A Story Within a Story
Episode 3 of Bloodride, Bad Writer, starts in the bus with our usual array of people and this time we see a woman, Olivia, typing on her laptop with blood over the keyboard. We then cut to her waking up with her boyfriend Marcus next to her. After he receives a text from her mother, she tells him that she doesn’t think his mother likes her. He reassures her and tells her she is the loveliest girl in the world. Feeling a little better, she gets ready for a writing class as her roommates act overly nice around her. She arrives outside class and meets a shy man called Alex. During the class, the lecturer asks about the worst experience of her life. She gives them advice about how to write and what to do with the characters in their stories. After this finishes, Olivia says goodbye to Alex who tells her he has written his own amateur story. Olivia returns home to hear her roommates talking about her, calling her spoiled and rude. They plan to invite her to a picnic and to kill her in the woods. She walks away shocked but as her friends notice her there, they invite her for a picnic at the weekend. She starts to feel paranoid when she sees one of them picking a knife up so she throws the contents of the boiled kettle on them before running out of the house. Her boyfriend catches up with her in the street and as he grabs Olivia, she gets scared and stabs him in the face with her keys. She runs off and as she waves to a car for help, she ends up in Alex’s car. After telling him she just stabbed her boyfriend, he takes her to the police station. While she waits in the station, she sees her three roommates arriving with a knife. This inevitably causes her to run away and fall, just as we see that Alex is typing on his laptop at the same time. In her bag, Olivia finds some of Alex’s manuscripts she took by accident and as she reads them, she realises that what he’s writing is coming true. As she starts writing about him, she sees that it is also coming true and decides to turn his laptop into a monster which bites his fingers off. She heads to confront him when she realises that she is a character that he made up. He then explains that he started it as a fantasy but was planning to end it well. She suggests going to a sushi bar to write the story from the beginning again. He explains that his wife is the lecturer and he wanted to learn something. Suddenly she notices that one of the samurai swords on display is missing and, realizing that someone must be writing about them, she turns around and sees Marcus with the sword. He first kills Alex then as he looks at his mother, who turns out to be the lecturer, she tells him to also kill Olivia. We then cut to a woman called Annelisse writing the story that has just unfolded while her husband looks after the barbecue. Both look like the lecturer and Alex. Their son Marcus arrive with the real Olivia who hugs her mother-in-law. Annelisse returns the hug but stabs her with the barbecue fork. This leaves everyone shocked but Annelisse tells them she can delete it. She goes to her computer and frantically tries to delete what she just wrote as the episode ends with the sound of sirens in the distance. Bad Writer starts off simpl enough as we follow our main character’s life, which seems to be perfect. The episode soon starts to uncover some dark truths behind it before delivering the final twist that someone has created her and is controlling her life. Just as we think we have seen the big reveal, Bad Writer delivers one final blow when we see that Olivia is indeed real but her mother-in-law has become so consumed with her hatred, she imagines that she can actually make what she writes come true. Bad Writer gives us a twist within a twist, which was quite the clever end to another decent episode of Bloodride. So far the anthology series has been really thrilling but quite what the rest of the series has in store for us, remains to be seen.
