All things must come to an end — but not without raising a little hell first.

The last two episodes of UnREAL season one (“Princess” and “Future,” respectively) play out like one movie-length episode. The finale gives some much needed closure on season-long character arcs — Rachel’s love triangle with Adam and Jeremy, Quinn’s future with Chet and Everlasting, which contestant actually wins Everlasting — as well as introduces new developments to be explored in the following seasons.

Television as a medium is pretty postmodern, especially considering how quickly its distribution and consumption have evolved in recent years. It’s rare that people watch shows week to week, let alone pay for cable. Instead the market has shifted to streaming — Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, Showtime and tons more — to cater to the desperate binge-watcher.

This change in structure is integral to the conversation about television as a medium as well as the consumption of UnREAL over time. When UnREAL premiered in 2015, streaming sites were seeing their first real push. Netflix accounted for 50 percent of the 3 percent national decrease in television ratings that year alone. Netflix’s first original series House of Cards premiered in 2013 as one full binge-worthy season — comparable to the business model used today, only less saturated than 2018 standards.

But UnREAL was on cable in 2015, specifically Lifetime, so it relied on a week-to-week structure. At the end of “Princess,” Adam asks Rachel to run away with him. He’s sick of Everlasting and wants something — or more likely someone — real. But it leaves off with a cliffhanger — something almost foreign in modern television that’s written and conceived to be watched in a short amount of time. Consuming these two episodes back to back in 2018 seems natural because it’s considered the new standard — but audiences had to wait a whole week to see how the conclusion unfolded.

“Future,” starts with Rachel leaving Jeremy to run away with Adam — but he gets cold feet (in the form of Quinn pressuring him to finish Everlasting.) Rachel then comes back to the set of Everlasting similarly to how she came back in the first episode. Instead of “crazy is back,” she tells Quinn she wants to produce “the best finale in Everlasting history” with a wild smile and runny mascara. It’s a detail that makes Rachel’s cyclical arc of being tied to Everlasting and Quinn come full circle — and it’s easier to spot having seen all the episodes in a short amount of time.

Rachel in episode 1 “Return”

Rachel in episode 10 “Future”

Rachel and Quinn decide to make this episode unforgettable — and to get revenge from Adam and Chet, respectively. Rachel convinces Adam to pick Anna while also convincing Anna to dump him on live television — shattering his meticulously rebuilt image in seconds. Quinn produces one hell of an episode out of chaos — proving herself to be more worthy than Chet to Brad and the network.

The last scene of the season, however, caters to a building tension that can only be fostered in a week-to-week format. After being dumped and manipulated by Rachel, Jeremy takes drastic measures and goes to her emotionally abusive mother. Now that UnREAL is all on Hulu, the first inclination is to play the next episode and get that immediate satisfaction.

The season ends with Quinn and Rachel talking about their future, which seems just as dark and hopeless as their past — feeding into their toxic, tethered and inescapable relationship.

“Love is swell,” Quinn says with disdain. “But it’s not something you build your life around.”