HONESTY TIME: If you pay attention you might have noticed that it’s not currently Saturday. That’s because I forgot to post my recap on Saturday. It’s Sunday right now– or at least it’s Sunday if you’re reading this on the day it posted. You have a 1/7 chance of it being Sunday otherwise, I suppose.
How did I forget to post my recap on Saturday? Drugs! I’m on them. This is actually the second time I’ve had to write a recap while on mind-bending (disappointingly, legal) drugs. The first time, it was Vicodin. This time, it’s a little thing called Lexapro, proscribed as an anti-anxiety drug. Basically all it does is make me sleepy and really, really unlikely to, like, do stuff. There’s really no way I’d have just forgotten something like this otherwise. But, yeah: Luther’s doing another drug recap, guys! (Hilariously, the previous episode was called “Forget.”)
Oh, right, also: There’s been, like, all kinds of family stuff going on today and I haven’t had time to rewatch the episode like I usually do. It’s possible that this will be at least partially made up. And it’s totally gonna be completely out of order. Consider this less a recap and more of a disjointed set of recollections, much like the entire last week of my life.
Let’s start with the hospital people, it’s easier. Griselda? Dead, because they had to cut her foot off but she went septic anyway, which doesn’t really surprise anyone. Turns out that Doctor Whatshername is already fully aware of the rules of the game, those being: 1) Everybody turns, 2) headshots, 3) Bites are gonna ruin your day. We see one soldier being triaged into the cow-hammer line and Eliza actually puts a… bullet? Slug? Cow-killing pneumatic thing into Griselda’s brain after she dies, which makes a smaller hole than you might think it would. Eliza also finds out that everybody’s bugging out in the near future, and makes a deal to bring Chris and Travis with her. Chris and Travis aren’t there at the time, though, and we all know how these deals go.
(My wife insists that this conversation did not happen during this episode. She was there with me while I was watching. Entirely possible that I made the whole damn thing up. I dunno.)
Meanwhile, there’s this guy:
I don’t remember his name, so I’ll call him… hmm… Faustus seems appropriate. He’s in Troublemaker Jail with Nick and the really sad guy from last episode who we all assumed was dead but it turns out he isn’t. When we first see him, he’s ruining Sad Guy’s day by assuring him that his wife will be just fine after he dies, because she’s hot and she’ll surely glom onto some dude who will protect her so that he can use her body. For, one presumes, sex. So he’s saying she’ll be Lori, basically. Sad Guy bursts into tears and the guards haul him off somewhere. Then he bribes them not to take Nick away (why are they taking people away? Where are they going? How does Troublemaker Jail work?) for some reason and explains to Nick that he’ll need him for his particular skills as a heroin addict. Which include lying, stealing, and basically doing whatever one can for heroin. Also probably being hard to fight. Faustus is kinda cool but I can’t figure out what the hell he’s doing there and he’s black so they’ll probably kill him next week anyway. Also unclear: whether Troublemaker Jail is connected to the hospital or not.
Alicia and Chris break into a house, trash it, and spend the episode playing dress-up. Yeah, that really happens. They’re all disaffected and teenagery. There’s a couple of moments of weird sexual tension, like, eew, your parents boink and you don’t get to, but it goes away. They are rather definitively Not in the House, but no one notices. Seriously, no one ever pays attention to Alicia.
Travis tries to get taken to the hospital, gets crammed into a Humvee with about a half-dozen soldiers, doesn’t shoot this zombie in the head because he doesn’t wanna, and then the soldiers rush off into a building to get into a fight and it’s really heavily implied that they frag Captain Butthead from last episode. Anyway, the survivors pile back into the Humvee, tell Travis they ain’t taking him nowhere, and drop him off. He shows up in the next few scenes I’m going to tell you about but hell if I can remember what he did. Probably something wimpy.
Everybody else gets the cool part. Remember Ofelia’s boyfriend from last episode? She starts by throwing a bunch of bottles at the soldiers and screaming about her mother, which leads him to tell them that he’ll take her home. Next thing we know her boyfriend is duct-taped to a chair in a neighbor’s house (I ask again: how many neighbors do these people have?) and Daniel’s taking his shirt off. This isn’t gonna go well.
I can’t quite figure Ofelia out, guys. She’s basically all oh, so long as you don’t hurt him, Daddy, and Mercedes Mason is 23 but the character sometimes looks like she’s 40 and I really can’t figure out either how old she’s supposed to be or how naive she’s supposed to be. But… dude, you were okay with the taped-to-the-chair part? How did he get taped to the chair? Did Daniel knock him out or something? We don’t see that part and I have no idea how it happened and I’m really not sure how much Ofelia is supposed to know.
I do know that when she comes back later and Daniel has basically skinned part of soldier boy’s arm, she’s not super happy and kinda runs away screaming:
That looks a lot like a bite, by the way. Good luck convincing anyone it isn’t.
Daniel gets a lot of speechifying this episode, but here’s the gist: All of his stories about El Salvador were true, only he wasn’t entirely honest on which side he was on, and it turns out– oops!– he’s a war criminal. I’m trying really hard not to use the word badass to describe him at any point during this piece, because, again, war criminal. War criminal is bad. But yeah: Daniel’s a torturer. Griselda makes it real clear that she knew before she dies, and I still can’t quite put together what Ofelia knows.
Maddie shows up partway through too. She’s cool with it.
Basically he wants to know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on: the soldiers are leaving. It’s called Operation Cobalt. Everyone at the hospital and in Troublemaker Jail is gonna be “humanely terminated.” Oh, and apparently they abandoned a couple thousand people in an arena nearby and just sorta locked the doors and left.
And guess where Daniel’s standing in the morning?
Yeah.
Is it next Sunday yet? Wait, no, that’s next week. Is it Sunday yet? Yes, it is. Go watch the finale tonight, is what I’m saying.
