There are many personal and political failings in the episode which will have repercussions beyond belief. The main one is Avasarala, failing her first debate against Nancy Gao, who predictably leverages her background to argue that her plan for colonization not just for the colonisers, but for the working men and women, the engineers, the masses desperately competing for a few spots that may lift them up, is the right on leading into the future. She seals the deal when Avasarala, under time pressure, decides to blow up a ship that bears the signature of the ship that Marco Inaros pirated, incidentally blowing up the women and children upon this ship (we will see who managed to pull that off). All of this, while her argument that colonization isn't safe yet becomes more and more salient back on Ilus, where Holden, after receiving news about how much alien artefacts are waking up beyond the surface, decides to try and evacuate the settlement. This is, not surprisingly, unsuccessful, since it plays right into the hands of Murtry, who wants nothing more than the settlers to leave so he can successfully claim the planet for RCE. Holden has always been bad at seeing different sides to a conflict beyond his earnestness, and his attempt now to simply tell everyone the truth and hope they will make the correct decision once they have all the information fails - because trusting a man who says he has the voice of a protomolecule emissary (who has been conspicuously MIA) in his head doesn't carry as much leverage as he would have thought. The settlers decide to stay, and take two RCE employees hostage. Murtry, furious, tells his ship up in orbit to rig a landing shuttle into a bomb, presumably to do something to the settler's vessel which is about to carry Lithium back beyond the gate.
We've just left with Marco Inaros regaining his freedom because Drummer thought it was the salient political play - to counteract this idea, Naomi tells Lucia about what kind of a man her former lover is. Lucia is battling her guilt over helping the conspirators to blow up the landing pad, which she thought would happen well ahead of the RCE landing team getting anywhere near it. She wants to die because she cannot live with the guilt (barely reacting to the news that her daughter Felcia has disappeared), so Naomi tells her how much she wanted to die after Marco manipulated her into sharing code that would manipulate drive cores, which ended up with several hundred victims. Drummer has hinted at what kind of damage this did to Naomi, and how long it has taken her to live with the guilt for something she didn't have much control over (the books are very good at detailing how manipulative and abusive Marco was to her), but that finding a new family, one she never expected, on the Rocinante, made all the difference. This storyline works well and is a change from the books, where the husband is the one who laid the charges.
