As has become the norm on “The Trump Show,” this was an action-packed episode: the introduction of the “Mooch” character, with one of the most out-there performances the show has yet seen, President Trump’s bizarre appearance at the Boy Scouts Jamboree and his policymaking by Twitter were just a few of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on how you watch this thing). But to me, the most powerful thread in the episode was the way the series built on its James Comey plotline to play with our emotions in a new way. The Jeff Sessions character has long been one of the most unlikable on “The Trump Show.” But the series managed to find a way to make the audience feel pity for him without asking us to admire him.

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The writers for this series are so unsubtle that they gave Sessions the same first name as the president of the Confederacy and the same middle name as the general who helped kick off the Civil War, and then put a character with that name in charge of the Justice Department.

If “The Trump Show” were a period piece, you could easily imagine it repurposing Sessions as the character who worries about reefer and interracial dancing at the local high school. If “The Trump Show” were a self-conscious civil rights drama, you’d argue that it was laying on the villainy a little thick. But “The Trump Show” has always been almost joyfully unsubtle. And an episode like this one shows the sly genius in that approach.

Under no other circumstances, after all, could you imagine a show or movie making you feel pity for a character with Sessions’s characteristics.

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“The Trump Show,” though, has built up Sessions’s arc brilliantly. At first, it seemed like a triumph-of-evil story, in which a character with marginal views and a near-apocalyptic view of American society took a bet on another outsider and seemed to come out on top. But slowly, it became clear that for Sessions to carry out his plans for turning back the clock on American law enforcement, he would need to endure ritual humiliation from a man he thought was his friend and ideological ally, but turns out to have been neither.

Indeed, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, another character who has become increasingly prominent on “The Trump Show” via his utter cynicism, Sessions described Trump’s criticism as “kind of hurtful.” That’s the understatement of the TV week. “The Trump Show” has often seemed as if it’s competing with “Game of Thrones” to show us what it’s like for characters to humiliate each other, and to carry out that torment as long as possible. But even by the standards of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), or Trump’s relationship with characters such as Chris Christie and Sean Spicer, Trump’s torment of Sessions feels like an unusually painful plot point. This relationship was personal, mutually beneficial and remarkably successful for both parties. Trump’s decision to taunt Sessions while refusing to fire him is exceptionally cruel.