Skip to content

The Things in Appalachia, Episode 05

The fifth session of the arc was played but never recorded; it covered the evening and night after the team left Auraria, and its events are known only from what later episodes say on the recording.
Arc The Things in Appalachia
Episode 05 (unrecorded)
Setting Dahlonega, Georgia
In-fiction date The evening and night of Thursday, October 7, 1992, between the end of Appalachia 04 and the morning that opens Appalachia 06
Previous Appalachia 04
Next Appalachia 06

Unrecorded session

This session was played but never recorded. Nothing on this page was heard directly; every statement below comes from a later episode and is cited to it. See lost episodes.

What later episodes establish

Appalachia 04 ends at dinner time, with the team leaving Auraria and planning one more meal at the Spud Hut. The recording of Appalachia 06 begins partway through Andre's recap of this session and then opens on the following morning at the Smith Hotel. (Appalachia 04, Appalachia 06)

The Biz's night

The Biz had a storyline of his own that night, which Andre calls "your nonsense" and Ezra calls "my thing". Andre recaps the only parts the other characters saw: when Huell Kendrick woke in the morning the Biz wandered in wearing slept-in clothes, not having slept in the room; the door of the hotel room next to theirs, room 111, had been broken down; and the Biz had a badly twisted ankle. Ezra, in character, insists that everything was normal. (Appalachia 06)

The cold open of Appalachia 06 shows the aftermath: state police have taped off the bushes outside the hotel, and one of them pulls out a night-vision headset and has it bagged for "the Secret Service fellows". Later the same day Ezra asks Andre, "Did I ever retrieve the thing?", is told he did not, and the two settle the rest privately. After a day of hiking, the Biz's ankle has swollen up badly by evening. (Appalachia 06)

Later episodes fill in what the police think happened. In Appalachia 07 the state police call a press conference about Bill Clinton, whom nobody in town knew was in Dahlonega. In Appalachia 08 the players sum up the story so far: surveillance equipment found in a bush is believed to have been used to spy on Clinton, and the police have fingerprints. In Appalachia 09 the Biz complains that he cannot find his night-vision goggles. See Clinton surveillance scandal. (Appalachia 07, Appalachia 08, Appalachia 09)

The Spud Hut auditor

By Appalachia 06 the team has met a financial auditor from Spud Hut corporate. Kurt Larson calls him "the Spud Hut guy that came to interview us" and "the one that was following us", and has a number to reach him on. When the auditor balks at being shown a photograph of a corpse, the Biz reminds him, "Look, you wanted to help the FBI." He does not appear in Appalachia 04, so the meeting took place in this session. (Appalachia 06)

Frotter's bear

Frotter Comstock asked the agents to come and shoot a bear on his property, and they would not. He opens the next morning by declaring his "disappointment that y'all wouldn't come down and shoot that bear for me", and at his homestead he points out "the bear incident": a large streak of gore on the ground beside one of his shacks. (Appalachia 06)

The hybrid

In Appalachia 04 Donald McManley has only just been handed the blood from the mineshaft and is still proposing a large man on drugs. In Appalachia 06 Kurt wants the gore at Frotter's compared with "the human hybrid tissue" and asks for another blood sample to be cross-checked "against the ape-man", and nobody at the table questions either phrase. McManley's finding that the mineshaft creature is part human was therefore delivered in this session. See Ape-Men. (Appalachia 04, Appalachia 06)

Left unanswered

The recorded episodes never return to several things that Appalachia 04 set up for this evening:

  • Whether the team ate at the Spud Hut again or tested the Covenant's river.
  • Whether anyone attended Jeremy's baptism, and what became of him.
  • Whether Elijah Ray was ever met.
  • Who the suited man and the forest ranger in the hotel parking lot were.
  • What came of the eviction letters from Jackson and Lee's, and of Kurt's promised follow-ups with the state police.
  • Exactly what the Biz did during the night, which was played privately between Andre and Ezra.

Continuity