I am being asked for my thoughts about the Hacks series finale. I don’t want to spoil the last episode for people who haven’t seen it yet. But the series’ final storyline compellingly grapples with one of the most highly contentious issue roiling the contemporary West and is deservedly receiving much commentary.

SPOILER ALERT: I will not disclose the denouement. But stop here if you don’t want to know the plot point.

The episode has the series’ protagonist, seventy-something A-list comedienne Deborah Vance, telling her closest friend and beloved protege Ava that her previously beaten breast cancer has returned. She has a 40 percent chance of surviving the disease if she receives aggressive treatment. But that is not what Deborah wants. She tells Ava that she doesn’t want to become sick from chemo. She doesn’t want to lose her looks. And she is terrified that if she dies from cancer that she will not be remembered well by those who love her and witness her decline.

These are common terrors expressed by people who receive catastrophic diagnoses, and they are completely understandable. Indeed, they fuel the euthanasia movement. For example, the dual worries about suffering and not being remembered well were the very reasons Britanny Maynard cited in explaining why she planned to — and did — die by assisted suicide. And the media amplified those fears, making her an international celebrity. One media commenter even called Maynard’s death “a gift” to her husband.

Back to Hacks. Deborah asks Ava to come with her on a final grand vacation to Paris. Then she wants her friend to accompany her to Switzerland for her death by assisted suicide. Deborah doesn’t want to live with cancer and does not wish to die alone.

In my view, asking a loved one (or anyone) to attend one’s suicide is both solipsistic and unintentionally cruel. It puts the asked person into a terrible emotional and moral conundrum. Say yes, and they become complicit in the suicide. It is also unintentional abandonment. Agreeing to attend is to, essentially, validate the suicidal person’s worst fears about their future — about being a burden, or not having a life worth living, and not being remembered well. These serious concerns require loving intervention and care, not acquiescence in self-destruction.

But say no, and the asked person can be made to feel that he is the selfish one, that he is abandoning the suicidal person in her time of greatest need, indeed, that he is a judgmental and rigid moralist devoid of compassion.

This is precisely the bind Deborah puts Ava into, the person she supposedly cares for most in the world. It’s so unfair. Ava is appalled and grief-stricken, desperately seeking to do the right thing by Deborah — and herself.

The rest of the episode deals with how Ava responds to the request, arguments between the two women about whether life is worth living while seriously ill, and how to best help an ill loved one in need. It’s a dramatic and compelling presentation of the personal and societal stakes involved in assisted suicide that respects both those who would attend such deaths, and people like me, who would not.

The acting by Jean Smart (Deborah) and Hannah Einbinder (Ava) is terrific, by the way. Highly recommended.