There is a moment in “Fight or Flight,” the latest episode of Impulse, where Nikolai puts in his earbuds, presses play on “Spirit in the Sky,” and goes about his business as if the world around him hasn’t just come apart at the seams. Two people are dead or dying. Blood is on the floor. And this man is essentially on a casual stroll. It’s one of the most chilling character moments the show has delivered — not because of what Nikolai does, but because of how little any of it seems to cost him.

That detachment tells you everything about who Nikolai is.

The Coldest Man in the Room

When Bill Boone shoots Cleo, Nikolai is watching from outside the window. He has teleportation powers. He could have intervened. He chose not to. Then, as Boone crawls across the floor begging for help, Nikolai simply steps over him. Not out of cruelty, exactly — more out of a kind of ruthless accounting. Boone made his choices. Nikolai made his.

What follows is methodical and disturbing. Nikolai drags Boone’s body — possibly still alive — out to a barn, and dissolves him in a vat of acid. He might as well be taking out the trash. When Henry arrives, bewildered and panicked, Nikolai hands her a shovel and asks her to get to work. He isn’t interested in her shock. There’s a mess, and the mess needs cleaning.

It’s worth noting that Henry has no real understanding that she set all of this in motion. She calls it an accident. Nikolai doesn’t argue the point. He just wants the shovel.

Henry Is Falling Apart

Henry is carrying more weight than any teenager should have to bear, and “Fight or Flight” makes that brutally clear. When she nearly loses control and almost teleports hard enough to bring down the barn, Nikolai talks her down with quiet precision: make a fist, then squeeze, then breathe. Then he says something that cuts right to the heart of her situation — “Not going to do your mom any good if you keep disappearing.”

That line lands hard. Henry’s mother has just been shot. Henry is the only one who knows where Bill Boone’s body is. And Henry is a teenager with unstable supernatural powers and no roadmap for any of this.

Nikolai also coaches her on what to tell the police — keep the focus on Boone, keep herself out of it, give them nothing to grab onto. It sounds like he’s teaching her to lie, and he is. But the reasoning is grim and practical: if the authorities ever found out Henry could teleport, they wouldn’t help her. They’d cage her.

The episode makes that threat feel very real by the end.

What the Party Reveals

Henry, Jenna, and Patty go to a party. Henry wants weed. She ends up with alcohol instead. What she actually needs — though she doesn’t frame it this way — is to stop feeling what she’s feeling, even for a few hours.

It doesn’t work. In a drug-induced hallucination, partygoers mock her about dissolving Boone in acid and leaving her mother lying in her own blood. Then she rips someone’s arm off. It’s a nightmare she can’t fully separate from reality, and that’s the point. Henry’s guilt has gotten inside her, and it’s growing.

The most honest moment of the episode comes later, when Henry — drunk and raw — admits out loud what she’s been afraid to say: killing Bill Boone felt good. Like a release. The show doesn’t flinch from this. Henry isn’t just a victim reacting to trauma. She liked it. And that scares her more than anything else.

Jenna, to her credit, doesn’t run. She tells Henry: “You are a good person too. But you need to believe it, or it doesn’t matter.” It’s the right thing to say. Whether Henry can actually hear it is another question.

Dreams That Leave Mud on Your Feet

Henry’s nightmare goes somewhere deeply unsettling. She’s screaming for her father, stuck in mud, begging him not to leave her. She says “I need you” over and over. But her father has been dead a long time — she just doesn’t know it yet.

Here’s the detail that makes your skin crawl: when Henry wakes up, she has mud on her feet. And she’s missing one shoe. Exactly like in the dream. The line between Henry’s inner world and the physical one is dissolving just as surely as Bill Boone in that vat of acid.

Townes, the Hacker, and the Bigger Picture

Townes is dealing with his own creeping dread. His girlfriend Zoe — who he assumed was safely contained within their shared online world — turns out to know far more than he realized. She knows about the teleportation video he posted a thousand times on YouTube. She knows about the hacker. She even wonders aloud if Townes himself might be the hacker.

Then the hacker sends a delivery directly to Townes’ house. It’s a message, and the message is: I know exactly where you are.

Townes has been saying for a while now that they need information and they need to be able to defend themselves. He’s right. What they have so far is a collection of loose, frightening unknowns.

One of those unknowns becomes terrifyingly concrete when Henry, Townes, and Jenna watch the tape the hacker sent them. It shows Cleartech’s plan for teleporters: build them a room that feels safe, that feels like shelter — and make sure they can never leave it. Study them. Torture them. Control them the way you control any dangerous animal, which is to say: put it in a cage, and then make it do what you want.

The episode ends on this note, and it earns the dread it’s going for. Cleartech has a teleporter locked to a bed somewhere. They torture him until he teleports to the location they’ve chosen. He gets there. Then he dies.

“The only failure in science is failure of imagination,” someone says. It might be the most sinister line of the season.

The Armor We Build

The episode’s thematic spine is stated plainly by Nikolai, who has clearly seen enough of the world to have formed some hard opinions about it. He says that if we don’t relive our moments of danger and pain — if we don’t move through them rather than around them — we will keep hurting ourselves and the people around us. Survival isn’t just physical. It demands something from the inside too.

Henry is being asked to face all of this at once: a mother shot, a man dissolved, a power she can barely control, a guilt she can’t outrun, and a corporation that wants to own her. She is seventeen years old.

Meanwhile, Patty Yang hovers at the edges of the group, trying to belong somewhere. She gold-digs a little, name-drops a rich boyfriend, gets left behind when Jenna chooses to hang out with Townes instead. By the end, Patty has been absorbed into the group — but Henry’s secret stays hidden from her. The circle of trust is small, and the walls around it are getting higher.

“Fight or Flight” earns its title. Every character is choosing, in their own way, between those two responses to fear. Nikolai chose long ago. Henry is still figuring it out. And somewhere in a Cleartech facility, a kid strapped to a bed never got the chance to choose at all.