Episode #22

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

That’s a line from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and it’s one that Doc is surely on a handshake basis with, or would at least nod kinda knowingly to before returning to his cloud of Asian indica. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” as Bigfoot Bjornsen says…but what if…what if even that was one of the certainties that the Golden Fang could take from us? Who could you turn to? Who else could Doc take this to, besides our old flat-topped pal?

As Chandler wrote in The Long Goodbye, “I never saw any of them again — except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”