For a show that has never once shied away from depicting the life-altering consequences of bigotry, I somehow did not see the ending of Fellow Travelers Episode 5 coming. I’ll admit, I even audibly gasped—something I very rarely do when watching, well, anything. Something that this episode does admirably is making even a relatively minor character’s death feel seismic. This occurrence shifts the narrative entirely, presumably sealing the 1950s-era half of Hawk and Tim’s story behind brick, not to be reopened again.

In fact, this episode buttons up Fellow Travelers as we’ve known it so far: as a tale of the effects of McCarthyism on innocent people and their loved ones. It was necessary for that period of this historical epic to come to a close; there are only so many ways that this show’s talented writers can maneuver its core couple around before those tactics become trite, feeling like ways to stall the narrative to fill an episode order. Frankly, the McCarthy years of this story were running the risk of bogging down the series, with five of its eight episodes spent entrenched in the Red and Lavender Scares. Luckily, the final episode set in the ’50s wipes the slate clean, but leaves blood on everyone’s hands with a few shocking and profoundly sad twists.

The wheels of McCarthy’s reign are spinning out, and before things come crashing down, a citywide crackdown on subversives is conducted, with the public remaining in favor of rooting out these supposed deviants. Hawk goes searching for Leonard Smith (Mike Taylor), the son of his senator boss Wesley Smith, who hasn’t been home for the last two nights. Hawk, who sees himself in Leonard’s lack of closeness with his father, asks his contacts in the Washington D.C. underworld to give him a call if Leonard turns up at any of Hawk’s favorite cruising spots.

But it’s already too late. The city is crawling with cops, and for the first time in the series, The Cozy Corner—the preferred haunt by Hawk, Tim, and Marcus—is raided by the police. It’s not that I was excited for this to happen, but I still think it was overdue. The Cozy Corner is a fictionalized version of a real bar, so a multi-story watering hole for drag queens, drag kings, and queer people of all kinds that wasn’t being raided more often had been nagging me as a major plot hole (even if the bar owners were conceivably bribing cops to stay away). During the raid, Leonard is caught fellating another man in the bathroom, and a whole new world of trouble lands on Hawk’s doorstep.

None of the Washington papers have picked up Leonard’s arrest, but it’s only a matter of time before one of McCarthy’s cronies gets their hands on his arrest record. Hawk is furious, and having to play the role of a straight man admonishing Leonard exhausts him. By the time he makes it back to his apartment, there’s only an hour until sunrise. But Tim—who fell asleep waiting for Hawk to return—doesn’t get kicked out like he would’ve so many months before. Instead, Hawk folds himself into Tim’s arms and the two of them bask in the few moments of tenderness they’re allowed before they return to normal life.

“You know, you’ve been rather sweet lately,” Tim tells Hawk in bed. But Hawk’s capacity for warmth extends only to his lover, and he turns cold and ruthless when it comes time to deal with the repercussions that Leonard’s transgressions have on Senator Smith’s career. The senator is playing a pivotal role in Army-McCarthy hearings, grilling McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and David Schine about the misuse of their subcommittee’s power. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for McCarthy’s allies in office to threaten the senator with his son’s offenses. Smith is given an ultimatum: Resign from office or they’ll expose Leonard’s deviance.

But Leonard’s arrest record hasn’t yet been found, and without any concrete evidence, all Senator Smith can do is lie to his blackmailers and tell them that he’ll back off McCarthy and vote against his expulsion from the Senate if it comes to it. It’s a bid to buy time, but the clock is ticking. In the meantime, the Smiths ship Leonard off to conversion therapy, but not before Lenny can get one last dig in at his father. “Whatever disgusting thing I am, you made me this way,” he tells him, implying that Wesley’s favoring of Hawk over his own son caused his nature.

Ben Mark Holzberg

Hawk speaks with the conversion therapy facility’s head doctor, who assures Hawk that the combination of aversion therapy and electric shock therapy has been proven to show progress in some cases. “It’s a small price to pay to be sane and happy,” the doctor tells Hawk. It’s hard not to wish that Hawk will do the right thing, and let Leonard abscond somewhere else, avoiding this horrific future. But Hawk doubles down on the cruelty that’s expected of him. Before he enters the prison of the clinic, Leonard reminisces about the first summer Hawk spent with their family, during which Hawk and Leonard got drunk and masturbated together on a camping trip. “All boys do that,” Hawk says, “normal men grow out of it.” Leonard discloses that he thought of telling his father about Hawk as retribution, and Hawk lashes back out. “About what, some sad, twisted fantasy you created in your perverted brain?”

Speaking of twisted: McCarthy has been trying and failing to curb every suspicion about the nature of his relationship with Cohn and Schine. While he can refute the courts, it’s not as easy for him to rebut his own beard—sorry, I mean wife—Jean Kerr (Christine Horne). Jean approaches her husband with a raised eyebrow, wondering why he’s stuck by Roy, despite Roy letting their once-valiant ship sink. “What does he have on you?” Jean asks, not knowing that Roy is blackmailing McCarthy with proof that the senator drunkenly sodomized another man. “Men from Wisconsin don’t turn on their friends,” McCarthy responds, to which Jean retorts, “You would think a man from Wisconsin would know how to get his wife pregnant.” If only they would play this show at bars every Friday like Drag Race.

But things quickly turn dark again. Senator Smith gathers Lucy (Allison Williams) in his study to tell her that the Republican senators have found Leonard’s arrest record. Wesley can either resign from office entirely and have his post replaced with a Republican—who will surely vote in McCarthy’s favor and potentially keep him in power—or the arrest record will be released. “When Lenny comes out of that hospital, even if he’s cured, what chance will he have to live a normal life?” Senator Smith asks his daughter. “This will hound him for the rest of his days, and it will be my fault: I will have destroyed him twice.”

Lucy tries to reassure her father that everyone will be fine, regardless of what happens. But things have devolved rapidly, and Smith can’t fathom a world where he loses a lifetime of fighting for good just to protect his son, nor can he bear the thought of hurting Leonard more than he already has. The next day, the senator goes to his office, pens his resignation letter, puts a gun under his jaw, and pulls the trigger.

So much of this episode revolves around the characters of Fellow Travelers trying to navigate one of the show’s most prevalent themes: truth. Or, more specifically, how the truth is twisted to align with any larger narrative at play in a town like Washington, D.C. The truth about Leonard ruins his father’s life in almost no time at all, but the weight of Lenny’s reality is what really seems to impose on Wesley before he kills himself. His rash decisions have likely already resulted in his son facing untold trauma and mental anguish, and knowing that will be for naught if he doesn’t resign is an impossible thing to endure.

Hawk takes on his own silent level of blame as well, knowing that his inability to recover the arrest record before anyone else was a contributing factor in Wesley’s suicide. Now, sending Leonard to conversion therapy just to save face serves no one, and Hawk’s reluctance to act with empathy toward Lenny has conceivably destroyed another one of the Smiths’ lives. Hawk knows that he’s toxic, and the dance between truth and fiction is poisoning everyone around him—Tim included.

Hawk tells Tim that he’s going to propose to Lucy, and the two men spend one last night together. Tim has resigned from McCarthy’s office and enlisted in the Air Force, telling Hawk that he’s going away because distance is the only way out of their dynamic. “I need to get over you,” Tim says. Hawk agrees, knowing that there is only destruction for everything in his path. This is their mutual chance to clean things up, and a jumping-off point for Fellow Travelers to make good on its promise to show us how these lovers find each other again through the decades to come.