The Boss' Last Orders

With the final instructions in hand, Team Bucciarati must bring Trish to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore within fifteen minutes of activating the disc. One member alone may climb the bell tower with her, carrying no weapon and no means to communicate, while the rest wait aboard the boat. As they land, Bucciarati reminds the group that a last assassin may still be near. Giorno offers to escort Trish, but Abbacchio argues the honor belongs to Bucciarati, since delivering her is a rare chance to draw close to the Boss. Bucciarati asks Giorno for a brooch as a good-luck token, and Giorno gives him one that Gold Experience has turned into a living tracker.

Inside the empty church, Trish falters at the elevator, dreading what awaits her. Bucciarati promises she will likely take a new identity in a safe hiding place, and that any father would surely come to love his child. As the lift nears the top, he realizes Trish has vanished and only her severed arm remains in his grip. The Boss had always intended to kill his own daughter.

Bucciarati's history comes into focus. Born to a modest fisherman, he was seven when his parents divorced, and he chose to stand by the more broken-hearted of the two, his father. At twelve, tragedy returned when his father stumbled onto a drug deal, was shot, and barely survived thanks to a coast guard. When the dealers came to finish the job, the boy stabbed both of them to protect him, a crime that forced him into a gang. He believed Passione stood for justice until he learned it trafficked drugs, and that the Boss he had trusted was the very source of the trade that had nearly killed his father.

Resolving to end the Boss, Bucciarati gives chase down the elevator shaft. He drops the tracking brooch onto the man's coat, zips down to a dark crypt ahead of him, and lies in wait behind a column. The Boss speaks first, warning him to back off or die. Bucciarati lunges with Sticky Fingers, but his target is gone and an unseen Stand seizes his arm. He escapes by zipping it free and phones Giorno, who confirms the Boss is very close. Cutting away a column, Bucciarati sees his own reflection just as King Crimson emerges from the shadows. Boasting the power to erase time, the Stand drives its fist clean through his stomach.

The episode reworks much of Bucciarati's flashback, adding tender scenes of his family life, dinners together, and his mother reading to him, while replacing the depicted drug deal with a hospital scene where a detective explains what his father witnessed. His father is given the name Paolo Bucciarati on a tombstone, and Bucciarati's discovery of Passione's true trade is shown rather than narrated.

Other small adjustments include Fugo noting they are almost at the Rialto Bridge, Bucciarati now visibly wearing the borrowed pin, and the tracking brooch shown clinging to the Boss in the present rather than in a flashback. A portion of the source chapter showing the rest of the team feeling King Crimson's effect is held back from this point.