When I saw the words “The Silence Breakers” splashed across TIME’s Person of the Year issue last week, a GIF began playing on a loop in my head. It was pulled from a scene of television from 2013, one that often flickers in the back of my mind. I saw Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, scowling in a sunny board room in the finale of Enlightened. The scene is one of divine retribution. Amy sits, seething in a denim jacket, across from the high brass at Abadonn Industries, a fictional Southern California pharmaceutical conglomerate where the character toiled for 15 years. The suits have just learned that Amy is a whistleblower who leaked incriminating emails to the Los Angeles Times. The head honcho glowers across the lacquered conference table, violence in his eyes. “Who are you?” he growls, by which he means what gives you, a woman far down the corporate ladder, the right to destroy my life?

Dern, whose elastic face is one of Hollywood’s great instruments, frowns wearily. “I’m just a woman who is over it,” she sighs. “I’m tired of watching the world fall apart because of guys like you.” As she leaves the meeting, the CEO flies into a misogynistic rage, spittle rocketing from his mouth. He hisses and turns red, telling her he will crush her, calling her a “psychotic fucking cunt.” After the elevator doors close and Amy is safe from any physical threat, she tries to suppress a nervous grin. Her life may have just exploded, but she won’t be the one going to jail.

This scene aired only shortly before HBO announced that Enlightened was cancelled. Mike White, the show’s creator, and Laura Dern—who became an executive producer—had planned out a future trajectory for Amy to follow in season three, but it was never made. The cancellation was a blow to critics and to a small but loyal cadre of evangelist fans, who crowed about the show’s merits so fiercely that by the time the show ended, it had a near-perfect Metacritic score. And yet, Mike White has said that the verdict did not come as much of a surprise. He glazed the finale in hopefulness for Amy, just in case this was her swan song. The network had already given the show one lifeline, greenlighting season two despite dismal numbers, some of the worst on cable. Streaming television hadn’t really taken off yet. (House of Cards premiered right as Enlightened was dying.) The show was one of the last great cable gems to wither on this cusp.

I have been thinking about Enlightened a lot in 2017. I recently re-watched the entire series and it felt as fresh as anything made this year. It is not that the show was ahead of its time—more that it now reads like a vital warning, a visual message in a bottle washing up on this anxious shore of a year. When once I looked at Amy’s new-age crusades with a mixture of cringey annoyance and pity, I now look on her journey through the series with a newfound tenderness and curiosity. This is not to say that I think the future is going to be made by an army of Amys—she is, after all, a white woman of privilege whose solipsistic search for meaning causes her to steamroller everyone else in her path. But I am seeing nuances in her story that I never did before, and new ways in which her dogged pursuit of justice in the workplace feels especially vital.

I keep watching it, not as a clear template for action, but as a parable about what can happen when a woman decides she is finally done.

Earlier this week, New York magazine columnist Rebecca Traister published an essay entitled “This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex. It’s Really About Work” arguing that now, in the post-Weinstein reckoning, we must turn our attentions toward systemic workplace harassment rather than focusing solely on sexual assault. She writes that while the #MeToo moment is a powerful watershed, the important conversations we should be having are not simply about sex, and who gets to hug whom by a watercooler, and whether or not it is okay to marry your boss. “I am just as worried about what we will not do,” she concludes. “The thing that is harder and more uncomfortable and ultimately inconceivable: addressing and beginning to dismantle men’s unjustly disproportionate claim to every kind of power in the public and professional world.”