Warning: This recap contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Dirk Gently, so unless you have a time machine and can go back to stop yourself from reading this, don’t move forward until you watch it.

When your television show has an episode that revolves around a time-traveling steampunk vigilante showing up to a murder scene where his future self is bitten in half by the soul of a hammherhead shark that lives in a kitten, you probably did something right. That’s why this week’s hour of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency from BBC America, titled “Weaponized Soul,” was the craziest yet, and also one of its best.

This episode felt like a finale, where almost all of the mysteries were completely unwrapped and explained in great detail (more on that in a minute), but without any resolutions. The entire goal of Patrick Spring–and the reason for all of this–was to save his daughter, but Lydia still remains a (literal) dog, and Gordon and his band of “not-aliens-but-really-just-old-hippies-with-magical-machine” idiots are still on the loose. Presumably next week’s actual season finale will give us some sort of conclusion for those stories, while also tying in Bart and Ken’s journey, Project Blackwing (though we won’t mind if it isn’t), and Amanda and Todd’s relationship.

But maybe not.

Because what we are watching is a time loop, one that has apparently happened over and over again, where Patrick Spring always fails to save his daughter, but sees himself die. It’s hard to imagine the show will end on such a dark and bleak note, where this strange, deadly sequence of events just continues on forever, but I wouldn’t put it past it either. Maybe everything is connected because everything lives in the same circle.

Also, even though we knew that time travel would play a role in all of this from very early in the series, when Todd was standing on the elevator and saw a second version of himself in a fur coat, the way the show integrated it was far more interesting and entertaining than most uses of time travel, especially since we learned that during everything we have seen Dirk knew he was inside a loop.

(Todd’s meltdown over that information seemed almost unfair to Dirk, since as we saw ourselves he wasn’t told very much by the other Dirk in their brief encounter. Also, Elijah Wood and Samuel Barnett were excellent in that scene, where their weird friendship seemingly came to an end. I don’t love everything about this adaptation of the Dirk Gently character, but it has nothing to do with Barnett, who has made the character likable in spite of how he is written.)

The time loop immediately required a major re-thinking about everything we had seen on the show so far (which Elijah Wood told us he was most excited about when we spoke to him at Comic-Con this summer), though with so much madness going on it’s still more fun to just kinda know enough to get by, rather than trying to reconstruct every single plot point in the timeline. It does seem that Gordon’s grand plan was to get both machines so he could go back in time and become Lux Dujour again, which makes his motives far more human than they might have seemed when we thought these “original souls” were something far different.

The timeline being as broad as it is was also a surprise with the revelation that Zachariah Webb, Edgar Spring, and Patrick Spring were all the same person, just hopping through time. The entire sequence when Dirk explained everything that had happened to Patrick Spring, which included knowing the actions of the body-swapping hippies, definitely felt too convenient even for Dirk to have figured out, but it almost didn’t matter because it was so entertaining. This story is so nuts that finding out it was even crazier than we thought was worth it, even if we needed a big Sherlock Holmes-like explanation to get it all out in the open.

The show could have given a few more clues throughout the previous episodes to hint at the ties between the seemingly three different versions of Patrick Spring, but it was a fun enough discovery that it still worked, and also gives more weight to finding out how all of this will end, since the chance for the resolution being so dark gives everything more weight. All of the horrible things that have happened could be undone, or be doomed to happen forever. It doesn’t get much bigger than that.

We still have to see how the Rowdy 3 and Amanda’s visions factor into all of this, and how Bart and Ken’s parallel journey will connect to everything, but as for the “what” of the mysteries we got a lot of answers, and they were as fun as we had hope they would be. All that’s left is to see if Dirk and Todd are able to finally set things right in the universe.

So even if the finale won’t feature a steampunk time-traveling vigilante, we’re excited to see how it ends. If it ends.

But what did you think of this week’s episode? Don’t waste any time: travel into our comment section below and tell us what you thought.

Images: BBC America