, in collaboration with her close partners Jenni Konner and Judd Apatow, has been one of my favorite shows—and, yet, I’m grateful that it’s ending. Shows shouldn’t last forever. That goes double for shows about brief, intense periods in people’s lives (created during them, too). And, honestly, as a phenomenon—as opposed to as a TV show—“Girls” has been exhausting. A catalyst and an irritant, funny and kinky and helplessly provocative, it was a tiny show that cast a huge shadow. Once that recedes, it’ll be art again, not an op-ed, a referendum, a manifesto. There’s something joyful in that.

Anyway. The finale. It was imperfect, but it was effective and it was original—although I have some caveats, which I’ll get to. It was interestingly quiet. Mainly, it was a meditation on a new kind of life limbo, the newborn stage, as experienced by a radically unprepared new mom: isolated, overwhelmed, and seething with self-pity. (And, let’s face it, that’s many new moms. You don’t have to be a solipsistic memoirist from Michigan to have trouble bonding with your baby.) The first scene of the finale mimicked the very first scene of the show, with Hannah and Marnie, best friends, curled up in the same bed. This time, however, Marnie was there to offer her services as a volunteer doula—the superior swaddler and bossy reader of breastfeeding books. Cut to five months later, however, and that setup isn’t working. The two friends have gone “Grey Gardens,” cranky and codependent—Marnie’s a do-it-all martyr, while Hannah is hands-off to the point of pathology. She’s convinced that her baby, Grover, hates her. She’s pumping breast milk non-stop, because Grover won’t latch. She’s sleeping in until 11 A.M., assuming that somebody else will handle him.

Eventually, Marnie gives up and calls Hannah’s mother, Loreen, who shows up to berate her daughter and deliver a few choice anecdotes. “It was the eighties,” Hannah’s mom recalls, of her own struggles to breastfeed. “All these cunts in their linen pants, so pleased not to be using formula.” The last time we saw Loreen, she was telling Hannah that when she looked at her grandson, she’d be seeing her own death. This time, she's no less harsh: exasperated, she tells Hannah that everyone on earth feels pain and that hers is nothing special. She also lets her know that she’s made a choice that’s irrevocable: she needs to step up and be a mother. “You can’t get your tuition refunded. You can’t break the lease. You can’t delete his phone number.”

Hannah storms away for a long walk, then stumbles onto a pants-free, barefoot teen-age girl, who is wearing only an Abercrombie shirt—a weeping, whining mirror self, only even more panicked and self-centered. (And also more cartoonish, something I’ll return to in a moment.) This time, it's Hannah who delivers a tough-love speech, in which she tells the girl that she’s upset about nothing (which is true—in a great dark joke, Hannah had assumed, and maybe hoped, that she was rescuing an assault victim, only to find that she’d lent her pants to somebody who’d fought with her mom because she refused to do her homework). She tells the girl to go home and to listen to her mother. Mothers, Hannah says, have one purpose, to “take care of you forever, even if it means endless, endless pain.” Maybe Abercrombie’s mother would prefer to do something else. Maybe she’d like to have an adventure—but she has no choice. Her choice is already made. Then Hannah goes home, and this time, when Grover cries, she doesn’t just hand him off to someone else. She goes upstairs to soothe him. He latches, it seems, and she has a look of immense relief: she can do this. She can connect.

In between, there were some funny bits: “O.K., Ghostbuster,” Marnie tells Hannah after Hannah finishes yelling at her while wearing a newfangled pump backpack. Hannah’s mom walks in on Marnie, who is masturbating while Skyping, spooling out a kinky British-stewardess scenario that might impress even Adam. But the episode over all had an effectively spooky, jagged feel, a float through the gray, murky soup of long days with a baby—a state of mind that is eerily familiar to those who’ve been through it. In this case, however, the quiet was punctuated by something else: a set of rants, intended to set their whiny targets straight.

So, about those speeches. I know that many people found them refreshing—as people frequently find it refreshing whenever the “Girls” characters call one another narcissistic assholes. My own feelings were more mixed. It’s been striking to me, as the seasons have passed, that with increasing regularity, the speeches that characters on “Girls” give have begun to echo the diatribes that are made _toward “_Girls.” It's the familiar music of Twitter trolls: “Grow up, snowflake.” “Put on your big-girl pants.” “Fuck your feelings.” It’s the same theme you find in op-eds denouncing millennials and haughtily invoking the Kardashians, an obsession shared by both the right and the left. The secret ingredient is contempt.

Plenty of these speeches—Ray’s, in particular—have been memorable and hilarious. Early on, when two characters yelled at each other (“No, YOU’RE the bad friend!”), both scored points. And yet it has also felt, in later seasons, as if “Girls” were altering, in increments, in response to the profound and often overtly misogynist cultural radiation that has surrounded it, as if growing tumors of self-consciousness. Sometimes this felt strategic. One way to defend yourself against being called names is to turn the insult into your nickname, to say it before someone else can. Another is to make your characters a notch starker, more neon in their narcissism, so that no one can misread them as role models, then insist that they’ve failed in their task.

“Girls” has had some brilliant episodes in its final seasons, and not just the celebrated “bottle episodes,” like this year’s “American Bitch.” The show has swung in unsettling, often darkly hilarious, bleak, and raw directions. (I have special affection for the deranged arc involving Mimi-Rose; all things Natalia; the amazing Kitty Genovese play; and that random argument Hannah had with Fran about the ethics of ex-girlfriend porn.) But something’s been lost along the way, too, or at least dimmed: a certain tenderness “Girls” had to abandon in order to keep going. When your character is a selfish, unformed person—but also a bruised, struggling oddball whose failures are human—that’s one thing. That kind of character is unsettling to viewers, because they’re forced to feel pangs of identification and judgment, both at once, an unsettling sensation. Make those characters more stylized, more broadly comic, and the viewer is let off the hook: it’s O.K. to feel contempt for a contempt magnet, a selfish person who is just asking for it—asking to be yelled at, told to get thicker skin, to grow up, to man up, to shut up.