Is it cathartic to condemn yourself? Can it be healing to admit your wound was, in part at least, self-inflicted? Can you move on from the worst thing that’s ever happened even if you know you’re part of the reason it happened? Is that the only way you can move on at all? The fourth and final episode of Adolescence has a plot, of course. Thirteen months after Jamie Miller killed his classmate Katie, his father Eddie is celebrating his 50th birthday with a leisurely morning when he discovers his work van has been defaced with (misspelled) graffiti accusing him — or Jamie, it’s not initially clear — of being a pedophile. After his initial, frantic attempts to wipe the spray paint off fail, Eddie rallies his wife, Manda, and their daughter, Lisa, for a trip out to a Home Depot–style store where he can get what he needs to remove it properly. This is how they’ll “get the day back,” to use his repeated phrase; it’s how they’ll “solve the problem of today,” in the therapy-speak he and Manda have been learning. Maybe afterwards they’ll go to the movies — “the pictures,” he calls it in Scouse parlance; Marty Scorsese would be proud — and get Chinese. And maybe afterwards he and Manda will fool around, as he’d eagerly tried to initiate before the van incident. There’s your fiftieth sorted. But the good cheer of the excursion — Eddie and Manda make Lisa play a-ha’s “Take On Me” on her phone while they reminisce about school dances and making out — proves short-lived. First, an employee realizes who Eddie is and essentially endorses Jamie’s crime, his brain liquefied by conspiracy theories and manosphere fascism. Next, Eddie catches the teen vandals who tagged his van because they’ve followed him on their bikes, roughing one up before sending them on their way. Now almost vibrating with shame and rage, he takes the blue paint he hastily purchased from the groyper employee and tosses it haphazardly at the side of his van, blotting out most of the offending word but pretty much ruining the van in the process. Finally, Jamie calls as the family rides in pained silence back to the house. He’s calling not just to wish Eddie a happy birthday, but to tell him something: After all this time, he’s finally decided to plead guilty. No more fighting, no more pretending, no more forcing his father into the impossible position of being the only other member of the family to have watched the video of the murder while also being counted upon to support his son in every possible way. Other than the family’s eventual decision to can the movie plans and instead order in and rent something, that’s it, as far as actual events go. But some of the most momentous material in the entire series happens in the interim, as Manda and Eddie process what’s become of their lives, both alone and together. Here’s where we have to shift gears and call out actors Christine Tremarco and Stephen Graham by name. And Amélie Pease, too, who as Jamie’s older sister Lisa brilliantly navigates the Scylla and Charybdis of her parents’ attempts to pretend everything is okay and their inability to do so convincingly for longer than a few minutes at a time. But Tremarco and Graham do the bulk of the heavy lifting, and they make it look appropriately mythic in scale, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder, like Atlas lifting the world. Some of this is due to the sharpness of their portrayal of grief. As she hangs up her coat after the disastrous shopping trip, Manda starts crying with an expression on her face that’s almost bright, poised halfway between a laugh and a scream — the expression of someone almost deranged with pain. Eddie goes through his own version of this later as he sobs into Jamie’s bed, emitting high-pitched, almost feminine squeals of anguish before finally full-on screaming into the pillow. Director Philip Barantini’s technical achievements in presenting these four episodes as single takes are impressive, but please do not overlook the mastery required to tap into the kind of pain and shame and emotional agony Tremarco and Graham are mainlining to produce sounds this painfully familiar and true. Specifically, they’re the sounds of people who have no further interest in being let off the hook. We’ve seen enough of Eddie by now to know that he really is a decent guy, a man who cares about his wife, daughter, and son and is comfortable showing it in both word and deed. About the worst thing you can say about him is he has an occasionally explosive temper, but given that his own father used to brutally beat him, he has been true to his childhood vow never to do this to his own family. How could such a stand-up guy, however imperfect, produce a son capable of crimes Eddie himself would never contemplate? Didn’t he and Manda also produce Lisa, a similarly stand-up kind of person? “How?” he stammers near the end of their conversation, asking the only question worth asking about what made Jamie into what he became? The answer Eddie and Mandy arrive at is devastating in its triviality: They gave him too much unsupervised screen time. Loving and supportive but busy, they let Jamie drift away from his hobbies and interests into closed-door sessions with his phone, but since he was home behind closed doors, they figured he was at least safe. By now, Eddie has noticed that you can’t so much as search for videos on advice for the gym without being suggested white-hot misogynistic screeds in the sidebar, so he can see how easily Jamie could fall down that rabbit hole. They did nothing wrong. But Stephen can’t help but wonder, “Should we have done more, though?” “I think it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we shoulda done,” Manda replies, with real warmth. “I think it’d be okay for us to think that.” And in the end, Eddie does think that. Lying in Jamie’s bed as Manda and Lisa have headed downstairs to finish preparing his belated breakfast, he takes the boy’s teddy bear and tucks it in, kissing it as a proxy for the boy he’ll never be able to do this for again. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “I should have done better.” These are the final lines of the show. The way out, allegedly, is through, but until you really reckon with “through what?,” there’s no way out at all. Eddie and Manda did their best, and their best was excellent. Even at their lowest, they can’t lie to themselves about that. Eddie literally broke a generational cycle of violence to provide Lisa and Jamie with the loving home and family they had growing up. They were simply too busy working hard and playing by the rules to be up to date with every trend and notice every symptom. They didn’t install a lights-out thing on his iPad. That’s as little and as much as they had to do to help make a murderer. Only by facing the awful caprice of this, the fact that for millions of other parents the same circumstances don’t lead to the same out come but that this doesn’t stop it from leading to that outcome for them, can they move forward. Asking your audience to accept that good intentions aren’t guarantees of good outcomes and don’t morally absolve you from bad ones is bold at any time, much less this one. It’s a dramatic third rail few shows dare touch; even the very fine and similarly themed Disclaimer, filmed by technical wizard Alfonso Cuarón, turned its well-meaning failures into outright villains rather than ask the audience to live with the pain of their understandable, relatable guilt. Wallowing in that anguish, employing a phalanx of performances by actors who make their characters feel like they’ve been set on fire from within, shooting through a camera that never lets us look away, Adolescence is truly exceptional television. Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.