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Things are getting sexy on White Lines.

I mean, you kinda knew they had to at some point, right? You don’t throw actors who look like Laura Haddock and Nuno Lopes together on a bunch of zany drug-running nightclubbing adventures and decide to throw a bucket of cold water on their chemistry. Sure enough, when their characters Zoe and Boxer have a long romantic night together—dancing, drinking, cooking, eating, watching Breathless—they finally (finally? it’s only been like two days since they met! anyway) get it on.

The funny thing is the way in which this information, which I think you’ll agree is pretty vital, gets doled out to the audience. Remember that last episode ended with Zoe ghosting Boxer while he was in another room of his apartment. This episode begins the next morning, with Zoe showing up at her dad’s camper to ask to be taken in. Seems like a pretty straight line from point A to point B, no?

No! Utilizing a curious one-step-forward, two-steps-back rhythm, the show only reveals to us that Zoe and Boxer slept together in dialogue, when Zoe meets up with her new friend Kika to console her about her father’s car accident, which has left him paralyzed from the waist down. We don’t actually see the pair get together until much later in the episode, in a series of gorgeously lit cobalt-blue scenes of dancing and fucking.

It’s such an unusual decision that it’s made me prick up my ears on several occasions, not quite sure if what I’m hearing is new news. For example, at the end of the episode, Zoe tells her dad off, insisting that she be left alone on Ibiza to find herself. (She withdrew into a suicidal shell following Axel’s disappearance not due to the disappearance itself, but because her temperamental father issued the same ban on talking about it that he’d apparently done earlier regarding the death of Zoe’s mom when Zoe was little. It’s like living frozen in amber.) As her dad drives away, he fields a phone call from a cop friend on the island, who asks in passing if the Calafat family has threatened them again. Yes, “again,” as in it happened before. When? Twenty years ago, or twenty hours ago? Did I blink and miss it, or is it being hidden from view?

It should be noted that Zoe and Boxer aren’t the only couple doing something they perhaps shouldn’t. (Zoe’s married with a daughter, after all.) Former couple Anna and Marcus also get frisky, thanks in part to Anna reminiscing about getting caught having sex as kids by Zoe. Her subsequent boast that she and Marcus came together every time is enough to rev the wounded DJ’s engine, damn the broken tibias, full speed ahead. “Crying and being turned on don’t usually come together,” Anna protests when Marcus tells her how the conversation was simultaneously melancholy and arousing. “I know,” he admits, “but when they do? It’s fucking amazing.” Yowza!

On the flip side, Conchita—who we learn had a parallel relationship going with Axel the whole time he was dating her daughter Kika—crawls into bed with her husband Andreu, and reminisces about all the little things they used to do together. What happened to the couple who shared songs and movies, who laughed at each other’s childhood photos, who asked each other questions about life? Kudos to writer/showrunner Alex Pina for summing up the conversational life of a healthy couple in just a few short lines like that. It makes it clear how easy it is to let all that slip away.

It’s funny: I feel like I’m writing myself into liking this episode more than I thought I did at first. Perhaps it’s just that it takes a while to get going, thanks in part to that hiccuppy storytelling rhythm I mentioned earlier. Perhaps it’s because Zoe begins the episode saying stuff like “I don’t know who I am on this island,” which have the ring of cliché to them—such a far cry from the very specific and keenly observed descriptions of love and sex that follow later on.

I’ll also admit that a part of me wishes the show would try a little harder with its music cues. We’ve now heard the Happy Mondays’ “Hallelujah” twice, for example, and the episode lets M83’s epic “Outro” do a lot of heavy lifting at the end, when Zoe goes for a life-affirming skinny dip and Boxer and the Calafats gather around Andreu’s hospital bed.

But then Boxer leaves a voicemail for Zoe, talking about how much he liked feeling her warm skin against his back as they slept and ending with an almost childlike “I like how you kiss” and I’m pulled right back in. I have no idea who killed Axel Collins, and given how strenuously all the Calafats have denied involvement I’m not sure we’ve been given very many clues, even. But halfway through the season, I’m looking forward to following the rest of the investigation.