A confession: like many people, I do not now understand, nor have I ever really understood, everything that is going on in HBO’s Westworld. The show is opaque enough that scores of us must rely on the hard work of people like my colleagues to understand its twists and turns and overlapping temporalities, especially this past season. When your fans need to make an elaborate timeline that includes more than 100 different events across 19 episodes just to straighten things out, that's not a mystery—that's sheer, intentional confusion.

Typically, I'd be more critical of this opacity (and I have been, in the past). But this spring, the mystery enticed me; for some reason, I watched it all anyway, and even mostly enjoyed it. Westworld is an undeniably beautiful show, even when splattered with gore; its violent delights are underscored with poetic tragedy, and its violent ends are carefully, thoughtfully made elegant. The show’s wide-angle views of wild, rugged landscape produce the romance of the American West, a romance I once thought was too archaic for our modern era. And although I rarely, if ever, know the full import of what the characters are saying, the show’s stars have been able to convey their internal, deeply rooted struggle to come to terms with the boundaries of their consciousness. In my review at the beginning of the season, I was struck by how much Westworld feels like a game, with each character tracing their own journey through an open sandbox. As the season has gone on, it’s been fascinating to watch Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Ed Harris, James Marsden, and the very welcome addition of Zahn McClarnon locked into the struggle of their mysterious existence, searching, on some level, for an escape from their endlessly repeating patterns.

But despite all this, Westworld’s characters remain a bit remote. My theory until now has been that this slight alienation has something to do with the fact that many of these characters aren’t exactly human—and maybe it stands to reason that meatsacks filled with code aren’t quite as relatable as humans might be. Now, though, I’m not sure if that’s still the case. I think instead, Westworld is almost offering a reprieve from the taxing weight of investing in this cruel world by establishing distance between its universe and ours. Watching Westworld is like watching eddies dance in a snowglobe; apparently quite riotous, but separated from your concerns by smooth, solid glass.

Instead, Westworld presents its universe as a puzzle. The show is, at times, comically clue-oriented; it seems wholly unable to introduce a plot point organically. Instead, every detail is given some measure of a reveal, often with a thrumming crescendo of Ramin Djawadi’s score underneath it, to draw extra attention. Westworld is less a narrative than a matrix of interlocking ciphers, where any and everything is always some ridiculous key to something else. The most fatal flaw in the show is not the desire its characters feel to murder or rape, but its failure to see the full contours of its own design. For everything Harris’s Man in Black has done, mistaking his daughter (Katja Herbers) for another trick up Ford (Anthony Hopkins)’s sleeve is the only time he experiences consequences for his actions in the park. Even then, he’s punished less for murdering his daughter than he is for the sin of hubris; with his tossed-off “Nice try, Ford,” he dared to attempt to outsmart the grand plan.

Oh, the plan! Midway through Season 2, Westworld fell into a common narrative trap: it brought back a dead person, via some bells and whistles of plausibility. The show is in love with Hopkins’s Ford, if only because he so magnificently stalks around in a three-piece black suit, quoting William Blake as the mood strikes him. Ford has a silver pocket watch, and with the show’s emphasis on living machinery, he seems to be an embodiment of the divine watchmaker parable—which suggests that the universe, so beautifully constructed and carefully assembled, must be the intentional design of some grand intelligence. Ford is that designer, and the long tail of his creation is still slowly unfolding.

But the outsized qualities assigned to Ford are hard to stomach—and they should be harder to stomach, for the characters in the show. He’s presented as a creator and a liberator, as an architect and a revolutionary. He is ascribed godlike powers and enacts his schemes with a tyrant’s disregard for his subjects, but we are told that he is also egalitarian, sensitive, and reasonable. In Season 1, Ford was a suspicious character. In Season 2, his goodness is presented as practically irreproachable, even though he inhabits Bernard’s brain and then coaches him through enacting Ford’s own plan. When Bernard does finally shed Ford, the scene carries the notes of a believer wrestling with God’s voice in his head, instead of a captive struggling against a captor. It feels unnecessary, and more to the point, has racial implications that the show doesn’t even touch.

This might be something in the wings for Season 3, because the finale’s big reveal puts Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores inside the body of Charlotte Hale, played by Tessa Thompson. But it’s strange, in a show that otherwise evinces so much cultural sensitivity, that the racial dimension of two different white characters taking over the minds of black characters is left unexplored. It’s doubly strange in the midst of a social and political climate where the American populace is the most articulate about structural race relations than ever before.

But perhaps this is the point. Perplexing as the show itself can be, Westworld offers not a broken, confusing, messy world like our own, but a world with a purpose—a world calibrated to unfold according to a gorgeous, lofty plan. It’s still bloody and terrifying, full of struggle like our own world. But then again, every moment of Westworld seems laden with meaning, and the world comes together with a detail that suggests close attention.

This is often the charm of epics; they present the awful stuff of human existence as waystations on a meaningful quest. In Westworld the hero’s journey is just another feature of this world—Ford’s inescapable labyrinth, which is drawn inside the brains of the hosts and dug into the ground of the park. What the show offers is not a simply map for one’s own journey, but a collective, larger attempt to understand the puzzle of the world’s design. It’s a community of people, many of whom are sworn enemies of each other, trying to make sense of why the world is the way it is. The ephemera of Westworld—the cottage industry of fan theories, podcasts, and recaps that are often more comprehensible than the big, empty spaces of the show itself—are replicating that communal effort.

And there’s something soothing about being led on; even the way the timeline jumps erratically backwards and forwards becomes more appealing when it comes with the assurance that in Westworld’s universe, there is a future to flash forward to. Most importantly, Westworld withstands large-scale dissection. It’s a coy show, teasing themes in its symbol-heavy opening credits, nodding at what’s important via especially stylish pre-episode plot recaps, winking to the viewer when a reference rolls across the screen like a tumbleweed at a standoff. Finding the pattern to the clues is thrilling, even and especially when packaged in the show’s oddly de-centered storytelling style. Westworld shows us beautiful, stark chaos, and then strings the viewer along on hope: the not wholly unsubstantiated but seemingly impossible idea that this struggle matters, that everything happens for a reason, that at least in this world, if not in our own, it’s possible to make all the pieces fit.