Image: Comedy Central

An intrepid viewer who watched the epic Nathan For You season finale with the closed captions turned on discovered what he thought might be a “hidden message” for viewers, signaling the end of the show. (A fifth season has not yet been announced, or publicly green-lit.) What you hear when you watch the episode—which, by the way, is among the weirdest, most amazing episodes of TV you’ll see this year—is this: “A part of me wondered if Bill was just a bored old man looking for an adventure to keep himself busy, or maybe when you prioritize your career for too long, you just become desperate for any human connection.”


But what the closed captions read is this: “A part of me wondered if Bill was just a bored old man looking for an adventure to keep himself busy, and if I was just a bored younger man who also wanted an adventure, because he was tired of doing the same show for four seasons.”


Calling this a “hidden message” is a bit far-fetched; it’s more likely that Nathan Fielder just changed his mind somewhere in the edit, and used a line that he liked better than what he had initially written. The as-delivered line also works better in the context of the show, since it could refer to either the subject of the show—Bill Heath, who Fielder was helping to track down a long-lost love—or Fielder himself, who is so immersed in his own world that he turns to a prostitute (in the episode!) for some expensive “flirtatious companionship.” As always, it’s hard to tell how much Fielder is pretending—it’s never clear whether he even knows.

If “Finding Frances” was indeed the last-ever episode of Nathan For You, it was incredible note to go out on, a two-hour opus that encompassed a lot of Fielder’s best tricks and introduced a heartfelt new angle.