If you’re deciding whether to trust your Murderbot on your journey to the Planet of the Giant Two-Headed Centipedes, you might want to bring it along. That’s my takeaway from the second part of Murderbot, concluding the show’s debut double feature. At the very least, it saves you from being mocked behind your back for questionable decisions.

With the injured scientist Bharadwaj back in action, expedition leader Mensah plans another outing, targeting one of the gaps on their company-provided maps to uncover potential mysteries. However, despite obvious threats, they decide, based on Dr. Gurathin’s advice, to leave their SecUnit—none other than Murderbot—behind. Gurathin, who seems to have a tense history with the SecUnits, considers Murderbot the most significant threat they encounter.

In a fascinating clash of quirky character dynamics, Gurathin confronts Murderbot, their altercations brought to life by David Dastmalchian and Alexander Skarsgård. Murderbot struggles with eye contact when its mask is off—an issue Gurathin exploits by ordering it to maintain eye contact. To keep up its pretense that its governor module is functioning and obliges it to follow human orders, Murderbot forces itself to face Gurathin despite preferring the thought of being dismantled instead.

Gurathin closes their tense conversation by ordering Murderbot to retrieve its buried memories of its last incarnation, which we know are images of horrible violence. In fact, Gurathin tries accessing this info directly by tapping into Murderbot’s brain; Murderbot quietly retaliates by showing him Pin-Lee, Arada, and Ratthi signing a contract that makes them an official throuple, then making out awkwardly. “This is the part I skip over when I’m watching media,” Murderbot says, sounding like way too many grown-ass adults if you ask me.

While all this is going down, Mensah runs into trouble, but it’s trouble of a different kind. For one thing, she’s prone to panic attacks brought on by her failure to keep her team safe in the previous episode, and she has one in the middle of climbing a slippery ridge to set up equipment. Determined to prove she’s still got it, she ignores Murderbot’s desperate pleas to turn back to the ship due to dangerous fauna in the area, which it detects remotely.

Sure enough, one of those monstrous centipedes arrives, rising up behind Mensah. But instead of gobbling her up, it rushes headlong for some weird white vortex, surrounded by dozens of dead centipedes. When the crew’s surveillance drown flies overhead to investigate, the power of the vortex smashes it to pieces. The team surmises that technology left behind by ancient aliens, a common enough hazard for space explorers apparently, could be responsible for the phenomena. Such relics are just as dangerous, if not more so, than gigantic arthropods or malfunctioning security droids.

Before they do anything else, Mensah radios their counterpart team on the other side of the planet for advice. When she can’t get ahold of anyone, she decides to head out there to see what’s going on.  A cut to the other base shows exactly that: Everyone there, including their own SecUnit, has been slaughtered, seemingly quickly and easily. As Murderbot muses to itself when it hears Mensah’s plan to investigate, “What could possibly go wrong?” 

Apple TV+ has done more experimentation with 30-minute dramas, particularly genre pieces, than any other streamer I can think of. To cite two examples, last year’s Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as an unusual private detective, worked, because the mystery format lends itself to being broken up into discreet chunks whenver there’s a twist or breakthrough in the case. Before, a supernatural thriller starring Billy Crystal and Judith Light, did not work, because effective horror depends on building tension and dread, which you can’t do if you’ve got to end on a big cliffhanger every 26 minutes or so. 

Murderbot can go in the “works” category. It’s not asking a ton of you as a viewer, at least not yet; its main question seems to be “Do you like watching Alexander Skarsgård play a neurodivergent Terminator?”, and that’s a question you can easily answer, in the affirmative, in 30-minute chunks. I want to see what trouble this big goofy killing machine gets up to. I want to find out what trouble it’s gotten up to in the past. And I want to see how it gets its reluctant human friends out of their own trouble — or, who knows, maybe abandons them to it in a shocking way and becomes a real antihero, instead of a wisecracking sidekick who suddenly got a story of its own. Either way, I’ll be watching. 

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.