These scenes feel like a secret between us and Garland, the purest distillation of the argument he’s making for all of the potential in our universe. And one in particular is one of the best moments in television that I or you will see this year.

There’s the flashback to Katie herself as a grad student with a penchant for storming out of physics lectures in a dozen different directions. But we follow the Katie who Forest catches up with, whose tuition he offers to pay, who he lures with a shiny job for after graduation. It’s the most low-key of the episode’s three examples, juxtaposing this frustrated young woman’s mundane reactions: throwing her laptop case down, crying, calling someone… and receiving an emotional lifeline from a mysterious tech disruptor.

A little more complex is the episode’s cold open, in which varying combinations of Lily/Sergei and Lily/Jamie exist simultaneously in the same apartment, because of course Lily kept that place post-breakup (Bay Area real estate, am I right). As this sequence is bookended by shots of Lily lying catatonic in bed in the psychiatric ward, it could be read as her mind unspooling memories simultaneously—a metaphor for the ghosts of relationships that haunt our every movement and every space. Yet we know within the larger episode context that it’s the same as the Katie flashback: every possible scenario playing out at once.

But it’s the Forest scene that both makes the argument for the existence of a multiverse at work, and provides the most devastating illustration. While it was clear from the beginning that Forest lost Amaya far too soon, I never could have guessed how utterly cruel those circumstances might be. Standing at the end of his cul-de-sac, chatting amiably on the phone with his wife about something completely forgettable, only to watch her car get T-boned and their lives dashed away before his very eyes. Then the way that Offerman shouts “No!” with increasing violence as he staggers toward the wreckage, already knowing the answer despite the need to try and save them anyway.

Most of all, watching that same scenario play out around him with every single other outcome where they live. I confess, it took me a moment to catch on; when the car just missed him, I initially thought it was mirroring Lily almost getting run down on the highway after last week’s car accident. Then it clicked: No, this was that same gold Volvo, only in that universe it was a beat later. Every other glancing collision or near-miss plays out around Forest, but he is the one version of himself with the absolute shit luck to be stuck in the universe where Amaya and his wife died.