While Henry and Alec wait for a flight home, Henry tells the story of his older brother, Bill, a renowned horse trainer tamer.

This book picks up pretty soon after the last, with Henry and Alec sitting and waiting for a flight home from Lisbon after racing for a while in Europe (after their insanity in…wherever it was Black Stallion Mystery was supposed to take place). To pass the time, Henry starts telling Alec about his oldest brother Bill (apparently there were five kids and Henry was the youngest). Bill was a horse tamer, and Alec assumes that means trainer and Henry says THEY ARE VERY DIFFERENT but doesn’t really explain how?

Anyway, here’s how Henry describes the Dark Ages sixty years ago:

“Most everybody had a horse, y’know. It was about the only way of gettin’ from place to place. Yet few owners knew anything about horses except how to ride or drive ’em. When trouble arose, it was hard on both man and horse. That’s when they started lookin’ around for a horse-tamer.”

The entire narrative of this book is predicated on the idea that in Ye Olden Times (1880ish, based on context clues later), people were REALLY DUMB. Like, I will accept that a casual rider who sits on a horse in a lesson once a week might not have the tools to cope with a tricky horse, but surely someone who handled horses every single day and depended on them for livelihood would know…something? NOPE. Not according to Henry!

Anyway, we open on Henry – called Hank for some reason – as a young kid, apprenticed to his brother Bill, who is a carriage maker. The two are delivering a fancy carriage to its buyer, and Bill is driving his mare without a bridle. Cute gimmick, but as Henry Hank keeps pointing out, maybe not while they’re transporting really expensive merchandise?

Predictably, the mare bolts when she hears the sound of a whip, and smashes the carriage. They’re fine, though, and go to investigate the sounds. A guy named Finn Caspersen, a peddler, is whipping his horse because he says the gelding either balks or bolts constantly.

Bill offers to take the gelding and trade it for another horse, train the gelding in the meantime, and then give Finn back his gelding. Just because. Bill has absolutely no business sense, which you’d think would cause problems except the book would like you to know that having no business sense is the PURE AND RIGHTEOUS path.

Bill is full of information about what other horse trainers might have done with the gelding, like this doozy:

“Some horsemen say,” he told Hank, “that the best remedy for a balker like this colt is to take osselets, or small bones, from his legs, dry and grate them fine, then blow a thimbleful into his nostrils.”

WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK. No really, WHAT THE FUCK. Perform surgery, grind up the bones, blow them into his nose, and startle him into moving him? WHAAAAAT.

I wish I could tell you that is the least questionable training practice in this book but JUST YOU WAIT.

Finn is amazed at how Bill cures his gelding (let’s be clear, he coaxes the horse forward, rewards him for going forward, and then does a little bit of work to figure out the horse doesn’t like the noises from the peddler’s wagon, so he uses some very basic positive reinforcement to get him over that, it’s not goddamn rocket science) and decides to have Bill try his luck with a mare named Wild Bess – oh, and he sells tickets to it.

Bill doesn’t like the idea of performing, but Finn tells him that it will be an opportunity to teach people how to handle horses, and Bill is all over it, because he is nothing if not a condescending ass. He has a System, you see, and he firmly believes that if everyone just knew his System, all horses would be better off. (Please note, he never actually does explain the System.)

So, Wild Bess.

He was anxious to see Wild Bess for he had learned to associated a horse’s disposition and character with its color, eyes, ears, and contours.

sigh.

Her medium size told him she’d be wonderfully quick, and by the shape of her head he knew she’d make few mistakes in the coming struggle.

siiiiiiiiiigh.

Anyway. Wild Bess is a biter and kind of a nasty piece of work, and here’s how he cures her.

1. He puts a sort of war bridle/rope halter on her.
2. He grabs her tail.
3. They spin in circles until she’s exhausted and dizzy.
4. He switches sides and spins her the other way.
5. She’s cured!

No, really. She gets dizzy and that’s it. The idea, I think, is that she’s been allowed to take liberties and all it took was one man to tell her firmly NO and tell her she was not allowed, and…that fixed it?

What’s bizarre about this book is that there is genuinely some great advice amidst the insanity!

“You give this kind of mare an inch an’ she’ll walk away with you. But she’ll respond quickly to kindness. So love her love her lots.”

…”Too many bad horses are the result of bad management. Jus’ like Wild bess was. More owners than horses need training.”

