The following contains spoilers about the "Big Little Lies" Season 2 finale.

(CNN) Nothing about "Big Little Lies" demanded an encore, although the casting of Meryl Streep -- and reuniting of the big-name cast -- provoked understandable excitement about the return of the Emmy-winning limited series.

Yet after a solid start -- exploring how the members of the "Monterey Five" would deal, individually and collectively, with the aftermath of those explosive, fatal events -- the narrative began feeling a trifle aimless. Controversy about the behind-the-scenes relationships -- and specifically, whether the producers undermined the contribution of director Andrea Arnold -- only magnified those perceptions.

With all of that as context, expectations for the finale, which aired Sunday night, went from being too high to perhaps unreasonably low. In the final analysis, an episode that spent much of its time in the courtroom yielded a split decision: While the payoff proved anticlimactic in some respects, it finally came around to addressing the core issue -- that for the five women connected by the first season's closing act, as Nicole Kidman's Celeste put it, "The lie is the friendship."

The driving force behind the latest season, other than Streep's suspicious mother-in-law Mary Louise, thus became the daunting challenge of keeping secrets, especially when they involve the guilt associated with a killing, even if it was a righteous one.

In the finale, the cost of that deception motivated each of the characters to advance their individual stories: for Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) to find a way to save her marriage; for Bonnie (Zoe Kravitz) and Renata (Laura Dern) to end theirs; and for Jane (Shailene Woodley) to brave embarking on a new romance.

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