While Norma spends the episode dealing with the day-to-day while having more and more bizarre roadblocks thrown in her face -- murder evidence discovered in her home, Norman having random violent blackouts, possible sex slavers trading sex for paternalistic offers of help -- everybody else is feeling pretty okay. Dylan's got a job guarding the marijuana fields, which indirectly causes a fairly touching welling-up about how twisted his little brother's gotten. In fact the only person not in a fairly great mood this week is Norman himself.

One concerned touch from Miss Watson and Norman abruptly blacks out, mashing her odd cuteness and his weird sex torture comic together into a full-on seizure that lands him in the hospital. Norma's very careful to make sure everybody knows he's not constantly doing this and going into murderous fugue states, so that's not suspicious at all, and in the course of the day she also learns that Keith Summers's toolbelt/raping kit -- squirreled away by Norman in a moment of anticipatory creepiness -- was discovered during a warranted search, and then kept secret by Deputy Shelby.

So that's good, then, right? I dunno. Although Norma was clearly planning on sleeping with him anyway, Norman does have a point about the leverage this now gives the good Deputy over them both -- not a thing I can see Norma Bates suffering for long -- and you can see his weird little gears turning: If Norma sleeps with Shelby because of the belt, then he has engineered his own romantic demise, because either she's whoring herself out for him, or she isn't, but either way he's no longer the man in her life. It's pretty sad...

But then immediately pretty awesome, as a ghostly Norma appears to him in his bedroom, compares this situation to whatever hold Norman's father had on them before he died under those ever less mysterious circumstances, reminds Norman that everything is his fault, and then sends him to the Deputy's house to steal the toolbelt back. The house becomes stranger and stranger as Norman investigates, and in the episode's last moments -- as Shelby's arriving home -- Norman discovers that fluorescent-light heroin chick from the end of the pilot, chained up in ol' Shelby's basement for the purposes of sex slavery.

So while he begins the episode crushin' on Bradley and ignoring -- and then openly abusing -- the ever-lovely Emma Decody, by the end of the hour she's got him convinced enough that you knew what he'd probably be walking into/imagining at Shelby's house. But the really lovely twist here is how honest, as usual, Emma Decody is: She chose him because he's a weirdo and she's lonely, she felt perfectly fine pimping out these imaginary dead girls for his company until they turned out to be real, at which point she kind of unspooled -- and she's pretty clearly in no denial about exactly why young dead girls fascinate her so much. She doesn't hold a grudge about Norman's stressed-out bitchiness (which is a thing to behold), but it seems she'll be taking less cues from his direction now that she knows just how prissy His Highness can get.

Next Week: Nobody believes Norman about the sex slave in his mom's new boyfriend's basement -- except, it looks like, possibly Dylan, who seems likely at this point to either be turned into a man by this show or brutally murdered or, you know, both. Knowing Norma knows a lot more about Norman's 99 psychological problems than she lets on -- and that sometimes he'll just go ahead and hallucinate conversations for himself -- really moves the titular question to the forefront, without taking away anything from the deliberate way it's exploring the many other problems of the many other people on the show who are not Norman but for all we know are worse off than Norman.