SEE?

Bill, Finn, and Hank go on the road with a traveling horse-breaking show. The next horse they cure is a stallion named Thunder and Bill rigs up a rope around him and then proceeds to simply throw him to the ground for some horrifying length of time.

Bill lost track of how many times he threw Thunder before the horse finally lay quiet with the cord slack.

Not laid down, like The Horse Whisperer, but violently thrown to the ground, over and over and over. So much for love.

Here’s my poor snapshot of the illustration that’s included in the book.

low-quality picture of high-quality insanity

Anyway, on with the show!

People start thinking Bill has some kind of magic trick, so Finn says okay, let’s give them magic! They find some old recipes for horse remedies and Finn thinks they should just sell them, because that would be way easier and more profitable than actually explaining the System. Bill is not a fan.

Basically the book goes from horse to horse that Bill fixes. Next up is Tar Heel, a black stallion (HMMMM).

But his eyes gave him away. They were snakelike. His forehead, too, was a little too low. Bill would have known without being told that here was a horse who would look pleasantly at a man one minute and strike the next.

Bill ties his war bridle to Tar Heel’s tail and then sits back. CURED!

The show travels on. They do better and better. There are newspaper articles saying how Bill keeps fixing bad horses in a matter of minutes, right on stage.

Finn gets big ideas, and pitches Bill on how they can do even better, maybe if they got a nasty-looking horse and Bill just re-tamed him night after night? Oooh, or maybe they could tame a wild zebra? And don’t forget selling those elixirs!

How Finn was ever successful as a peddler is beyond me, because he reads Bill so, so, so poorly. Bill gets furious and kicks Finn out of the business. Finn then turns a weird and complete about-face on the character we’ve known so far and says fine! I’ve watched you and now I know your System and I’ll go off and do my own act! Which he does. Off-screen for a while.

Meanwhile, Bill ate blueberry pie before a show and has stomach cramps and can’t actually perform one night, so his credibility takes a hit so he really HAS to succeed with a gray stallion called The Mustang.

He was the worst horse Bill Daily had ever seen and the most dangerous. There was no telling what the Mustang would do.

Please note, his assessment of worst/most dangerous is based entirely on looking at the horse – not observing behavior or body language or everything. Just conformation and his head. The Mustang is apparently a really ugly horse.

It’s during his fight with the Mustang that we get the most succinct statement of Bill’s System:

The success of all his methods lay in overpowering resistance within a short time. Only if the Mustang fought the bridle and was quickly overpowered by its force was there any chance of achieving control over him.

Horse “taming” my ass.

[The bridle] applied pressure to a horse’s most vulnerable spot, a point behind the ears. The more cord that was used, the greater the pressure, and it could not be left on too long or the horse’s life would be endangered.

Today I learned that a tight rope halter can actually kill a horse? Huh? I mean…I guess there are some big veins behind the ears? Or is this supposed to be a neurological thing? WHY are you using methods that might kill the horse, Bill?

Turns out the Mustang was a ringer, everyone knew he couldn’t be tamed, they’re actually impressed Bill didn’t get killed, so it all works out despite the blueberry pie.

Meanwhile, Finn is in New York City doing exactly what he told Bill he would do: his own show taming horses. He’s really successful at it, so Bill gets furious and they head to NYC to stop him. When they arrive, the hear that he’s gone off to London to perform before the Queen.

Turns out, NYC is very strange!

Many women were riding horseback, and this surprised Bill and Hank very much, for such a thing was never done in Pennsylvania.

The fuck it wasn’t.

Never had Bill Dailey been so impressed by the passing scene. But the greatest shock of all came when a woman went by, sitting on the box seat of a coach like his own and skillfully driving four horses. “Now I’ve seen everything!” he told Hank.

Will it surprise you to learn that Bill is a lifelong confirmed bachelor? And that this is the closest we get to a female character in the entire book? (Not counting Wild Bess, earlier.)

Finn’s stable hand greets them and tells them all Finn’s secrets, thanks for nothing, asshole, which mostly involve leaving the horses without food or water for a long time and locking them up so they’re weak when they go on stage. Objectively a shitty thing. But morally better or worse than throwing horses down, manhandling them with war bridles, spinning them in circles until they’re dizzy…?

