It’s been nearly two years since the last season of USA’s Mr. Robot left the air. In the intervening time, star Rami Malek has become an Oscar winner and frequent meme, while series creator Sam Esmail has expanded to other projects. You may have, in fact, completely forgotten what made the show the tensest, most creative TV show on the air.

Good news, then: Mr. Robot is back to remind you why the series was so groundbreaking with an apocalyptic fourth, and final season of the series that takes it to new emotional and visual heights.

A little bit of recap to refresh your foggy memory. Malek plays Elliot Alderson, a hacker with dissociative identity disorder who shares a brain with his dead father in the form of Mr. Robot (Christian Slater). After engineering a massive hack of the seemingly evil, all-powerful organization E Corp, run by manipulative CEO Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer), Elliot uncovered a far vaster, far more insidious conspiracy that he’s only seen a small part of at this point. In fact, we as viewers have no idea what Whiterose (BD Wong), the leader of murderous hacker group the Dark Army is truly up to… Is it time travel? A way to resurrect the dead? Or something far more banal? Theories have flown fast and furious, with few answers.

On the periphery of this conflict is Elliot’s sister Darlene (Carly Chaikin), who has suffered massive losses of her own; Tyrell Wellick, an accidental acolyte of Elliot’s who has been installed as CTO of E Corp; Darlene and Elliot’s childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday), who may be more connected to Phillip Price than she knows; and Dominique “Dom” DiPierro (Grace Gummer), an FBI agent who was completely broken by the Dark Army at the end of Season 3.

There’s a lot more going on in the world of Mr. Robot, but those are the main players you need to know about as Season 4 begins. By tightening the scope of the series, Esmail and company are able to go for broke with the main cast, opening the season with a shocking scene that changes everything, and not hitting the brakes even once; at least over the course of the five episodes screened for critics.

Those five episodes are a small part of the 13 that encompass Season 4 — the longest season of Mr. Robot ever. Yet despite that increase in length, the episodes never flag. Never has a show so clearly broadcast “this is the end of the line” in every moment as Mr. Robot does. Even the characters know that this time, whatever they do, they have no more chances left. There’s even a ticking clock introduced right at the beginning of the season which I won’t spoil here, but suffice to say what started as a seeming financial thriller may lead to the literal end of the world — or perhaps, the beginning of a new one.

That’s saying nothing about Esmail’s boldest choice, turning the final season into one long, extended Christmas special. Still set in 2015 in the months after Elliot’s initial hack brought the global economy to a standstill, the Christmas setting amps up the emotion and isolation the characters are feeling throughout. Christmas, after all, is a time for togetherness, for sparkling lights and presents. As always, Esmail’s camera finds the bleakness in these scenarios, with big, wide shots that catch a string of lights here, or a Christmas tree there.

As the season slowly moves through the holiday in semi-real time, it doesn’t eschew the episodic nature of the show. There’s a flashback episode showing key moments in one character’s history, another that works as a semi-tribute to everyone’s favorite Christmas movie/not a Christmas movie, Die Hard. Each hour has its own visual flavor, brought together by Mac Quayle’s phenomenally taut scoring and Esmail’s steady direction.

It’s also very funny. Something that gets lost a little in the conversation about the Kubrick-ian influences of the show is that Mr. Robot knows how deep the tension of the show goes, and is always able to provide a momentary release. A guest star in the season premiere “401 Unauthorized” provides some incredible drunk acting, as does another in the season’s fourth episode. Both get undercut by a deep abiding darkness, because that’s where Mr. Robot mostly lives. But in both cases, this is dark humor at its best. After all, this is the show that introduced ALF and and then had him run someone down with a car. Nobody does dark humor better than Mr. Robot.

You also might have forgotten in the intervening time just how good Malek is as Elliot. A larger chunk of the world probably knows him now as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, but Malek’s black hoodie wearing weirdo is his true masterwork. His unblinking stare that never meets another person’s eyes yet remains fully focused on the screen of his computer is unnerving and purposefully off-putting, yet you can’t help but feel for Elliot as he (sometimes literally) stumbles towards his destiny. Knowing he’s so close to finishing whatever it is he’s trying to do — and perhaps even Elliot doesn’t know what his end goal truly is — there’s a simmering level of panic throughout Malek’s performance giving it a palpable urgency.

Equally good is Chaikin as Darlene, whose frustrations with her on-screen brother similarly simmer, before leading to a stand-out monologue on a cell phone that is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Gummer is mostly on the sidelines as the season starts, having been beaten down by her interactions with the Dark Army, but she can convey more emotion with a troubled look and a sigh than many actors do in an entire series of television.

In fact, the cast is reliably superb across the board. Mr. Robot might come off as cold to some, but the show even throws sympathy towards its villains, Wong’s serpentine Whiterose and Cristofer’s domineering Price. There are more performances and surprise returns I could call out, but I won’t spoil the surprises.

For a series that seemingly started as an extended Fight Club riff, Mr. Robot is as vitally relevant today as it was when it debuted. Perhaps even more so, as paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the threat of imminent financial collapse are omnipresent in the news, all day long. Will Elliot be able to find a spark of peace? Will the demons both literal and figurative haunting him finally disappear? Whatever Esmail’s final statement is — the world is doomed, or there’s a glimmer of hope — remains to be seen. But at least based on the beginning of the season, Mr. Robot is putting it all on the table and is ready to go out the way only it can. Welcome back, friend.

Mr. Robot returns on Sunday, October 6 at 10/9c on USA.

Where to stream Mr. Robot