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If you saw the finale of “Enlightened” last night — only half-jokingly titled “Burn it Down” — you know that Amy made good on her promises to confront her employer, the giant drug company Abaddon, about the callousness and illegality that she uncovered through research. You also know that Amy, who survived a breakdown so severe that it sent her into rehab, is especially outraged about her own department, which is developing software that figures out how to work employees as hard as possible while paying them as a little as possible. “Enlightened” is not an explicitly political series — not in the way that “South Park” is, or that “The West Wing” was — and yet the corporate intrigue aspects strike to the heart of the moral crisis that’s convulsing this nation. The image of Amy fantasizing about pouring gasoline on the floors of Abaddon’s headquarters and setting it ablaze was chilling — and as metaphor, perfect. Do we continue to accept business as usual out of a weary belief that change is just too hard? Or do we say something, and do something, even if means enduring humiliation and abuse? Do we continue to live in this rotting house, or do we burn it down?

“I will not be afraid,” Amy said, walking into her office to demand a meeting with department heads and address the problems, her light blue blouse and yellow skirt standing out in a sea of corporate greys and blacks. “I will be bolder.”

It also helps to be “crazy,” one of the epithets that some of Amy’s co-workers use when they talk about her. Some people, of course, really are mentally ill, or at least so emotionally disturbed that nothing they say is of much use to anybody. But such epithets can also be used to stigmatize people who act and think in ways that call out the powers that be on their arrogance and complacency. The easiest way to neutralize a bringer of bad news is to stigmatize the messenger, either by calling her crazy (which is more or less what the board did after Amy left the room, revealing that they only let her speak to them as a joke) or by settling on some other pejorative phrase, such as “lazy bums” or “dirty smelly hippies” or any of the other retro smears trotted out in arguments about Occupy Wall Street.

One of the many wonderful things about “Enlightened” is that you can’t take anything that that pops out of its characters’ mouths at face value — especially not Amy’s remarks and requests, which are often self-serving. We’re quite aware that Amy is a terrible employee and is acting at least partly out of personal grievance. She wants to get back some of the power she lost when she went into rehab and lost her executive position, and she’s hurt by overhearing the board calling her crazy. But it’s also true — in life and in this series — that righteous action needn’t come from a disinterested place to be worth pursuing. Politics is personal.

“We can blow this place wide open!” Amy excitedly tells her co-worker, Tyler (Mike White), urging him to help her hack into the email system and retrieve correspondence proving that the company’s executives are hopelessly corrupt. “Why would we want to do that?” Tyler asks.

It’s also worth noting the difference between real-world Amy and the Amy we see and hear in the show’s contemplative, voice-over segments. Many of the lines that I quoted in this piece occur in what you might call a “protected space” — inside Amy’s roaming mind. The character that we see in these sequences is a best-case-scenario version of Amy. I think her statements express the show’s true outlook on life, its sense of what is possible, without sarcasm, irony or winking. It’s a benevolent and even inspirational view. It’s very easy to sneer and snicker at. It’s valuable. And right now it’s almost nonexistent on TV.

“Enlightened” might be a great series even without the parts about Amy’s workplace crusade. White, Dern and their collaborators have a keen ear for the way that people deceive each other and themselves. As TVLine’s Michael Slezak, another renewal booster, wrote, Amy is “the most tantalizingly/unapologetically unlikable lead character in recent memory” — and considering how many comically unlikable characters there are on television, that’s a bold statement. At the same time, though, “Enlightened” has compassion for foibles and empathy for pain. Last week’s episode — essentially a solo turn by Diane Ladd, who plays Dern’s elderly, widowed mom on the show, and is Dern’s mom in real life — might have been the most moving half-hour of TV I’ve seen this year, as good as the best of “Louie.” The scene between Ladd’s character and Amy’s druggie ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson) in the kitchen had the sting of observed truth, each character reopening old wounds and saying and doing things that real human beings would actually say and do. As I said in an earlier piece about the show, the series is as merciless as can be without being mean. It sees through everyone’s b.s., including Amy’s.

But it’s the connection between Amy’s personal psychodrama and her workplace that puts the series over the top, and turns it into something more than a quirky half-hour show about a troubled woman living with her mother. It’s a reminder of how work defines us, and in some cases deforms us, along with everyone we know — and the soul-crushing opposition that rises up whenever we try to change anything about it.

We need a show like this right now, and not just because it’s a great comedy and a great character study. Beneath its comic brilliance and formal daring, it believes in a better future, a better country, a better human race. And if you rolled your eyes at that last line, you should work for Abaddon.

I thought about tone during that haunting close-up of the soon-to-be-late James Darmody smoking a cigarette by an open window. There was really no reason why such a simple moment should have summoned such force. Michael Pitt wasn’t selling the moment at all. He was just sitting there smoking. Yet the accumulated weight of Jimmy’s trauma — his wife’s death and his tragic inability to feel his way through it thanks to his war experience, his Oedipally perverse childhood, and a life spent among super-macho gangsters — came through loud and clear. Pitt’s posture, gestures and slightly mask-like expressions were exactly right, just as his gentleness during the beachside pony-ride scene with Jimmy’s son was exactly right, and as his ego-free coolness during that rain-soaked final sequence was exactly right. I love how Pitt delivered Jimmy’s statement to Nucky about what to expect after your first killing: 48 hours of nausea. It reclaimed a bit of dignity for Jimmy in his final moments — the implication being that this was first time that Nucky, the butcher of Atlantic City, ever personally killed anyone — but it was not particularly boastful or petty. Jimmy was just a guy who had nothing to lose, delivering information.