Finn returns to New York City having tamed a vicious racehorse, and Bill confronts him, and Finn confesses quite happily that he isolated the racehorse in his stable and…maybe?…withheld food for as long as a week? It’s really not clear and also kind of insane. Whatever, it worked great! And he came back with the racehorse because it’s not a permanent fix and he doesn’t want to get found out.

Finn goes on with his show, which pisses Bill off, so he forms the following plan and then executes it.

1. Talk someone from the Barnum & Bailey Circus into buying a zebra named “Man-Eater” from the NYC zoo
2. Sneak this zebra into the back of Finn’s show in the place of the racehorse he brought back from London
3. Follow the zebra into the ring and call Finn out in front of the entire crowd
4. Tame the zebra in front of them and humiliate Finn

It all works until #4, when Bill’s patented “throw them onto the ground” move fails to work with the zebra, who is wilier and quicker than the horses he’s worked with before and keeps getting back up and coming after him.

Enter Hank, who leaps down from the top of the circus wagon onto the zebra’s back, which startles him long enough for Bill to gain the upper hand. Bill ties the zebra’s tail to its halter so it can only spin around. And the zebra is tamed!

Bill’s reputation is officially made, and he decides to hire Finn so that he can keep an eye on him. He spends the rest of his life traveling around doing his show, and he writes a book. Finn gets into bicycles, and then into automobiles, and makes a ton of money. The end.

Small coda: so on the one hand, a lot of Bill’s training techniques in this book are objectively insane. But he also matches up his misguided actions with statements that really get it.

Not hands, Finn, head. Head and heart are needed to manage horses.

Which: yeah! That’s it, Bill! Now use those! Jesus.

It’s really hard to square.

Though, props to Walter Farley for continuity, because Bill’s training methods are almost exactly what Henry uses in a last-ditch attempt to tame Satan in Son of the Black Stallion. Interestingly, they fail miserably there, and it’s Alec’s saving of Satan from Henry’s idiocy that ultimately tames Satan. So I’m not sure what that says about the longterm of Bill’s training methods. Henry still seems to revere him, but doesn’t really follow his System.

Did this make any sense to you? Have you ever thought about taking a rope halter in one hand and your horse’s tail in the other and spin around until your horse was obeying your every command? If not, why not? Bill has a System that says that works great.

Remember how The Black Stallion’s Courage was (though insane in parts) essentially a pretty good horse book?

Have no fear. We return to form in spectacular fashion with this book.

The book actually begins in medias res to Courage, with a strange angry figure watching the Black win the Brooklyn Handicap. It’s really kind of weird and sets the tone for this book: if The Island Stallion Races was a science fiction book, this is trying to be horror. Hamfistedly, at best. For example:

By my oath I shall overtake him with my vengeance and destroy him!

The pair of eyes followed the boy and his giant horse to the post, showing no interest in the other two entries. They watched the stallion charge out of the starting gate with Alec Ramsay’s chin almost touching the black mane.

Death to him because of what he took from me.

Heart-rending despair and agony replaced the furious storm in the eyes as Alec and the Black flashed past the stands.

A curse on him for his wings of power. But I shall overtake him and destroy him.

Then we leave the weird crazy person and head to the backstretch, where Alec and Henry are hanging out with the Black and a stranger approaches. The stranger asks them all sorts of weirdly intimate questions about the Black – like he’s thrilled to have Alec tell him that the Black snores??? – and gives off a creepy vibe but I’m just going to spoil you right now: the stranger really is just a totally random person and plays absolutely no role in anything that happens in the rest of the book.

Chekhov would like a word with you about your shitty plotting, Walter Farley.

Anyway, it mostly serves as a way to do some more recapping, and some more hammering of a central theme of the Black Stallion books: those women, who even knows???

“Humph,” [Henry] grunted. “The likes of him’s got no use for braids. That’s for women an’ tame horses an’ he knows it.

It also gives us this absolutely hilarious bit from Alec:

“He’s a terrific eater,” Alec added. “Three meals a day he takes. Six quarts of oats, four whole and two crushed. Maybe thirty pounds of hay, too, special from the farm – timothy and a little clover thrown in for dessert. And sometimes I give him a salad for good measure – lettuce with a little endive, romaine, and leaves of the chicory plant. He likes it a lot.”

A salad of mixed greens (chicory!!!) as a special treat, I’m dying.

