Episode Recap: The Chopsocky Special

So after the weirdness at Red River, Arthur and Grace are headed out of town. They’ve killed that cop with no eyes, and there seems to be a lot more focus on this mysterious journal that Arthur’s been carrying around. Questions abound: Where did he get it? Who wrote it? What’s the deal? But our heroes have a lot on their plate. Arthur’s been shot, and Julian Slink has messed with their GPS coordinates to send them right next to the Scar. Grace guns that car right into a vast white desert. And the only place around to help is a Chinese restaurant.

 

Grace struggles to get Arthur inside and once she does, they meet an elderly Asian woman, the restaurant manager, who demands they order something before she agrees to help. Arthur is force-fed some of her soup. And something major happens. It makes him either hallucinate or end up in another dimension, but either way, he sees a dead version of himself and is invited into a Blood Drive- esque wonderland by a version of Aki.

 

This is when Grace realizes that everyone in the restaurant has spooky eyes that are all white. Including Arthur. She fights the owner of the restaurant who convinces her to just be patient. Mostly by tying her up. Things get super weird for Arthur on his trip through Aki's nightmare world.

 

First, he stops off in a nightmare sitcom that finds him married to Grace, and they have a child that they have to feed to the garbage disposal. Turns out the whole house runs on blood.

 

This fantasy is quickly broken by his need to escape from that cop with no eyes, who arrives on horseback, guns a-blazing. Aki leads Arthur into what feels like a memory: that hallway from that asylum episode. Arthur keeps seeing the number 1031 everywhere. Aki tells him that something in these memories is the key to getting him out of this nightmare. They finally end up in a version of Pixie Swallow. Remember that place? Where people ate other people? He goes in to find all the Blood Drivers in a DaVinci tableau of the Last Supper. From there, he bumps into a nightmare version of both Christopher and Julian Slink, who want to remove and eat some of his organs. All this time, some spooky horseman has been chasing everyone through Arthur's journey and that scares off Slink and Christopher long enough for Arthur to escape. (Also Christopher was super occupied with eating his own arm for some reason.)

 

All of this is, of course, mirroring what Grace and the restaurant manager have been doing for Arthur: removing the bullet from his torso. Then Grace realizes that she's also on a journey of her own - the manager has a photo of her sister Karma! What's going on?

 

The spooky horseman turns out to be the guy with no eyes in Arthur’s vision. He and Arthur face off OK Corral style, but ultimately Arthur ends up crucified on a cross and remembers a flashback that explains where that notebook came from. See, before he was a cop, Arthur was a thief and while stealing some supplies, he was interrupted by a Contracrime officer. The two had a quick firefight where the cop calls him a "demo" and seems to suggest that Arthur's a robot (?!?!) but finally decided that Arthur is human, and then relents and lets Arthur go. Only problem is, the cop turns out to have been hit by a bullet. As he lay dying, the cop tells Arthur that if he wants to make it right, he should take the book he's holding! Arthur's going to carry on the work of The Cop. Now it makes sense --somewhat.

 

Arthur realizes that the Sheriff that's been chasing him around is actually the cop from his flashback. In order to keep going, he kills himself in the hallucination, and as his blood pressure starts dropping in real (??) life, Grace leaps into action. Arthur needs blood to live and so Grace hooks herself up to him directly. When she wakes up and realizes that Arthur is gone, she heads out of the restaurant, where she finds herself alone, in the desert, with just her car and a fortune cookie that has the same number Arthur’s been seeing throughout his journey: 1031.