Recap Episode

Story so far

The chapter opens with Carl and Princess Donut waking in time to watch the Recap Episode, and within a minute he wishes he had stayed asleep. It opens with Vrah and four other mantis creatures dropping onto a wooded trail, beheading a cartload of crawlers, looting the bodies while a rapid-fire loot list scrolls, and mounting the two human heads on her carapace. The first act is otherwise crawlers being mauled by jungle wildlife, including one who bends to pick a mushroom and is skewered through the eye by a spike that erupts from the fungus — a skewer belle, Mordecai notes, which he would like collected, by the stem only.

It then runs a much abridged version of Carl's dinosaur encounter from the night before, reduced to a few majestically slow-motion shots of Mongo getting lucky, before the screen goes black for a few minutes and moves on. Lucia Mar kills a stegosaur borough boss with a reflected blow and eats its eye on camera. Elle, Katia, Bautista, Florin and others raid a druid town hunting Eva, with Louis and Firas directing from above and Imani — now flying, wings solid, fire trailing, skull paint glowing — counterspelling the glamor Eva left behind.

As an information channel it is indispensable and cruel in equal measure: it is how Carl learns what the hunters are doing, how strong Lucia Mar has become, that Eva cannot be magically tracked, and that his friends have learned to fight without him. It is also how the galaxy learns that his dinosaur fight was not worth showing in full.

Appearance

A broadcast filling the Personal Space — cut fast, scored for spectacle, with loot lists and slow motion and a few minutes of black screen where the edit gives up.

Role

The production's periodic highlight show, and the only window crawlers have onto the rest of the floor.

Relationships