Random stranger leaves, and it comes up that a local horse dealer has imported three yearlings from Spain, which sets off alarm bells for Henry because Spain, what the hell do they know about racehorses? Why would they send over yearlings?

So of course Henry and Alec decide to go see the yearlings. They get there and find – gasp – that they are like mini Blacks! There’s a lot of flailing about this, and particularly weirdly they go on and on about how the yearlings are what they have been trying and failing to breed.

Hopeful Farm: still the weirdest breeding operation on the planet. They openly admit here that the Black is not siring the kinds of horses they want (“They’re everything we’ve tried to breed…and haven’t.”) and yet THEY KEEP BREEDING HIM. And yet he’s sired a Triple Crown winner (Satan), a Derby winner (Black Minx), a Hambletonian winner (Bonfire) and they’ve got who even knows how many foals on the ground from him. So their strategy is a) ignore their own proven success in favor of b) continuing to breed a stallion that isn’t getting them what they want. WHAT THE HELL.

Anyway, they conclude that these yearlings HAD to have been sired by the Black’s sire because…I don’t know? Like if you saw three yearlings that looked an awful lot like your horse wouldn’t your first assumption be that they were also by the same (LONG DEAD) stallion?

So of course they head off to Spain to go find out what’s going on. (Presumably Alec’s dad is taking care of rebuilding the barn that burned down in Courage? And they have plenty of money to go off to Spain? WITH THE BLACK?)

They get to Spain and meet a guy named Angel Gonzalez who is a seriously weird dude.

“Please,” [Gonzalez] added, “there must not be formality for I feel we have known one another for years. May I call you Henry? And you Alec?”

…sure? But Alec is kind of a dick, just FYI, not sure you want to be friends with him.

It wasn’t going to be easy to be courteous and polite, to look at their host without flinching before his unnatural ugliness.

Just to give you the rundown real quick, Gonzalez is a young rich guy who owns a ranch that primarily raises bulls for the fighting ring. He’s got a bunch of scars, and he’s also maybe sick? Or maybe not? Alec keeps thinking that he’s sick but he shows no actual signs of being sick.

He shows them the stallion that he says sired the yearlings, a black stallion named El Dorado, and it is pretty clearly not the right horse. The way he’s described he sounds very typey for a Baroque horse. Oh, and Gonzalez uses him in bullfighting. So really not Arabian at all. Except Gonzalez claims he is?

Alec sneaks out in the middle of the night to go see El Dorado close up and there’s a whole really dumb scene where he accidentally gets into the bull’s pasture and somehow escapes because his white shirt rips and he uses it as a flag like a bullfighter. At night. It’s so typically Alec, saved by plot again.

The next morning, Gonzalez decides to show off and proceeds to stage a bullfight in his own arena on his horse. Farley plays this up as totally insane and not the kind of thing that’s ever done but frankly it reads exactly like every bullfight ever? If you don’t know much about the practice, there’s often a phase when a horseback rider tires the bull out before the matador on foot enters. (If you want to see a video of it without gore, this is a good example; I don’t suggest just Googling if you’re squeamish.) Gonzalez mucks it up and almost dies, and Alec has to run in and save him somehow because of course he does.

Gonzalez admits that El Dorado is not the Black’s sire, and promises to take them somewhere they can learn the truth. So they all get on a plane with this guy they have known for maybe 36 hours. He says it will be a short plane ride. It’s not.

“Where do you think we are, anyway? Not that it matters.”

“Maybe the Balkans.”

OF COURSE IT MATTERS WHY WOULDN’T IT MATTER?!? You just met this guy and he’s flying you somewhere random to do something that he won’t give you details about!

Gonzalez lands somewhere in the middle of nowhere. They all get out. And then Gonzalez leaves them.

[Henry] and Alec ran after the plane, shouting into the wind, “Why Gonzalez, why? Don’t leave us alone, here! What are you doing, Gonzalez? What are you doing? Wait for us! Come back, Gonzalez! Come back! You can’t leave us here!”

Look. I don’t want to victim blame BUT WHAT EXACTLY DID YOU EXPECT FROM ALL OF THIS YOU FUCKING IDIOTS.

We then get a very long segment where Henry and Alec and the Black wander around…somewhere. The landscape isn’t really clearly described. It’s mountainous and kind of like a dessert, but not really. They have some food but really no water. They are basically screwed.

