The latest episode of Impulse Retcon, “Making Amends,” is one of the show’s most emotionally loaded installments yet. On the surface, it delivers the globe-hopping teleportation showdown fans have been waiting for. Underneath, it’s an episode about what power actually costs — and what it can never give back.
Superpowers Don’t Fix Anything
The episode opens on a startlingly honest note: having superpowers isn’t the fantasy it’s cracked up to be. Henry can build technology nobody else on Earth could dream up, and yet poverty, war, and death haven’t gone anywhere. That’s the quiet gut-punch at the center of “Making Amends” — extraordinary ability doesn’t translate into a better world. If anything, it isolates the person who has it. All the power in the world means nothing next to losing the people you love.
That loss is personal and specific here. Henry’s grief over her parents and siblings isn’t treated as backstory dressing — it’s presented as a wound that never closes. The kind of loss that makes you question whether you’re even still alive, whether this is some kind of punishment, whether you’ll ever see the people you lost again. It’s the emotional engine driving everything else that happens in the episode, including the choices Henry makes that she can’t take back.
A Teleportation Fight That Bookends the Series
Structurally, “Making Amends” is designed to rhyme with where the series began. Henry and Nikolai’s final confrontation isn’t a single set-piece battle in one location — it’s a fight that jumps from country to country as the two of them teleport in and out of each exchange. The show started with a teleportation chase across the globe, and it ends the same way, giving the season a sense of coming full circle.
Nikolai’s death itself is one of the episode’s stranger, more haunting touches. As he’s dying, he sees his younger brother, already gone. It’s an eerie detail with a real-world echo: people who’ve studied near-death experiences often describe the dying seeing shadowy figures they believe to be family members, even when the figures themselves are indistinct. Whether or not that’s literally what’s happening to Nikolai, the show leaves the ambiguity hanging — is it real, or is it just the mind’s last act of mercy?
A Biblical Undercurrent
Religious imagery runs through the episode in a way that rewards paying attention. There’s a reference to the Book of Job — specifically the passage where Satan appears, unnamed, to torment Job through his so-called friend Eliphaz, who never actually recognizes who he’s dealing with. It’s a fitting parallel for an episode full of characters who don’t fully see the danger standing right in front of them.
Later, the episode touches on the origin of the cross itself, noting that in the original Greek, it was simply a straight pole — not the shape most people picture. It’s a small detail, but it sets up a bigger idea the episode seems to be reaching for: that teachings get twisted over time, and that warnings about false interpretations aren’t new.
That thread continues with the Mennonite community’s new leader, Mrs. Miller, who does some quiet investigative work of her own. She corners Lucas Boone with a pointed question — why is he protecting an angel who might have killed his own father? Lucas doesn’t answer. He doesn’t deny it either. His silence says everything.
Revenge Doesn’t Heal Anything
If there’s a moral center to “Making Amends,” it’s this: revenge doesn’t fix what’s broken — it just breaks more things. Henry kills Nikolai and walks away literally covered in his blood, which is as visceral a symbol as the show has offered. When her friends Jenna and Townes ask where Sheriff Anna is, the show lets the silence do the talking again.
That silence hides one of the episode’s darkest turns. Earlier in the series, Townes warned Henry that if the government ever found out about her powers, she’d be locked away and experimented on — which is why a fake replica of Henry’s bedroom had been built, a gilded cage meant to hold her for life. That threat hangs over everything now. When Jenna and Townes ask about Sheriff Anna, Henry’s look tells Townes he already knows the answer. Townes insists Anna is a good person — but he understands, even as a defender of hers, that no outsider can be allowed to know the truth about Henry’s powers. Not even a cop. Not even a good one. So Townes knows, without being told outright, exactly what happened to her.
Not Normal, and Not Ashamed of It
The episode doesn’t shy away from how people with powers are perceived by everyone else. Some call them sick. Others call them monsters. But “Making Amends” pushes back on both labels — these characters aren’t sick or evil, they’re simply operating on a different wavelength than “normal” people, thinking and reacting in ways shaped by being fundamentally abnormal. It’s less an excuse than an observation: you can’t judge someone by rules that were never built for what they are.
That same resistance to easy judgment shows up in a smaller, quieter moment — a woman tells someone they’ll answer to God for the bad things they’ve done. The episode seems to push back gently on that too: whatever reckoning exists between a person and God is exactly that — between them and God. Nobody else gets to weaponize that idea to shame or control someone. It’s a pointed jab at the kind of self-appointed moral policing that shows up in religious communities, delivered without ever being preachy about it.
Secrets, Trust, and the Power of Words
Two smaller storylines round out the episode, both about the risks of letting people in. Townes tells his online girlfriend Zoe about Henry — a massive risk, since he knows full well that people can die if this secret gets out. Whatever he saw in Zoe convinced him she was worth the risk. Or maybe he’s playing a longer game we haven’t seen yet. Either way, it matters that Zoe isn’t just some passive confidante — she’s established as someone with serious computer skills, capable of finding almost anyone. That’s a detail that feels like it’s being set up to pay off later.
Meanwhile, Henry’s own relationship with words takes a darker turn. Instead of using her ability to speak with power for something kind or healing, she turns it inward on her own mother, attacking her emotionally. Cleo, left with no other way to protect herself, kicks Henry out. It’s a small, human-scale tragedy tucked inside an episode otherwise dealing in death and revenge — proof that the most damage doesn’t always come from superpowers at all.
The Angels Behind It All
Finally, the episode widens its scope with a bit of cosmology: angels, created by God, with Jesus as the first — the one through whom everything else, including the rest of the angels, came into being. Millions of them exist, the episode reminds us, and some — like Satan — fell. It’s a big, mythic backdrop dropped into an episode that’s otherwise deeply personal, and it hints that “Making Amends” is setting the stage for questions the series isn’t done asking yet: about power, fallenness, and who really gets to decide what’s righteous.
Bottom line: “Making Amends” is less about the fight itself and more about everything the fight can’t undo. Power doesn’t erase grief. Revenge doesn’t bring peace. And the truths people bury — about death, about faith, about who they really are — have a way of surfacing anyway.