There's an air of finality to the most recent batch of Arrested Development episodes, and maybe that's for the best. Canceled on Fox in 2006, the show's reputation and legacy outgrew its oddball, less-than-subtle satire, so much so that its 2013 revival on Netflix landed to mixed reviews, which have not softened with time. More so than the last time we did this, both the audience and those involved might be happier to let a once-seminal series go, finally, in a much-changed TV landscape. If season 5 really is the end for Arrested Development, it's a fitting one—occasionally frustrating, structurally labyrinthian, and still more clever, funny, and complex than any TV show has to be. Mitchell Hurwitz, its creator, must be exhausted, and probably wouldn't have it any other way.

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Season 5.2, as I'll call it, helpfully jettisons some of the bloat that made season 4 such a slog, and introduces some familiar Arrested Development tropes to proceedings that aren't necessarily retreads, but also don't break any new ground for the show. GOB is back at the helm of the Bluth company, however temporarily. Tobias's acting career is in a holding pattern, and he now has an all-new family to feed. George Michael and Maeby are still scamming their way through their young adulthoods.

Since its first comeback in 2013 (five years then passed until its follow-up season, so I'm really feeling two comebacks here), Arrested Development's fatal flaw has been its admittedly noble but unhelpful impulse to manically recap every single plotline, character motivation, and relationship, in case your concentration lapsed for a second. The second part of season 5 spends much less time than has become usual in bringing the viewer up to speed, resulting in a more incoherent but mercifully less bloated experience. Was I fully sure, going into 5.2, where Lindsay had disappeared to? No. Can I remember why Buster was in prison in the first place? You bet your ass not. Do I in any way care about the somehow both central and peripheral mystery around Lucille 2's disappearance? I do not!

Basically, it no longer matters what you missed. Ron Howard's ever-present narration tells us what we need to know, scene to scene, so the actual interactions and jokes can become a focal point. The ninth episode of season 5, "Unexpected Company," despite being a mid-season premiere, feels like a fresher start than we've gotten from the show since its original run. There's a slapstick sequence that quite literally harks back to the Keystone Cops that would have been right at home in season 1. The previously levelheaded Michael's descent into the kind of entitled, blundering antics he had to repeatedly rescue his family from in the show's earlier years is a welcome continued arc, too. At the end of it all, it would just feel wrong for the Bluths to have a hero in their midst.

And it does feel like an end after all. There's no escaping the truth that the show, as a whole, worked better as a zippy, subversive satire about the ineptitude and self-absorption of the wealthy under the Bush administration. There might be too many real reminders of that in the current climate, and season 4's "out-there" storyline involving the construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico is now, obviously, a startling reality.

That's not to mention the very real tensions that bubbled over in a now infamous interview with the cast members in The New York Times last year, which kicked off a series of ill-advised statements from the male members of the cast about the treatment of Jessica Walter. Even if there was a little left in the show's creative tank, it might be hard to get the band back together even if schedules allowed.

With all that in mind, I watched the most recent batch of Arrested Development episodes with an assumption of finality. For better and for worse, this is not the show it once was; its best jokes, its best characters, all still coming from the original run. Still, for those of us who've been watching, we've known the Bluths for more than 15 years now, and it's never a drag getting to spend a bit more time with them. The season (series?) finale is appropriately ridiculous, but warmer than previous false endings to the show. What's more, it delivers on the very premise that kicked off an all-time cult TV series all those years ago: These may not be smart people or even good people, but they belong together. As the title promises, it's fun as hell to see how far they've come without really going anywhere at all.