At night they see something strange in the distance – a horse running in the mountains.

Their hearts turned cold when they saw the trail of phosphorescent sparks the horse was streaming in his wake! It was a shimmering streak of blue and red and orange lights. It swept from the mountainside into the depths and then was gone.

Henry compares the horse to Firetail which…okay, sure.

The next day, they are stumbling along what they think is a road when a open carriage pulls up. A woman leans out of the carriage and says “Welcome home, Shetan! We’ve been waiting for you.”

In case you thought this could not get weirder, you were wrong!

The couple in the carriage turn out to be our old friends Tabari ben Ishak and her husband Abd-al-Rahman, who last showed up in The Black Stallion Returns. To refresh: Tabari is the daughter of the guy who bred and owned the Black, and she was flipping awesome in the previous book.

Too bad both of them have had total personality transplants because literally nothing about their characterization is the same from the last book. Literally. Nothing. They’re both half-insane weirdos who say and do things for totally inexplicable reasons. They used to be kind of great! Did Walter Farley forget to read his own backstory???

Alec recognized her but she looked a far different person from the one he remembered. Was that so strange, though? He had last seen her as a growing girl. Now she was a woman.

Seriously Walter Farley has such a Madonna/whore complex it’s ridiculous. She was great when she was a young, innocent [virginal] girl! Now she’s all mean and weird. WOMEN, AMIRITE?

Then the book pretends that al-Rahman has never met the Black.

The man whistled softly. “He’s all you said, Tabari.”

THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE BLACK STALLION RETURNS WAS THAT HE RACED HIS STALLION AGAINST THE BLACK AAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH.

Tabari has also gone full English. I think in the last book they mentioned that she went to boarding school in England but her mannerisms here are totally different. She’s prim and proper and wearing dresses.

“My wife is like all women. She seeks to love and dominate at the same time. I suppose I have spoiled her, though. There is so little she can do here.”

Fuck you, dude.

Still no explanation on where “here” is. It’s some kind of mountain fortress built to hide horses. It’s where the Black’s sire lived – or maybe lives?

We get to the crux of the whole book: al-Rahman is convinced that the Black’s sire is still alive, because a) he sees the flaming horse sometimes too and b) they had three mares who turned up surprise pregnant and foaled out those yearlings that they sent to America and he went to the same logic school as Alec and Henry.

It turns out that sending the yearlings to America was a ploy to get Alec and Henry to…wherever they are. Because al-Rahman is convinced that the only way to catch the sire – whose name is Ziyadah – is to chase him down with the Black. Yeah. That’s his actual plan. Just run around chasing the ghost horse. With the Black.

They do this for a whole bunch of days and finally Alec says it’s dumb and al-Rahman loses his mind and accuses Alec of cowardice and laziness and all sorts of nasty things. Dude, you’re the one who tricked/kidnapped Alec, and now he’s decided he doesn’t want to spend all night, every night looking for a ghost horse and HE’S the asshole?

Henry, meanwhile, has been making plans.

“I’ve been talkin’ to some of these gardeners. Not that we understand each other’s lingo but they have an idea what I’m after. They hold up the fingers of both hands five times when I ask them how far it is to their village. An’ they point to the south, past the field where we landed. I figure they mean it’s fifty miles that way. All we got to do is get a few cans of grub, give the Black his head to the south an’ go. With his keen scent we’ll find our way all right. We’re no fools.”

The mind boggles at Henry’s idiocy here.

Anyway they’re not leaving because Tabari says she saw a hoofprint! Except it doesn’t look like a hoofprint. But it’s definitely a hoofprint, even though it doesn’t look anything like one! Alec decides to go out one last night.

He said to his horse, “I only hope you’ve saved something in case we meet up with Ziyadah. If you haven’t, it won’t be much of a race.”

Alec thinks of literally everything as a race. WTF.

He sees a flash of light in the distance:

Had it been made by a pawing, plated hoof striking stone?

WHO IS SHOEING THIS LOST/GHOST/WILD HORSE, ANYWAY?

It is Ziyadah, though, or it must be, he doesn’t actually really see the horse, anyway, off they go on a sort of weird steeplechase except the Black doesn’t quite clear one of the fences – he drops a hind leg and it gets stuck between two planks of wood on the top of the fence.

