I can still recall the way my heart pounded during the climax of the first Californication season finale. When Karen escaped her own wedding and leapt into Hank’s car, laughing and screaming at him to drive, she exploded a bomb of exuberance and fairy tale possibilities. She also left a pretty tough act to follow.

Full disclosure: I love Californication the way I would a significant other: teasingly, with great nuance, and, perhaps rather pathetically, with just about as much intensity. Which is fitting, as the show is as accurate and honest a reflection of human relationships as anything on the television landscape. It isn’t afraid to mix up emotions, to make grand gestures and then take them back. The affair between Hank and Karen evolves and then backtracks in an endless loop of confused seesawing and stammering conviction – giving us an honest depiction of love that the progress-oriented structure of television usually doesn’t allow.

The final episode of the second season, “La Petite Mort,” begins with a slow, contemplative crawl through the home of Lew Ashby – the infamous record producer who was last seen in the spasmodic grips of a cocaine overdose. “Keep Me In Your Heart” by Warren Zevon plays in earnest as the camera trails past the accumulated trashy decadence of Los Angeles’s very own Gastby-savant, ending in a wide of Hank as he types the final words of Ashby’s biography. Hank pours a glass, lights a joint, and ponders a few words of wisdom spoken by his subject and friend: “At the end of the day, it’s all about her.” And with this, the tone is set: the scene puts its foot down, opens its smartass mouth and says: I’m a season finale, and I intend to take this responsibility seriously.

The half-hour episode is framed by a series of smash cuts that move the action along, giving rhythm to something that’s required to do a good deal of both wrapping up and foreshadowing. Here’s where we are at this point: Hank’s been dumped by Karen after knocking up blind date Sonja, Charlie left Marcy for a cheeky porn actress with whom he’s experiencing non-premature coital bliss, Mia is reveling in the success of the book she stole from Hank after he penned an account of their deceit-laden tryst, and young Becca has just received her first dose of the heartbreak drug from cheating boyfriend Damien.

It’s quite a lot of plot for twelve episodes, and quite a lot of sex – which is, I suppose, what you’d expect from a show with a sexytimes reference in its title. I’ve heard complaints that the series has too much fornication, that it’s base and superficial. In the words of my very own mother, “Every episode is the same: Guy acts charming, gets drunk and sleeps with another woman.” And while this is true — and while, hell, that alone sounds like a great show to me – the series is, of course, about so much more. The framework of apparent frivolity only serves to make all the meaningful stuff that much more… meaningful. In a scene near the end of the finale, the recently separated Runkles meet for a tension-filled drink, all fermentation, hops and anguish. Marcy, looking pissed off and her particular brand of West Coast sexy, says to Charlie, “You could have stayed with me. You were number nineteen. There were eighteen cocks before you. Not a ton. Not a rogues’ gallery. But enough to know I liked yours the best.”

Poetry! Yes, it’s a bit crass — but it’s also lyrical, honest, and, well, funny. With all the angst, heartache, and long lenses peering into the grand abyss of Mulholland Canyon, it’s easy to forget that Californication is a comedy. But one key scene reminds us of this fact: Hank and Karen answer a call and find weary, long-suffering Sonja belly-deep in a kiddie pool, fighting and cursing her way through a water birth. The scene is goofy, punchy and satirical all at once. The character of Julian, the new-agey spiritualist author who’s been threatening to become a source of epic comedy all season, finally hits his stride when he walks in three-sheets-to-the-wind and scared out of his mind. And the ultimate reveal of the scene is so shockingly hilarious — yet still so entirely believable, that you can’t help but think: man, this show is just about perfect.

Okay, full disclosure: This is the part where I reveal that I’m no good at relationships – that I’m fickle and unforgiving and can’t make up my mind about anything. That the things I proclaim undying love for soon become points of contention. The old, familiar knock-down-drag-out between Hank and Karen, which moments ago I praised for its realism and integrity, begins to elicit a stale musk of repetition. Karen tells Hank about a New York job she’s taken and subsequently ignores his pleas to tag along — because, once again, she needs her space. And there are moments during the episode when Hank Moody — personal object of intense devotion — almost seems too clever. The constant word play and need to one-up himself, especially clear when he and Mia talk of her impending trip to take their “retarded love child” on a national tour, feels almost weary of itself. Their banter is so quick-fire and self-deprecatingly honest that it becomes incessant. In these moments it’s impossible not feel slightly exiled from the scene, difficult to avoid looking on from a distance, thinking: god it must be hard to be Hank Moody.

But if it’s tough to be him, it’s only because the man is ultimately so damn good. Just when Hank is about to slide by unpunished for his juvenile antics one too many times, he goes and does something remarkably grown up. And the structure of the show follows right behind, instantly airing out any lingering sillage of repetitiveness with a brief epilogue in beaches, colorful montage and “Keep Me In Your Heart” round two (incidentally, Zevon’s final song, which he wrote to poignant effect after he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer).

While I would argue that the best episodes of the season are the dinner party-centric “The Raw and the Cooked” and the time-traveling “In Utero,” the season finale is still pretty strong in its own right. It ties up its loose ends, and takes the preeminently focal Hank/Karen dynamic and spins it on its head — gearing us up for thirteen new episodes that I anxiously await. At the end of the day, the season finale isn’t as exuberant or as fantastical as it was the first time around, but maybe that’s exactly the point. The title basically says as much: “La Petite Mort,” the French reference to orgasm that translates as “a little death,” describes a feeling of melancholy that comes with release and conclusion.

So, then, things are changing. Californication has suddenly become more complicated. And oddly enough, I’m okay with that. In growing up, in doing exactly the opposite of what I would’ve thought I wanted, the show has given me the chance to accept it for its imperfections. And it has reminded me that — fickle or not — I am still capable of at least one type of love.