The night Israel launched its stunning aerial campaign against Iran last month, incredible stories began emerging from Tehran of senior generals and nuclear scientists assassinated in their apartments, attack drones launched by Israel from warehouses inside Iran, explosions at nuclear facilities, and even Mossad agents in Tehran.

No matter how outlandish the rumors, they’d almost all been foretold in Tehran, the Apple TV+ series now in its third season. The series follows the daring exploits of Tamar Rabinyan, a highly-skilled Mossad agent dispatched to the Iranian capital to undermine the mullahs’ burgeoning nuclear weapons program.

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But even more compelling than the propulsive on-screen action and its eerie predictive power are the tortured psychological gymnastics performed by the key characters as they stretch and leap to reconcile the competing loyalties to family, to country, to humanity, pulling them in multiple directions.

Take Tamar, a 20-something Israeli operative and computer hacker extraordinaire who was born in Tehran and fled the regime by immigrating to the Jewish state with her family. Played by the steely yet vulnerable Israeli actress Niv Sultan, Tamar infiltrates her former country with ease and initially takes shelter in Tehran with her aunt, who had remained behind. Despite severely imperiling her family, Tamar relies on her aunt’s protection for much of Season 1, no matter the consequences.

Along the way, she encounters, befriends, and, inevitably, falls in love with Milad, a brilliant young cyberhacker whose love for his people and their freedom is matched only by his hatred for the regime. Tamar doesn’t exactly exploit Milad — their love is genuine, and their goals are mostly aligned — but circumstances frequently test their relationship, with uneven results. 

Tamar’s main antagonist in Season 1 is Faraz Kamali, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s counter-intelligence division. Spellbindingly depicted by the elegant Iranian-born American actor Shaun Toub, Kamali ruthlessly hunts for Tamar and clashes with his own beloved wife, Nahid. As the first season climaxes, with Tamar and Milad struggling to shut down radar installations to enable an Israeli aerial attack and Kamali hot on their tail, all characters find themselves having to make painful sacrifices.

When Season 2 begins, we meet Marjan Montazeri, a widowed, American-born therapist in Tehran who, we later learn, works for the Mossad. She becomes Tamar’s handler. Following the traumas of the previous season, Tamar herself contemplates escaping to Canada but ultimately finds herself drawn back to the fundamental mission, which now shifts toward eliminating a particularly loathsome IRGC general playing a pivotal role in the mullahs’ nuclear weapons program.

Marjan, played chillingly by Glenn Close, has suffered her own losses and undertaken her own conciliations, and she steers Tamar toward doing the same. This time, however, Tamar aims to seduce the general’s fabulously wealthy, secular, partygoing, supercar-driving, playboy son in an effort to get close to the father, a gambit that badly strains her bond with Milad. Meanwhile, Kamali faces his own painful choice between Nahid and his future place within the regime’s hierarchy. When the smoke clears, success mixes with sorrow, and both Tamar and Kamali are once again mired in self-doubt over whether their choices, however necessary for the mission, have compromised their humanity.

By the time Season 3 begins, viewers have thus become accustomed to the divided loyalties afflicting the key characters. (And note: due to mysterious behind-the-scenes decisions made by Apple execs in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, the latest season is currently available in the U.S. only via VPN and Israel’s Kan 11 app.) Those contradictions become heightened as the Mossad targets key components recently delivered to Tehran that appear to enable the weaponization of the ayatollahs’ enriched uranium.

Emblematic of these twists and turns is Eric Peterson, a South African weapons inspector for a fictional equivalent of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who seems to switch sides multiple times over the course of the season. Peterson, whose South African accent flows off the tongue of a compelling Hugh Laurie, has one North Star: a love for Iran and its people.

Tamar, too, labors to reconcile her many impulses, much to the consternation of Yulia, her handler back in Tel Aviv, who occasionally frets that Tamar’s “Iranian side” has triumphed over her Israeli one. “Remember who you are,” Yulia chastises Tamar at one point, “and remember which side you’re fighting for.”

Yulia is right to worry: Early in Season 3, after defying another of Yulia’s commands, the wily, magnetic Tamar wins over a key character who initially intends to do her harm. And shortly thereafter, Tamar confronts the wife of a nuclear scientist that the Mossad had previously eliminated, and who herself is now aiding the program. She has to choose between her mission and her ethical sensibilities, as the widow is raising a 9-year-old girl. 

“The people [your husband] built the bomb for want to wipe us off the face of the earth,” Tamar coolly reminds the widow, gun cocked and aimed. “My husband never got to see his daughter grow up because of you people!” the widow shoots back.

In a critical sequence, all of the characters must make an impossible choice involving grave nuclear peril. Tamar and Kamali, who again face Nahid’s accusations of betrayal, find themselves, not for the first time, at loggerheads. 

“I never doubted your love for Tehran,” Tamar tells the IRGC man. “So don’t you doubt my love.”

“I choose Iran over everything,” Kamali smugly retorts.

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But ultimately, while Tehran’s writers admirably entertain competing motivations and, in depicting the costs and benefits of adhering to the mission, transcend black-and-white moralizing with the nuance inherent in every conflict, they nevertheless make their choices clear. In other words, Tamar, Milad, Marjan, and their allies care deeply about the Iranian people, while Kamali, the general, and the other antagonists defend the Iranian regime. 

It’s undoubtedly true that Israel, the Iranian opposition, weapons inspectors, and the Western world in general make mistakes and sacrifices in furtherance of their mission. And sometimes the costs of those mistakes and sacrifices seem downright unbearable. But the mullahs and their enablers intend to bring about evil out of a misguided sense of love of country. While we must wring our hands over the unintended and often terrible consequences of our well-intentioned actions, we must never lose sight of the motivations of our adversaries. Accepting evil in the service of good always beats the alternative. This message resonates throughout Tehran over its brilliant five-year run, much as it has resonated in the actual Tehran over the last few months as life has imitated art.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI