“Grotesquerie” may have been inscrutable to most of us when it began, but its star and executive producer, Niecy Nash-Betts, knew exactly where it was going, and the importance of staying mum about it. For some actors that means steering clear of social media or Reddit threads to guard the story’s secrets or peace of mind. For Nash-Betts, whose Det. Lois Tryon led us through the show’s mind-freakery maze, avoiding the comments wasn’t a luxury.

“Anybody who had my phone number called me or texted me,” she told Salon earlier this week. Not surprisingly, their questions were the same ones bedeviling the rest of us.

What’s happening now?

What’s going on?

And simply: What?!

Inscrutability is rarely presented as an asset when a show debuts in a crowded fall season, but “Grotesquerie" creators Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken turned it into a selling point. Nothing about the show turned out to be what it looked like at first: a standard albeit graphically gory serial killer cop show with a Murphy-esque horror twist, pairing Nash-Betts’ Lois, an alcoholic cop at the end of a failing marriage, with Micaela Diamond’s Sister Megan, a homicide-obsessed nun and…practicing journalist?

“You know, a lot of people expected it to be very similar to the other projects that Ryan has done before, but this one absolutely stood alone,” Nash-Betts told me.

Indeed. The good sister stood by Lois as her sanity unraveled at work and in her personal life, where her daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin) has failed to launch while, at a nearby hospital, her philandering husband Marshall (Courtney B. Vance) rots in a coma, cared for by a Nurse Redd (Lesley Manville) who’s in love with him.

"You know, a lot of people expected it to be very similar to the other projects that Ryan has done before, but this one absolutely stood alone."

Then, and without warning, the writers turned everything upside down. All along we were watching Lois’ coma dream, and she wakes up to a life in shambles. She was the one who cheated, with Merritt’s husband Ed (Travis Kelce). Megan isn’t a nun but a fellow detective married to a violent man Lois shoots in the face… or does she?

Marshall and Redd are having an affair. The only parts of Lois’ coma dreams that weren’t real were the grisly murders, until somebody starts recreating them…which drives Lois back to the hospital, the psych ward this time.

With “Grotesquerie,” Murphy tapped into the all-enveloping fear that the world is in a death spiral, building real-life metaphors into the horrors Lois dreamed of, including climate change, the loss of reproductive rights and the dehumanization of the unhoused.

The finale adds in gaslighting and patriarchal rage as Marshall is blindsided by a sexual assault accusation from a student he slept with.

With “Grotesquerie,” Murphy tapped into the all-enveloping fear that the world is in a death spiral.

“Accountability is everything,” Lois tells Marshall early in the episode, after she's rejected his preposterous suggestion that he, Lois and Redd move in together. That should have been it for them, Lois thinks. But this finale is half Marshall’s story now, and he crawls back from his lowest point by joining an underground men’s group led by one of Lois' doctors. And it has grand ambitions. “Perhaps the issue is that we need to return to a much more traditional model for society,” Marshall tells them, adding that it’s time to “find the bogeyman and........

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