You know the drill at this point, people! This is a recap of Voltron: Legendary Defender season two, episode 10, “Escape from Beta Traz.” There’s gonna be spoilers in this. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading until you’ve seen the episode. Thank you all, and Merry Christmas.

We’re deep into a season that has real stakes, and I love it. With the fate of the universe in the balance, and the paladins of Voltron being essentially the only thing standing between the free systems and Zarkon’s total dominance, the back half of Voltron: Legendary Defender season two is gripping. And episode 10, “Escape from Beta Traz,” builds evermore to the ultimate actuation of their good-guy plan. Hunk and Keith gathered crystals in “The Belly of the Weblum,” and “Beta Traz” showed us what Lance, Pidge, and Shiro had to do.

In the Blue Lion, Lance–believing himself to be the team’s sharpshooter (that’s his THING, he says)–launched Shiro and Pidge toward the floating prison of Beta Traz. Beta Traz is holding a prisoner named Slav who is said to be a brilliant genius engineer the team needs to build their massive wormholer, and they were surprised to learn that Slav is their only prisoner. Pidge scanned the the prison and learned there were two cells, so Shiro took one and Lance took the other, looking for Slav. They had no idea what Slav looked like, which is very important to the story.

The prison’s warden was a brute of a Galra who looked like some kind of Pirates of Dark Water castoff and he tortured the people in both prison cells…hmm, who could Slav be? Shiro’s freed prisoner was…interesting. A kind of owl mixed with a caterpillar mixed with I don’t know what. He also has genius-level ability to be worried about stuff, constantly talking about the percentage that this reality will result in a bad outcome. He naturally drove Shiro insane, but did have some hilarious dialogue. He wasn’t going to leave his cell despite Shiro’s pleas, but when Shiro told him he was the pilot of the Black Lion, the prisoner asked if it had particular range of telehertz. “Yeah,” was Shiro’s response, to which the other said, “That’s my lucky range of telehertz!” and finally decided to go with Shiro.

Lance’s discovery, on the other hand, was a large purple beasty creature who, when asked if it was the Slav Lance was looking for, it responded “Yup.” In fact, any time Lance asked it anything, or said anything, it would respond “Yup.” Lance found this very cathartic, as he was able to open up to it as they attempted to make their way back to the Lion. He mused about his place on the team and whether he was worthy to be part of Voltron. Was he the fifth wheel? Or, including Allura and Coran, the seventh wheel? That’s even worse!

While all of this happened, Pidge was busy searching the Galra prison archives for any evidence of where her family were taken. She did indeed find security cam footage of her brother Matt escaping with some insurgents. Things are looking up for our friend the Green Paladin. But it began looking down once Shiro and Lance each got back to where they were going and realized they both thought they had Slav. Go figure, Lance’s wasn’t the real Slav, but was instead the warden’s pet…a Yupper, turned out. And the warden had some weird Bane-like serum in his neck that made him enormous, and much harder for our heroes to defeat.

Ultimately, Pidge was able to open the airlock, sending everything sucking out into space, and Lance remained behind at Shiro’s urging to be the sharpshooter who could take out a particular weapon. He succeeded, because he really was the sharpshooter of the group after all. In true Lance fashion, after firing and hitting his target, he turned toward the camera, gave a smile, and put his thumb and first finger under his chin, like Justin Bieber or something.

Elsewhere in the episode, Zarkon believed he was ready to be his own RoBeast. Dun dun dun!

I love episodes where only a few of the characters are on a mission. They’re so much fun, and this one had me rolling with laughter quite a bit. Slav is a very weird character but a fun addition to the roster of heroes. His “telehertz” line still has me laughing.

Share your opinion on this episode, and all of the previous episodes, in the comments below!

Images: DreamWorks/Netflix

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!