Todd is still very much emotionally raw from mowing down Pat last episode and it’s kind of beautiful to see his hopeful delusions getting shot down in favor of a heaping reality check that does nothing for his decreasingly calm nerves. While I guess it’s not too surprising that Pat’s fate from last week is a permanent one, I half expected this season to see these guys on the lam and fearing to return home.

Even at the start of this episode—which sees the Malibu Crew getting holed up in Cher’s home, of all places—I thought that they might be stuck in this ghoulish new place for an episode while some sort of riff on a haunted house episode was done (it is October, after all…). As ridiculous as that may sound, it’s also a testament to just how unpredictable this show is. I’d willingly submit to a haunted house episode just as I would Pat surviving and somehow becoming a permanent member of the group.

As heavy as this show’s material can be at times, I still love that it makes time for Tandy to just run his mouth off, with his imaginary back-up team being a prime reminder of just how damn good Forte is on this show. This delightful aside is absolutely unnecessary but it’s a very bright spot in the episode and evidence of how some table setting sort of scene can still be made ridiculous and different.

Trauma is heavy in the air this week with both Melissa and Todd pretty stricken by the recent actions that they’ve taken, even if they were necessary ones that kept the rest of the crew alive. With this show never shying away from any topic really, it’s interesting to see grief beginning to manifest itself through this form rather than the “natural” losses that the gang has experienced. Regardless, there’s been a lot of death on the show by now—to the point where corpses are just getting thrown in trash heaps rather than getting fancy Viking funerals—it’s only natural that the heavy emotions behind all of this are going to start weighing down on some of these people.

While Melissa has efficiently been a lockbox of emotions throughout most of the series, Todd wears his murderer status on his sleeve and is having a pretty hard time getting over things. It’s a little crushing to see Tandy powerless to help his sensitive friend, but then it’s even more crushing when Tandy pushes things into screwball territory by championing the outrageous white lie onto Todd that Pat isn’t dead. At this point you’re like, okay, they’re not doing a haunted house this week, but is Tandy seriously going to do a Weekend at Bernie’s here? He’s not but his deranged lunatic solution to things is perhaps even more disturbing.