Murderbot is a triumph of casual viewing. It’s breezy without feeling flimsy and disposable. It’s intense without demanding that you respond to that intensity with your entire mind, body, and soul. The violence is taken seriously and depicted graphically, but it’s still more in the “Halloween haunted house” vein than the “Jesus Christ this is a real endurance test” mode. 

Everyone’s performance is lively and engaging. The biggest star in the piece steps back and mutes his wattage — it’s inherent to his character — so that everyone else shines brighter. There’s interesting romantic chemistry going on between a whole bunch of people with interesting faces, people who are handsome and beautiful in a real way rather than a movie-star-with-veneers way. 

Every episode is substantial but short, and you can watch it with your laptop on your lap, your feet kicked up on the sofa, stoned and eating pretzels and hummus quite comfortably. (Ask me how I know!) All told, Murderbot is my favorite way to spend 20 minutes on TV this season. 

This episode revolves around two major plot points. Out in the wilderness somewhere, Mensah and Murderbot are stranded in their crashed hopper, disabled when the sabotaged distress beacon exploded as they approached. If last episode featured Murderbot’s first real conversation, this one is about its first real emotional and professional crisis. Turns out that the hopper’s repair manual is one of the items it deleted from its memory to make room for its downloaded copies of Sanctuary Moon — a show that no one else can stand, by the way — and now Murderbot and Mensah are screwed.

Unless, that is, they pull it together. First, Murderbot helps Mensah come down from her latest panic attack by reassuring her that her vitals are steady, then showing her a calming episode of, you guessed it, Sanctuary Moon to slow her breathing. Mensah returns the favor by saving Murderbot’s life when it passes out from a lubrication leak, patching it into the hopper’s lubrication system on the correct hunch that the two would be compatible.

And this gives Murderbot the idea it needs to fix the hopper and get back to the base: If it’s compatible with the ship in one way, it may be compatible in another. In a wonderfully gnarly field surgery scene, Murderbot has Mensah slice open its back, crack open its biomechanical spine with a monkeywrench, and pull out a nerve strand like a piece of spaghetti. Murderbot uses the nerve fiber to patch up a vital but fried computer component, and voilà, they’re off to the habitat.

Just in time, too. Unfortunately for fans of Anna Konkle’s entertainingly randy performance, Leebeebee’s flighty horniness for Murderbot is all a ruse. She’s actually an agent of whoever orchestrated the DeltFall massacre, and she turns a gun on the gang who stayed behind at the habitat while Murderbot and Mensah traveled to trigger the emergency beacon. She orders Gurathin to give her access to the Company-installed HubSystem, for reasons still unknown — and she shoots him in the leg to prove she means business.

There’s no leg shots in store for Leebeebee, however; whatever it’s been watching, Murderbot has clearly never seen Terminator 2, a symphony of dudes getting shot in the shins by Arnold Schwarzenegger. When it bursts in on the standoff, it blows Leebeebee’s head completely apart, I’m talking a fine red mist, the second it’s able.

But rather than the hero’s reception his serials have trained it to expect, everyone’s more horrified than grateful. Gurathin is understandably furious that Murderbot would risk shooting someone who was holding a gun to his head. He’s also pissed that now they have no chance to get information out of her about the attackers and their plans. Bharadwaj, the hippie of the group, his aghast to see Murderbot take a human life. Ratthi vomits, Pin-Lee laughs hysterically, and Arada just tries her best to comfort them. Mensah simply turns and looks at Murderbot like she’s never seen it before, which is rough. 

To top it all off, Murderbot realizes that killing Leebeebee “felt good,” which is either the best or the worst thing the killer robot entrusted with protecting you could say, depending on how you interpret it.

If you’re a gorehound like I am, the pleasures of this episode are obvious: Mensah slices Murderbot open from stem to stern like a Hellraiser cenobite, and Leebeebee gets herself Scanners’d. But it’s the impact of these events that make the show. Obviously Murderbot is an action/thriller comedy, and it’s never gonna stay super serious for very long, but that slow-motion shot of the crew all freaking out in their own individual ways is a memorable one that conveys Murderbot’s shock at their shock. 

And Mensah’s impromptu spinal surgery on Murderbot makes their increasing intimacy literal. I have no idea if they’re headed in a romantic direction — Gurathin also clearly has feelings for Mensah, and for a variety of reasons that seems a more plausible relationship — but the clips from Sanctuary Moon Murderbot keeps playing himself sure seem to indicate it’s on its mechanical mind. Actors Alexander Skarsgård and Noma Dumezweni have some real chemistry, too, and it’s unexpected given the boss/employee human/robot nature of their relationship. Putting them on a more or less equal playing field as characters reveals a spark that’s been there to begin with, even if Murderbot can never look her in the eyes. 

This show is fun as hell, man. Kick your feet up and enjoy.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.