The Things in Appalachia, Episode 10¶
The finale of the arc, in which the team caught up with Jan Martense and the Spud Hut plant exploded, was played but never recorded.
| Arc | The Things in Appalachia |
| Episode | 10 (unrecorded finale) |
| Setting | The woods and mines around the Spud Hut plant, Dahlonega, Georgia |
| In-fiction date | October 1992, the same day as Appalachia 08 and 09 |
| Previous | Appalachia 09 |
| Next | Walkers 01 |
Unrecorded session
This session was played but never recorded. What happened in it is known only from what the characters and players say in the next recorded session, Walkers 01: Kurt's interrogation of Jan, the Biz's appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, and the conversation at the table around them. See lost episodes.
Where Episode 09 leaves off¶
Appalachia 09 ends with the team in the woods outside the plant, at the top of a ladder out of the mines. Huell Kendrick and Andrew Howard can no longer walk, Kurt Larson has a cracked rib and a dose of ketamine in him, and everyone is carrying gold bars. Sheriff Carter Burke and the animal handler Clive are with them. Jan Martense has driven out of the plant in a red pickup with a large animal crate, about half the gold is missing, and a crack in the air is venting gas into the tunnels. (Appalachia 09)
What later episodes establish¶
The confrontation with Jan¶
- Jan shot Andrew in the face. When Jan greets Kurt with "Kurtis, you shot me", Kurt answers, "Ah, you shot my leader in the face. Seemed only fair." Jan remarks that Andrew "recovered from that remarkably well".
- Kurt shot Jan.
- The Biz also fired on him. On Letterman he jokes about "shooting a Polish person", and Ezra spells it out at the table: "I shot a Polish man in the woods with a shotgun."
- Jan was then crushed by a falling ape-man, which broke his skull, and he almost bled to death.
- Jan had meant the team to die underground. "I mean, you were intended to die, so, you know." He is still puzzled that the ape-men did not kill them.
- Kurt assumes that Jan had already "taken care of" his mercenary in the woods, and Jan does not contradict him.
Shelly¶
Kurt questions Jan about an ape woman Jan called Shelly, describing Jan as the only person besides the handler who saw her alive "while not trying to kill you for any duration of time". The team therefore met Shelly in the finale, and she attacked them. (Walkers 01)
Jan's account of her is the origin of the ape-men. Five years earlier, driving drunk, he struck and killed a man in a black suit who was crossing a Georgia highway at night. The man carried NSA identification, and in his van was an ape woman strapped to a gurney and being fed drugs. Jan sank the body in a lake in the man's own vehicle and kept her. She was aging quickly, so he set out to breed from her; the ape-men are her sons by Jan himself, the female offspring not having lived. To Jan she "seemed like a bright chimp", unusual only for her voice mimicry. (Walkers 01)
The explosion¶
The Spud Hut facility exploded shortly after Jan fled it, on the same day as everything else. Kurt tells Jan that "some other force" filled the mines with explosive gas, probably from an adjacent cavern, and that the timing implies someone who knew the operation was ending. Jan has no idea who. Kurt does not tell him about the portal. (Walkers 01)
Aftermath¶
- Jan survived, was turned over to "the national security people" while he recovered, and is held at the CIA's Black Site Omaha, where Kurt interrogates him. He names one more person who knew about the mine: Clyde Harvard, an accountant at Spud Hut.
- Clive survived the day. Kurt credits him with getting the team through the mines and passes on that he called Jan "the best boss he ever had", up to the point Jan tried to kill him.
- Andrew spent about half as long in hospital as his doctors expected. Andre confirms that being shot in the face, juggled and slammed into cave walls all happened to him on the same day.
- Kurt saw to it that the Spud Hut counter savant got a job at the CIA "in the wake of his job disappearing".
- The Clinton surveillance scandal outlived the case. A month later the Biz goes on Letterman as "the most hated cop in America". The state police say they found his night-vision goggles in a rose bush, Polaroids of Bill Clinton taken with a Russian camera have become public, and the line the Biz is given is that "Jan Martense, the illegal gold miner for the food company" was the one surveilling Clinton.
- President George H. W. Bush calls the affair "the debacle in Georgia" and puts the scandal down to "enemy action".
Unresolved¶
No later episode says where Jan was caught, what was in the crate, or what became of the pickup and the missing gold. It is never stated whether the ape-man that fell on Jan was Shelly, or whether she survived. Sheriff Burke, the gold the team carried out, the drugged shift and the loose "rejects" are not mentioned again, and nobody says whether anyone was inside the plant when it exploded. Whoever opened the crack in the air and piped in the gas is carried forward as an unresolved mystery.
Continuity¶
- Resolves the cliffhanger of Appalachia 09 and closes the arc.
- Walkers 01 picks up a few weeks later with Andrew's meeting in the Oval Office, Kurt's interrogation of Jan and the Biz's appearance with David Letterman, before the briefing that sends the team to Utah.
- Jan's hit-and-run victim gives the NSA a second dead man in black, after Agent Murphy in The Radford Horror; Dante remarks on it during the interrogation.