Pitt’s acting was always good, if a bit vague and guarded early on — an understandable response to being ask to play a character who was whatever the show needed him to be at any given instant — but he was especially strong during the last five episodes, probably because the writing sharpened up, and he hit his peak last night. The performance was free of 21st-century neuroses, which is by no means the same thing as being untroubled. When Jimmy said he died in the trenches during the war, there was nothing self-dramatizing about it. The character was just reporting the facts as he saw them. Pitt’s acting, here and earlier on the show, was retro, but not ostentatiously so. It seemed to be pitched somewhere between 1940s-era Joel McCrea or Dana Andrews and the kinds of performances that Montgomery Clift gave in the 1950s, which were soulful and tormented, but never never over-indicated or begged for sympathy.

In retrospect, I think the tone of Pitt’s performance is the tone “Boardwalk” should have hit, or should have tried to hit, from the beginning. I went back and re-watched sections of season one and the first half of season two before writing this piece, and I was struck by how much less focused and confident it was. The show was bloody and sexy and profane and handsomely produced, and it had great sequences and moments, but it seemed insecure and prone to distraction, forever adding new characters, subplots and locations instead of exploring what it had already created. It had the brash but shallow confidence of a gambler or a con man. Tonally and rhythmically it was all over the place. Its philosophical and theological banter felt forced, and frankly still does. (Margaret to Nucky in “To the Lost:” “So your version of God asks nothing.” Nucky: “There is more God in the love I feel for you and those children than in all the churches in Rome.”) And some of the violence — like a lot of pay-cable violence — seemed to be there just because the show knew it could do it. “Boardwalk” struggled a lot, I suspect, with the legacy of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos,” and probably all of those purgatorial gangster films by co-executive producer Martin Scorsese, who won an Emmy for directing the “Boardwalk” pilot. There were times when the show seemed as though it was trying and failing to capture the rough magic of its obvious inspirations, instead of finding its own voice in a somewhat lesser mode that it was actually good at: a modern cable version of default old-movie storytelling, lively but not deep and not really trying to be. In that sense, Nucky’s hateful kiss-off to Jimmy felt like a bracing recognition that “Boardwalk Empire” is what it is, and is content to be that thing: “You don’t know me, James. You never did. I .. am not … seeking .. forgiveness.”

That quality came through in this episode, which had the polish and snap of another classic Prohibition-era retro-gangster flick, “Miller’s Crossing,” but mostly minus the flamboyance. A rare exception was the crosscut montage that juxtaposed Esther Randolph rehearsing her opening statement while putting on her courtroom clothes, Jimmy and Richard extracting a Nucky-exonerating confession/suicide note from an alderman at gunpoint, and Nucky and Margaret getting married to inoculate Margaret against having to testify against her husband; the direct address of the camera and the whirling camera moves were very Coen brothers, and in contrast to most of the music on “Boardwalk,” the classical piano score was not “justified” by being, say, performed in a saloon or played on a Victrola.

There was an unabashed movie-ness to the sequence — an exuberant yet controlled showmanship — that the drama has never before attempted. There wasn’t a trace of Coppola-style solemnity; the sequence just flew by, and the camera seemed to be tap-dancing around the actors. Jimmy’s last moments were nearly as old-movie cinematic. Having a psychologically damaged vet buy it in the shadow of a war memorial was already verging on too much; and yet somehow having the shocking double-cross and execution happen on a melodramatically dark-and-stormy night put the whole sequence over the top in a good way. “To the Lost” director Tim van Patten, who helmed some of the best “Sopranos” and “Boardwalk” episodes, is the kind of filmmaker who would have anonymously directed five B-pictures a year under the old studio system, then been discovered in the 1960s by the French. Winter’s script was filled with quotable lines that had an early-talking-pictures hard-boiled cadence. (When the judge asked Esther if she wanted to pursue a case that had fallen to pieces or withdraw and “get your ducks in a row,” she replied, “I’ll take the ducks, your honor.”) The more enthusiastically “Boardwalk” embraces an old movie style and tone, and the less it grasps for “Godfather” or “Sopranos”-like depth, the better it is. The episode even had hints of sneaky Hays Code-era moralizing. Between Margaret’s giving herself a backdoor to redemption by signing the highway land deed over to the church and the revelation that the Commodore left his estate to the housekeeper who was framed for trying to poison him (Jimmy tore up the document, but still — hilarious!), you have wonder if the “Boardwalk” universe is really godless after all.

None of this, of course, erases the fact that “Boardwalk” spent roughly a season-and-a-half figuring out what to be, overloading its narrative with an excess of characterization and incident and putting most of its women into dependent little boxes. (Things got better on all fronts year the end, though, and Esther’s interrogation of Margaret was one of the season’s sharpest, truest scenes.) And they might as well keep whacking major characters, because a lot of them are, dramatically speaking, toast anyway. The writers systematically pulverized Special Agent Van Alden like Chalky’s men whaling on those abducted Klansmen, to the point where his character lay in pieces; he should probably just stay in Cicero with his nanny-wife. And minus Jimmy and the Commodore, I don’t see what the show can do with Gillian. But still! What a great hour. Winter and company seem to have figured out something essential. I hope they build on it.