The penultimate episode of the FX series The People v. O.J. Simpson is dedicated to re-mythologizing the trial as much as setting the record straight, and it succeeds at blurring even further the line between the truth and fiction. Does the truth even matter at this point—in the trial or in the series? As Christopher Darden points out, once again, to Marcia Clark, “People like stories. It helps them make sense of things.”

There’s not much about the Simpson trial that does make sense, as clear-cut as the crime seems to have been. As the trial continued to drag on for months and months, with inescapable media coverage, the toxicity of the case brought down everyone involved, including the viewers. This is the episode we hear the “Fuhrman tapes,” the violence behind the racial slurs as upsetting as any gory crime-scene photographs. There are threats of more riots in L.A. if the tapes aren’t released, the judge nearly recuses himself (and perhaps should have) after his wife becomes bizarrely involved in the case, and poor Robert Kardashian looks as troubled as ever by his former-B.F.F.’s emerging glee as he realizes that he’s literally getting away with murder. As Dominick Dunne put it, “This is insane. You couldn’t get away with this plot twist in an airport paperback.”

With the Fuhrman tapes, it seems as if both sides were handed “manna from heaven,” as Courtney B. Vance practically sings to his team. But even after the defense procures them from a begrudging Southern judge, the prosecution is basically handed grounds for a mistrial . . . which they choose not to pursue even though they know the case has already been lost.

This is the first episode where we start to see our characters looking forward to life after the trial. Clark is granted primary custody of her kids in the final scene; she, like the audience, seems to have forgotten that she was in the middle of a bitter divorce. The Simpson trial was the last case that the “trial junkie” ever took on; she left trial law to write a book and spend time with her kids. It’s not enough to be handed “manna from heaven”; you have to know how to use it.

As for the rest of the episode, as has become par for the course on this series, most of what happened was just as incredible in real life—and in some cases even more so.

O.J. Simpson’s “Minimum Fitness for Men” video was shot a few weeks before the murders.

True. You can watch it here. It’s also true that his doctor likened Simpson to “Tarzan’s grandfather,” due apparently to his arthritis. (Simpson, never one to pass up an endorsement opportunity, gave a motivational speech three months before the murders claiming that a product called Juice Plus had cured his arthritis.) Left out of the series, however, was a joke about beating his wife Simpson makes in the video that the prosecution successfully entered into evidence: “I’m telling you, you just gotta get your space in if you’re working out with the wife, if you know what I mean. You could always blame it on, uh, working out.”

Did Chris Darden really lose it at Johnnie Cochran over accusations that he himself was racist in quoting from a witness?

Not quite. Darden called out Cochran, but with “quiet dignity,” according to Jeffrey Toobin’s source book, The Run of His Life: “That’s created a lot of problems for my family and myself, statements that you make about me and race, Mr. Cochran.”