“Love Songs from Mars” is one of the show’s shorter episodes (43 minutes as opposed to the average 46-50), but it feels even shorter. Or, if not shorter, brisker — somehow “unstuck in time” to match Ray’s mental and physical distress as the death throes of a fresh, gnarly gunshot wound close in on him. Somewhere behind the fog of pain and memories, fresh and old, chaotically vying for dominance, Ray is still locked in as the kids say. “This is the same kid who used to sleep with a gun under his pillow,” says a house-arrested Bart as Ray bolts awake and holds a pistol to his father’s face. Ray has always lived in the netherworld between memory and the moment. Acting on the shadow fight-or-flight impulses erupting from an ever-present cognitive dissonance. And through it all, he still manages to solve some riddles of the case at large. Sharp guy, our Ray, and a more effective sleuth half-conscious and full of morphine than the entire DEA (except Mina, of course).

With a deceptively tight structure and a thoughtfully executed injection of surreality into the show’s otherwise economical visual sensibilities, Peter Craig, director Jonathan van Tulleken, editor Jennifer Barbot, and crew make a powerful, digestible vision quest out of Ray’s delirium. Like Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle’s heroin withdrawal sequence in French Connection II, only from deeper inside the protagonist’s afflicted mind.

“No one wants to die in custody,” Bart says calmly, earnestly regurgitating mantras from prison therapy to keep his son calm and alive. “We stay here. It’s a beautiful day. We live in the moment.” Unknowingly, he offers up the desired destination of Ray’s vision quest: a life lived well under the healing sun of the present.

As fate would have it, Bart — a.k.a. the ghost of Bart from Ray’s past — is the pole-position demon along Ray’s spiritual redemption path. The other is Marletta’s ghost, who, up until now, has only been a non-interactive black-and-white shadow of past events. But once Son Pham’s mom, Xuan, shows up to treat Ray’s fresh wound, ordering another shot of morphine and accompanying rush of pain as she puts pressure on his leg, Ray moves in and out of consciousness on a deeper, more violent level. (The recurring device of playing loud music to cover up the all-hearing ear of the DEA is a good one, particularly when James Brown shrieks along with Ray as Xuan puts pressure on his leg.)

“Fuck y’all people, man,” Ray says to all the people left alive who love him, the id of his distrust and childhood fear raging with the dying of the light. Images of distant and not-so-distant past meld together in the emotions that tether them together. A blurry Dutch-angled shot of a cross on the Wall. Xuan’s name means springtime. “That’s beautiful,” Ray says. The promise of spring and growth in the present time. A young ray looks up at a crying Mina next to him in a car. “The only real sides are the living and the dead,” Son tells Manny as they keep watch firmly among the living. The biker gang circles the house like an encroaching twister, and to make matters worse, Ray’s shoulder never healed properly, and the infection has reached his bloodstream. Getting Ray to a hospital is now their only option.

“The first wound never heals,” Ray had acknowledged as he drifted into unconsciousness. Now it’s time to open those origin-wounds and deal with them head-on. Marletta’s ghost catapults Ray back into foggy, surreal consciousness, and he bolts to his attic room, locking the door behind him. The stairs warp like a staircase from the Overlook Hotel as Marletta beckons him up to the CD player and her accompanying old mix tape. “So much top 40,” observes an annoyed Ray (Brian Tyree Henry is always good for that classic Paper Boi comedic timing, man). But a song isn’t meant to last forever. Neither are the hauntings inflicted upon us by our pasts.

“What you’re trying to keep alive is just a dream,” Marletta tells him. The parting words of this ghostly image of her have been lodged in Ray’s mind way past its welcome. By the time we get to the jump-scare shot heard downstairs and find Ray hasn’t shot himself, but the CD player’s top-40 siren, it’s clear that the Marletta part of the vision quest has been completed, the spirit put to some sense of rest.

Now comes the final stretch: the final reconciliation with the Bart of Ray’s mind and the Bart of the present. Assisted by an incredibly badass Xuan, who leads our crew into the street with an AK-47 in her hands (like she’s fired heftier weapons than this popgun before, I daresay), Bart gets Ray into his old station wagon and drives him to the hospital, their ragtag caravan an incredibly temporary salve for the gunfight to come.

The final showdown is always the toughest. “I’m sitting over here like this because of you,” exclaims Ray, refusing his father’s final gesture of love. “You killed me a thousand times already.” Our boy has let one ghost move on, but he’s still keeping tally with the other. But this isn’t a game of final tallies. Only the final shot counts. “I’m giving you my last dying breath,” his father replies.

And give Bart does, probably a lot sooner than even he expected. After a quick final shootout outside the hospital (not as bombastic as shootouts of other episodes but no less urban-Westerny in atmosphere — way to slip one in there), Ray sees his final vision of Mina — his spiritual partner on the other side of the investigation. Same path, different vantage points. “We’re not done yet,” she tells him with the force of the fates behind her.

• “Love Songs from Mars” efficiently uses Marchetti (Will Pullen) to shorthand Mina’s side of this week’s proceedings without shorthanding the thematic heft or the character’s emotional journey. With Ray’s interior trauma trip as the emotional crux for both of them, Marchetti’s POV gives us a triangulated glimpse at not only Mina’s suffering, but her laser focus on the truth (and justice) of the matter. While Nader is chasing the quickest, cleanest investigation wrap-up at the expense of any real sense of justice, Marchetti has a heart-to-heart with Mina where she confesses her daughter died from a Fentanyl overdose, caused by a boyfriend thinking he was getting Percocet. “I was a good mom,” she tells him. And he believes her. “It takes a lot to come back from something like that,” he replies, seeing the strength and clear eye her experience has given her but missing the point ever so slightly. Marin Ireland’s peerlessly authentic expression of immovable pain bridges the gap when Mina replies, “You don’t.”

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