Veep‘s final season spends most of its runtime toying with the fates of its five central characters, teasing the audience with resolution. In the show’s best subplot, Jonah (played by Timothy Simons) is now a fringe presidential candidate, buoyed upwards by his bumbling appeal to America’s seediest elements (the obvious Trump parallels are the weakest part of the season. Even Veep cannot satirize this president, cauterizing the show’s best character in the attempt.) It’s quite the heel turn for the man who was once the pole every character tries to vault in Veep’s vaunted Insult Comic Olympics. But for a brief moment in the penultimate episode, his father (/recently discovered father-in-law…just watch the show man) makes a meek plea for Jonah to find his inner decency and to not use his platform to take advantage of our nation’s fears and divisions. Incredibly, in the first moment of real reflection for his character in eight years, Jonah seems to internalize his father’s message. A moment later, his father drops dead (the consequences of living with an anti-vaxxer) and it all evaporates away. Jonah doubles down on his White Trash Mussolini schtick and rides it all the way to the convention.

Amy (Anna Chlumsky) and Dan (Reid Scott), the show’s bizarro version of the Jim-and-Pam inevitable couple, perpetually employed by some abscess of the Meyer machine, enter the season with a classic narrative device: Amy is carrying Dan’s baby and chooses to carry it to term, but doesn’t expect Dan to be the father. But of course she/we expect Dan to find an undiscovered fatherly impulse hidden in his psyche, the real subconscious motivation behind his womanizing, and both characters will ditch their profound unhappiness wheeling and dealing in the swamp and ride off into the sunset of domestic bliss. Don’t babies make everything better?

None of that takes place. After repeatedly failing to peel him away from some media sex kitten half his age, Amy realizes Dan is not the slightest bit shook by his pending absentee parenthood and opts for an abortion. The would-be couple goes dutch on the procedure (“send me a Venmo request” Dan proffers Amy,) and Dan dates the very same OBGYN that conducted Amy’s abortion (so much for the magical power of conception.) A few more moments of Chekov’s sexual tension fester, Dan and Amy share a tender moment post-abortion, but ultimately, the couple that is always missing each other ends up missing each other entirely.

And Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, now the most awarded television actor ever), the titular ex veep, running an another seemingly-doomed presidential campaign, also gets a salient out from the swamp in the form of Tom James (Hugh Laurie), her former vice president (and former lover. Veep doubles as a soap opera set in the West Wing.) Tom James is enough of a stone-cold catch to assuage Selina’s unassuageable ego, cynical enough to understand the rules of the game, and maybe even offers up a real form of affection towards our protagonist. They profess their love just before Tom drops out of the race, recognizing each other as the singular antidote to their twisted psyches. You can see a future where Tom and Selina shake off the disappointment of near-presidential destinies and shack up somewhere; bored but as happy as they could deserve. But as we inch towards to the final episode, it becomes increasingly clear this isn’t going to be Selina’s choice.

It’s as if all these characters haven’t realized that they’re in the final season of a television show. They all run headfirst into half-developed outs to find redemption or companionship, flirting with unfocused bouts of redemptive introspection. The threads of closure materialized in and out of focus throughout the last season and I kept waiting for the characters to latch on and experience the satisfaction of finale-induced character codas. But even as I neurotically flicked my mouse to check the minutes ticking away in the final episode, the characters kept not figuring it out.

Then, on nomination night, having seemingly fumbled away another presidential bid, Selina suddenly breaks bad. She slut-shames the shit out of Tom James’ campaign manager/mistress, destroying the public and private life of the man she loved, peeling away the last major contender for the nomination. After this, Selina shrewdly taps Jonah as her vice president, triggering the shocking resignation of ‘till-now robotic Kent (Gary Cole), who draws a moral line at promoting Jonah’s familiar blend of ignorance and bigotry to the White House. She promises a criminalization of gay marriage to secure a handful of DNC votes, hardly stopping to consider that she is the mother to a currently-engaged gay daughter. But the last domino is yet to drop. As Selina accepts the Democratic nomination, her perennially abused, disturbingly loyal bodyman (and the show’s second-billed star, Tony Hale) is whisked away by the FBI to prison, scapegoated for that same Chinese election interference that gifts Selina the White House.

Somehow, just a few minutes before the series ends, the show manages to entirely recast its protagonist. After watching her character spend years locked in the orbit of toothless power, minor ambition, and half-assed sociopathy, perpetually wracked in the inescapable gravity of minor scandals and unforced errors, Selina suddenly finds the version of herself that is capable of winning the presidency. In the process, she confirms our worst assumptions about our glorious leaders.