Jon: I’ll admit, writing about a season finale is going to be tougher than other weeks’ recaps. We have to talk about what happened last night, and then tie the whole season together in one neat little bow. That said, Don totally told that woman at the end of the bar that he was “alone,” right?

Wait. Wrong finale.

Cleveland (Photo by Chuck Allen)

Actually, I was pretty pleased with the way Veep ended its first season. It’s rough being Selina Meyer, and I don’t know what was worse for her: That she broke down in tears multiple times in the course of a day, or that she had to go all the way to Ohio to do it.

For the past two months, Veep has been picking slowly at a very short list of issues—the clean jobs thing, filibuster reform, Selina’s popularity, staff maneuvering. If you think about it, it’s a pretty limited universe. But it came together nicely at the end. Well, nicely for the audience, at least.

Selina had her Hillary-in-New Hampshire moment, collapsing into a “Veep-Weep” (as Jonah calls it) in her confrontation with the slimy Representative Furlong, an interview with a Cleveland reporter and once more in her ballroom speech. Armando Iannucci admits as much in a post-mortem interview with GQ. (Though Iannucci seems to be hinting that Clinton was letting out crocodile tears.)

But it has been a rough year for Selina. From that opening scene with the environmentally friendly utensils turning flaccid to the nasty congressman running for governor of Ohio, nothing has broken Selina’s way. That’s always been the point, I suppose, and all season, I’ve rather enjoyed seeing Vice President Meyer and her entire staff being on the losing end of everything.

That said, Furlong was a hell of a new nemesis to bring in for the season’s final installment. When he said he “might as well nail a bunch of puppies to the ground and crush their skulls with my campaign bus” if he received Selina’s endorsement, it almost seemed that he’d actually done that in a previous run for office. And not only does he continue Veep‘s device of elected officials verbally destroying their staffers, he ups the game, saying of his lackey that he’d “make more money if I installed Will here as a gloryhole greeter at a Georgetown gay bar.”

Outside of Selina’s emotional tussle with Furlong, the rest of the episode belonged to Dan, who appears to finally be paying for his decision a few weeks back to push the abandoned clean jobs program through a Congressional proxy. Whether we’ll actually ever see that Congressional committee hearing in which Dan is made to feel like “your football coach is like screaming at you, you look down, you’re dressed like Shirley Temple and then all your teeth fall out” is less certain, but the upshot is in keeping with the rest of the show. As soon as Dan gets a big promotion for his successful navigation of Furlong’s fickleness, the offer is rescinded. No one wins on Veep. Everyone is back where they started.

And I think that’s what I find most refreshing about Veep, and perhaps Iannucci’s oeuvre in general: No one makes any progress here. Selina is still powerless and isolated, Amy is an inept problem-solver, Dan is an overreacher, Mike can’t keep pace and Gary is clueless. But that’s OK. They don’t need to make progress. I wrote at the outset the season that it’s a “pleasure to watch them squirm.” And it has been. Veep places its characters in a frustratingly zero-sum setting, and as Mike tells Selina as the credits roll on Season One, they could be stuck there for another four, eight, 12 or 16 years.