Dhruv Sharma
Episode one, titled “Ultimate Sacrifice” seems to have a lot of similarities with one of King’s best works, “Pet Sematary”, and that’s probably the reason why it’s one of the best episodes of the series. It portrays how far we’re all willing to go just to fulfill our own sense of greed. If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to Netflix right away and if you have, read on further. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Bloodride Episode 1 Recap
Well-adjusted to city life, Molly and her family move to the countryside to further downsize their living standards. They do this to get through a financial crisis and hope they’ll be able to move back to the city soon. As soon as they reach their new home, Molly starts protesting that it’s not good enough while her daughter and husband quickly adapt to their new lifestyle. Soon their neighbors sneak in on them and begin to act extra friendly. They even seem to have a weird attachment to their pet cat and offer Molly’s family all the help they need.
While Molly is instantly creeped out by their neighbors’ acts of kindness, her husband and daughter just dismiss it by assuming that they’re “nice people.” To their surprise, the next day, the entire neighborhood shows up at their place to help and they even organize a whole barbeque for them. Strangely, everyone in the neighborhood seems to be freakishly happy and they all have pets. Molly again finds all of this really weird and she even complains about it. But her husband and daughter, Katja, ignore her again.
While sneaking on one of her neighbors one day, Molly follows them into the woods and discovers that they perform some sort of a sacrificial ritual on their pets by killing them on a sacred rock. When she asks them about it, they tell her that there is something supernatural about the rock in the woods and it was earlier used by Vikings for making sacrifices and anyone who kills a living creature on that rock is blessed with fortune. To test this out, Molly first kills a rat there. She then purchases a lottery ticket and ends up winning a little amount of money. She later discovers that in order to win more, the stakes of her sacrifices will have to be much higher.
Driven by greed, she takes her pet dog to the woods and although a little reluctant about it, she stabs him with a knife. After this, she purchases a lottery ticket and heads back home. While here husband and daughter head to look for the dog, she frantically waits for the lottery company to announce her as the winner. Unfortunately, she misses the lottery by a narrow margin and this makes her realize that she never really loved that dog. In the final moments of the episode, it seems like she’s guilty of what she has done as she takes her husband to the woods to tell him all about the rock.
Bloodride Episode 1 Ending: “Greed is a Bottomless Pit”
Molly takes her husband to the woods and tells him all about the ritual that is being performed on the rock. She then reveals it to him that she killed their dog there, but before he can react to it, she tells him that she loves him and pushes him onto the rock. With this, she almost kills him to make a bigger sacrifice but that’s where the twist comes in. Her daughter ends up following her to the woods and before Molly can kill her husband, her daughter stops her. Driven by her greed Molly proceeds to kill her daughter, Katja, as well but that’s when Katja smashes her head with a rock.
The closing scene shows a man and woman in a corporate office, talking about a woman who ended up winning 5 million dollars as a lottery. Adding to this, they even claim that her mother first mysteriously disappeared and then a few years later even her father went missing. Turns out that Katja killed both of her parents to fulfill her own greed and is now extremely rich. And of course, she has no intention of stopping now.
Earlier in the episode, this ending was mildly foreshadowed. There is a scene where one of the women from their town mentions that human sacrifices have bigger stakes and that’s why their reward is also greater. There are also several other scenes where the people of the town keep warning Molly and ask her to be careful with the rock. This probably suggests that it wasn’t just Molly’s greed that was driving her but it was the curse of the rock.
If you think about it, everyone in the town seemed to be really twisted and all of them were probably cursed by the Viking stone. Almost like the tribal burial ground in ‘Pet Sematary’, one you end up coming in contact with the cursed land, there is no escape. Molly seemed like a nice daughter in the beginning but after she accidentally killed her mother on the rock, she, too, became a victim of its curse. And in case you were wondering, certain archaeological findings do suggest that Vikings actually performed human sacrifices as an offering to gods.
The Intro, Explained
Before every episode of the show begins, we see a man walking inside an empty bus. He then adjusts his rearview mirror and people mysteriously appear in the seats of the bus. While the show never really explains the meaning of this common thread that binds all the episodes together, if we go by the themes of each episode, all of them seem to have something to do with the seven cardinal sins. The bus in itself is probably a metaphor for the seven deadly sins and the driver of the bus is the grim reaper who is taking all the passengers to hell. And as you might have already figured out, the first episode represents the vice of “greed.”
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