Before last evening’s debate began, everyone in the Clinton and Trump camps—Chelsea Clinton, Bill Clinton, Ivanka Trump, Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump—looked pale and on the brink of vomiting. Too bad for them that they weren’t like us viewers at home, free to vomit any time we felt like it, which was often. Everyone knew it was going to be a horrible evening for most people there, and so it proved to be. But it was also, let’s face it, a captivating evening. Donald Trump had the impossible task of having to recover from two disastrous death-spiraling weeks. And, like it or not, he kind of managed to do it.

How did this happen? At the outset, Trump seemed to have two options: to be mild and retiring, which would send off defeatist vibes, or to be aggressive and uncontrolled, which would make him lose the way he did in the last debate. Instead, he managed to exercise some self-control and stay calm, almost Klonopin-like, while, at the same time, baiting Hillary Clinton nearly as relentlessly as she baited him in the last round. Clinton is a much more controlled candidate than Trump, but during many of Trump’s statements she looked enraged—so livid that she seemed to have trouble collecting herself when it was her turn to speak. At one point, perhaps more than one, her jaw even dropped in disgust. In short, she was rattled.

It’s hard to blame her. Trump was determined to fight savagely, something made clear by the presence in the audience of two women who have accused Bill Clinton of rape and a third woman who was raped at age 12 (not by a Clinton, all parties agree!) and alleges that Hillary Clinton behaved callously towards her when Clinton was representing the defendant. About 15 minutes into the debate, maybe a little more, after Clinton had been firing all guns at Trump over his awful joking on tape about grabbing women “by the p----,” Trump decided to go there, bringing up Bill Clinton’s sexual history. Hillary was prepared for this, but it’s hard to prepare fully for it, and the disgust and anger was clear. It was sickening but, I’ll admit, also hypnotizing.

WATCH: Hillary Clinton Responds to Donald Trump’s Remarks on Women

At that point, much of the Twitterverse decided that Trump had self-destructed, but that moment on stage seemed almost to relax him—almost as if he was thinking, “There, now that’s out of the way”—and subsequently warm him up. He proceeded to attack Clinton for having deleted emails (an exchange she lost, actually), for failing to plug tax loopholes as a senator (it didn’t make much sense and didn’t dent her much), for voting to authorize George W. Bush to go to war against Iraq (hard to say whether this worked), and for supporting trade deals. Each time, in the split screen, Clinton looked like she wished to incinerate him, and many of her smiles before speaking were grimaces. She attacked right back, but somehow, substance aside, she was on the defensive. You could feel Trump’s confidence rising and hers falling.