Maybe I’m not reading this correctly, but let’s review:

• the Black jumps this stone wall + boards from a full gallop
• he lands from the fence and instantly stops, mid-landing (he’s described as forelegs on the ground, belly on the fence, hind hoof stuck)
• SOMEHOW HE DOES NOT BREAK A LEG OR ROTATE OR ANYTHING? HE JUST STOPS MIDAIR AND WAITS FOR ALEC TO FREE HIM?

So yeah. That happens. Alec decides it was intentional! Someone set a trap! By putting planks of wood on top of a stone wall!

Our old friend Gonzalez shows up with his plane, and Alec and Henry decide to leave with him, which makes al-Rahman even more furious. So they’re laying low but because of al-Rahman’s temper tantrums Alec locks the stall which made me SUPER nervous for the rest of the book because I was convinced there would be a fire and ugh.

Anyway no fire but Alec wanders the house because he can’t sleep. He is in a living room when he smells liniment which leads to him being convinced that either a) someone is hiding a horse in the house (?!) or someone is sabotaging the Black (!?!?!?). So he goes down to the basement and looks all through it: nothing. He goes out and checks on the Black and finds an iron ring in the floor of Ziyadah’s stall! Which leads to a trap door!

He finds a whole stable complex underground, including – surprise! – Ziyadah. He also uncovers the key to the horse-on-fire trick.

His hoofs were encased in a rubber sheath which was covered with sequins of many colors! They sparkled brilliantly in the play of light. They would also leave no tracks.

SEQUIN GLITTER BOOTS I’M DYING.

There’s also a long sequin glitter cape, and a flashlight. So the mechanism is to dress horse and rider up in sequins and then shine the light to make them sparkle. Which would be totally visible from a distance and definitely look like they were both on fire.

Then comes the denouement of the whole book. The ghostly rider is actually Tabari. Ziyadah has been alive the whole time. And Tabari lured Alec here so she could kill the Black – because her father died falling from him. The following is her evil genius plan.

• secretly breed Ziyadah to three mares
• send the yearlings to Gonzalez in Spain, then on to America to tempt Alec and Henry
• have Gonzalez trick them into flying to…wherever they are
• get Alec and the Black to chase Ziyadah
• kill them and make it look like an accident

That is some Bond villain stupidity right there. I feel like she could’ve hired a guy with a crowbar and skipped right to the last step without all the expense, time, travel, and stress.

Anyway, I’ll give the secret underground stable this: it sounds awesome. There are living quarters, a huge indoor arena complete with jumps (“jumps over brush and banks, stones and timber and water”), a fireplace with comfy couches, the works. I’d totally live there.

Alec realizes that he’s been discovered, and he rushes to get to the Black. Literally here’s his thought process: oh no, she knows I’m here! I need to get to the Black!

He had no doubt that Ziyadah and his rider would be waiting for them to follow. This was part of the deadly game being played. He felt confident of the outcome of such a race if it took place on the plain.

Whaaaaaaat?

Off they go! They gallop all over the place, with loads of jumps in between because the Black is now a steeplechaser too, and they catch up to Tabari, who villain-splains that she hates the Black because he killed her father. Then she fires a gun (so much for making it look like an accident) and the two stallions rise up to fight each other and Alec falls off and hits his head.

When he wakes up, Tabari is thrilled that she’s killed the Black, except she and Alec are alone in the dark on the mountainside. Alec takes her at her word and is super-upset until the Black trots up. Tabari actually managed to shoot her own horse. Which is both horrible and really dumb.

The Black came to them and Alec put a hand on his wet neck. ” I guess we’re going to keep a lot to ourselves,” he told his horse. “We’re going to forget there ever was a Ziyadah and that we caught up with him too late. We’re going to let Tabari tell her husband as much or as little as she pleases. It’s enough that we’re going home together.”

That is a stunningly mature thing for Alec to express.

They do, indeed, head home. On the plane home there’s a teaser, though: Gonzalez’s maid/housekeeper is reading a newspaper with a mystery racehorse on the front. He won a race in Cuba and then vanished.

Yep, it’s time for the Black and Flame to face off in an epic crossover event.

(Not right away, though, next week is The Horse Tamer.)

Well, do you remember this one? What do you think about what Farley did to Tabari? Do you think you could dream up a few more steps to Tabari’s plan to make it even more complicated?