This piece contains spoilers for the finale of Years and Years.

Years and Years, first broadcast across the pond in the UK earlier this spring before popping over to HBO in the US, doesn't pull its punches. The six-episode limited series chronicles the trials of the Lyons family, a bunch of upper-middle-class folks just trying to make ends meet in a future that looks more uncertain by the day. Naturally, since it was created by Russell T. Davies, who breathed life back into Britain's beloved Time Lord Doctor Who, there is no small amount of time travel: Every episode journeys forward a few years, all the way up to the season's end in the year 2030 (or, in layman's terms, Phase Six of The Avengers). It might take place in the future, but its anxieties and horrors are a product of right now.

Years and Years imagines a world that grows from the seeds of what's happening today -- or, more specifically, what's happening in so many Western nations, from Britain to Hungary to the US to Brazil. Banks collapse, tossing innumerable families into financial turmoil; a Trump-like politically incompetent firebrand (played with Tilda-Swinton-in-Snowpiercer spittle-flaked panache by Emma Thompson) out of nowhere is elected to public office; the gig economy forces down-and-outs to gamble with their health to make a living; refugees from war-torn nations are imprisoned in remote internment camps within Britain's shores and left for dead.

Looking at it like that, you could make the argument that we already live in a dystopia more insidious than any sci-fi property could dream up. The future of Years and Years is much more subtly devastating than something like The Handmaid's Tale, where the authoritarian and sexual violence onscreen, though rooted in today's still-rampant obsession with controlling the bodies of women, is far enough removed from the present to fit comfortably into the realm of science fiction. Next to that, Years and Years barely feels futuristic at all -- which is why its scares land so much harder, and its triumphs are so much more deeply felt.