Dhruv Sharma
The third installment of the season, “Bad Writer”, is easily the most twisted episode. With a stylish direction, it slowly lulls you in into a false sense of security only to take it away in the next scene. While doing this, it keeps you at the edge of your seat, making you wonder what could happen next. Although it’s very well-written, it’s a little hard to wrap your head around this one. So read on further to get a better understanding of how everything unfolds in the third episode.
Bloodride Episode 3 Recap
“Bad Writer” begins with the introduction of a young girl named Olivia who seems to have everything. A perfect boyfriend. Perfect roommates. And most of all, a whole lot of money. Aspiring to be a writer, she enrolls herself into a writing class where a middle-aged man enviously looks at her and keeps questioning her about her privileged lifestyle. The writing class is conducted by a seemingly renowned author who teaches them the basics of character development in stories. She explains it to them that a story is all about creating a character who first hits rock bottom and then rises up again. Olivia takes notes of this while the middle-aged man, Alex, just stares at her.
After this class, as soon as Olivia goes back to her apartment, she finds her roommates talking all about her. They criticize her by calling her spoilt brat and even claim that if they could, they would certainly kill her. This conversation escalates further and they finally conclude they should really kill her. With clear motives, they come out of the room, but before they can do anything, Olivia spills hot coffee on them and runs out of there. Right outside the house, she meets her boyfriend who tries to force her to go back in. In the heat of the moment, she stabs his face with her car keys but he still shows no signs of pain and claims that his mother was right about her.
With her perfect world suddenly falling apart, Olivia suddenly runs into Alex who offers her a ride to the police station. While leaving his car, she accidentally picks up some papers of the book that he’s currently writing. Soon after this, with her situation not getting any better, she ends up reading the papers that she had picked up from Alex’s car and that’s when it hits her. Turns out that she is simply a character in Alex’s story and all this while, he has been determining everything that is going on her life. With this, she pulls out her own laptop and starts writing a story with Alex as a character in her. To her surprise, Alex enacts everything she writes.
So to finally bring an end to all of this, she writes “Alex’s hand gets bitten by a monster in his laptop.” As expected, that’s exactly what happens. She and Alex then call a truce and decide to end this game. By writing on her laptop, she even restores Alex’s hand and they head to a restaurant. But even at the restaurant, strange unexplainable events begin to unfold and Alex swears that he isn’t doing anything. In the end, Olivia’s boyfriend approaches them with a katana in his hand and kills both of them.
Bloodride Episode 3 Ending: “Envy Eats Itself”
Just when you believe that the episode has ended, it moves another scene where a writer types away on her computer. When her identity is revealed, it turns out that she’s has been the narrator of the story all along. Soon it becomes obvious that Olivia and Alex are both just her characters and everything that happened in the episode previously was nothing but a part of her story. Alex from the story is her husband, Olivia is her son’s girlfriend, and Olivia’s boyfriend from the story is her son. Soon after this, her son shows up there while her husband prepares a barbeque. This is when something gets inside her and she stabs his son’s girlfriend with a skewer.
She then heads to her laptop and frantically presses backspace, claiming that she can delete all of this. The ending shows how she got extremely invested in the story that she was writing and ended up mistaking it with her reality. The writing instructor gets so consumed by her own hate and envy towards Olivia that she crafts a story where Olivia’s perfect world comes crashing down. But while she’s at it, she completely loses herself in this fantastical tale that she’s brewing and gives up on her own sense of reality.
After understanding the ending, if you look at the episode again, you’ll realize that the first half of the episode, in which Olivia’s life seems perfect, has these surreal visuals that portray how all of its straight out of a story. Also, the scene where Olivia’s boyfriend says that his mother was right about her, perfectly comes in tandem with the ending. The part where Olivia’s friend talk about her behind her back and claim that she does not pay rent probably shows how the writer of the story hates it when Olivia visits their home.
The Intro, Explained
As you might have realized, the theme of this episode is “envy” which, as discussed earlier, is another one of the seven cardinal sins. This also aligns with the “wrap-around” of the anthology that shows all the main characters of the series traveling in a bus, which is seemingly being driven by the grim reaper.
Read More: Bloodride Episode 2 Recap
