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In a television landscape where shows seem to either last one season or exist indefinitely, Vice Principals was always an outlier. Despite its place on HBO, the Danny McBride series always had relatively modest expectations. Vice Principals only wanted to explore the rise and many falls of two acerbic high school vice principals, nothing more, nothing less. Now that this humble and bitingly funny show has come to an end, McBride has shown us what TV with a definite end point can look like while exploring a new angle of a well-worn narrative that seems oddly relevant in Trump’s America. Spoilers ahead.

From Vice Principal‘s first episode, this was a show that was only supposed to last two seasons. Part of that limitation had to do with its creation. McBride originally created the story that would become his second HBO show as a long movie. It was a show that had a definitive conclusion — finally revealing who shot Neal Gamby (McBride) — from its first episode, and it never strayed from that original goal. As a result, the odd high school morality play that unfolded was allowed to explore an exhausting amount of emotional and intellectual depths on its way to this final episode.

Of course, it should be noted that Vice Principals was allowed to retain its two season story because of the show’s divisiveness. Despite the success of Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals was always either adored or despised by critics, and while it gained a strong cult following, it wasn’t a mainstream hit. This in-between status allowed McBride to tell exactly the story he wanted to tell without being pressured by mainstream appeal or overwhelming awards success, something that is now haunting Big Little Lies and its rumors about a Season 2. Vice Principals was allowed to be its own perfectly imperfect story, and to look at that story on a surface level would be a mistake.

As I’ve written about before, Vice Principals was never a show about heroes or antiheroes. Neal Gamby and Lee Russell (Walton Goggins) were always unequivocally villains. Sometimes their villainy was a bit dim-witted and ill-advised, like Gamby’s many plans for revenge that involved hiding a gun up his sleeve and telling his victims “As you can see, I am not armed” — a line that never worked. Sometimes that villainy was cartoonishly cruel, like Russell’s elaborate plan to bait Dr. Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) into making a drunken fool of herself and blackmail her with the recorded footage. However, even at their best and most sympathetic moments, we were watching a show about two villains that never realized they were villains. That’s what made last night’s conclusion so interesting. Gamby and Russell didn’t walk away from the series as two characters that had redeemed themselves. They walked away to embrace a new moral neutral. If that feels unnervingly sinister, that’s probably the point.

“The Union of the Wizard & the Warrior,” an episode clearly nodding to the show’s central characters, was one that was packed with tying up loose ends and intentionally rushed moments of self-reflection. It was a confident episode and one that entered its final moments with a level of self-assuredness few half hour comedies possess. There’s a lot of questions that had to be answered in a fairly short amount of time: Who shot Gamby? (Edi Patterson‘s ever-unstable Ms. Abbott) Can Russell be trusted? (Sort of, but not really) Will Gamby and Ms. Snodgrass (Georgia King) end up together? (Yes) And most importantly of all, will these two misfits ever get the permanent school-wide control they both so crave? (Eventually, yes) Vice Principals runs through its finale like it’s checking off boxes, but it never feels like the show forgot it’s giant plot points and is playing catch up. Rather, there’s a self-aware nodding to these moments. It’s the show’s final episode, and so the show knows it owes its audience a satisfying conclusion.

However, the real star of the episode is unquestionably its CGI tiger. Throughout all of Season 2, we’ve seen Russell’s absurd spending habits alter the chemistry of this fairly typical high school, but at no moment are they more extreme or ill-advised than when he rents a tiger for graduation. It’s oddly fun to watch a show that turns the world of high school employment into a high stakes, life-or-death thrill ride face an actual challenge that can threaten to destroy them. It’s also an obstacle that mirrors the animalistic in-fighting that has characterized this entire series. At one point Russell, convinced that he’s actually one with the beast, slowly approaches it, his hand outstretched. There’s a beautiful sense of peace as he gets closer and closer to petting the animal, and we hold our breath over the fate of his hand. When it’s finally bitten off, it may not be shocking, but it is still funny.

And that’s what’s always made Vice Principals such an interesting and essential show. It’s a series that has always pretended like it’s telling one story when it’s really telling another. For two seasons, Gamby and Russell have posed as the show’s heart and conscious, though they have never been anything more than spoiled children. By Gregory’s own admission, Vice Principals is and always been a show about the dark side of privilege told by the bumbling antics of two men disguised as heroes. Gamby and Russell are the ultimate examples of everyday “bad” white men. Though they do commit arson, they rarely do anything worse than act overtly racist, sexist, and vulgar. They’re two characters that are defined by undeserved egos, minimal real skills, and committed micro-aggressions. They’re not good people from the show’s first episode, and by Vice Principals‘ conclusion, they are redeemed to be middling at best.

If the final episode of Vice Principals left you feeling a little queasy, if it’s unsettling to watch two white men all but torture an accomplished women of color, a sweet and doting wife (Susan Park is fantastic in this show and truly doesn’t get enough credit), and two women who are their subordinates, if it’s disturbing to see two men get rewarded for grossly abusing their power, that’s the point. We were never supposed to be on Gamby and Russell’s side, not really. However, being forced to be there and seeing their “redemption” stories from their own warped lenses shows off how overly forgiving and toxic our favorite stories about white antiheroes are. By embodying this narrative, Vice Principals was able to tear apart privilege in one of the most simultaneously subtle and biting ways modern television has ever seen.

Stream Vice Principals on HBO