Ten Things We Learned From American Horror Story Coven’s Premiere, “Bitchcraft” (SPOILERS Included)!

Zoe: What do we do if we can’t get in?
Fiona: Tear the wall down.

Another season (or ‘Volume’, as Ryan Murphy said he wanted to refer to them-we think it fits and sounds awesome) of American Horror Story, an entire new twisted, fun, and scary world for Murphy and Brad Falchuck to explore and reveal to us! Hold onto your broomsticks and voodoo dolls, ’cause American Horror Story Coven is going to be one fun, fucked-up flight! So, what did we learn? Here’s ten items, dive in. Oh, and we’re adding a new feature to these weekly companion pieces: besides “stray thoughts” that Mrs. Horror Boom wanted to mention* but couldn’t squeeze into the top ten, we’re adding “Predictions and Speculations” (until we come up with a snappier name). As always, we’d love to hear your opinions on them, and your own predictions. Plus, HEADS UP! PLOT SPOILERS (spilled by Ryan Murphy and the cast to TV Guide) for upcoming episodes given at the end of this particular piece.

1. Hey guys, don’t have sex with Zoe until she learns to control her power, unless you’re suicidal. It’ll hurt and you’ll start bleeding from every orifice that can be shown on basic cable. I see plenty of theories (or declarations) that Zoe has teeth in a specific part of her anatomy, but since her first lover’s death was deemed a brain aneurism with no mention of “penis also apparently chewed off”, we don’t think that’s it.

“I’ll have what she’s having!”

2. Jessica Lange‘s character continues the tradition of getting all the best lines, from “Don’t make me drop a house on you” to “the world’s not gonna miss a bunch of assholes in Ed Hardy T-shirts”. We look forward to many more.

3. Murphy sure wasn’t kidding when he said Taissa Farmiga and Evan Peters would once again be cast as “star-crossed lovers“. Let’s see, she can’t have traditional sex with a male lover (and who knows if there’s a, er, workaround that’s not fatal), and he was killed by a telekinetic bus accident shortly after meeting his love interest, well before the end of the episode. We see in the previews for the upcoming episode “Boy Parts” (heh) that Madison plans to help Zoe bring him back… in a pretty messy, work-intensive method. The couple –and the writers– definitely have their work cut out for them (so to speak).

Tell us about this accident… and don’t spare us any of the gory details.

4. Fiona will stop at nothing to get “an infusion of vitality, of youth,” as she puts it to her pet scientist in Los Angeles whose research to discover an anti-aging medication/serum she has funded with her late husband’s money. He tells her they’ll be ready for human trials as early as two years from now – Fiona tells him she wants it now. The next time we catch up with her, she’s blasting Iron Butterfly and doing rails of coke in her very lavish, rock superstar-quality hotel suite, dancing, doing more coke**, nervously seeing a checking her appearance repeatedly in the mirror** . When she insists he visit her, we learn he’s been injecting her with it (at her insistence and probably threats to cut off funding) for five days, and “nothing, NOTHING has changed!” she yells at him despite his protests that he’s already not supposed to be giving her the drug. “Double the dosage,” she whispers, then practically roars, “GIVE ME MORE!” He tells her human bodies are organic in nature– “We rot. We die”, then resigns. Fiona slams and locks the doors and tosses him across the room with a very mild hand gesture, then starts giving him a very passionate kiss, so passionate, in fact, that she sucks the life out of him (every review I’ve read compares the way he rapidly ages and shrivels to the scene at the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade where the villain drinks from the Holy Grail). She looks decades younger briefly, then sees her age returning and smashes the mirror in fury. At the tail end of the episode, she digs up Delphine LaLaurie seemingly for the sole purpose of discovering how someone who was buried alive in 1834 seemingly hasn’t aged a day.

From Episode 2, “Boy Parts”.

5. The one thing that distracts Fiona from her coke-fueled frenzy while she not-so-patiently waits for visible results from the experimental anti-aging drugs is a news story on candlelight vigils for the young witch (her character is named ‘Misty Day’ and played by Lily Rabe) who has gone missing and rumored to have been burned at the stake–Fiona looks genuinely concerned, probably with good reason (see prediction section for more on that).

6. The relationship between the supreme Fiona and her ‘sole offspring,’ daughter Cordelia Foxx, is strained …at best. During a scene between them where Fiona visits Cordelia working in her absolutely beautiful, lush greenhouse/lab, Cordelia is soon calling Fiona a bitch to her face. The conflict seems to be Delia’s teaching philosophy as Headmistress; Fiona thinks her daughter should take a more direct, assertive approach and prepare the girls for the coming storm (especially with the royal blood running in her veins), instead of teaching them to ‘cower and hide in the shadows’. Surprisingly, most of the spite seems to come from Cordelia’s end. When she turns to her mother and asks, “When are you going to die and stop ruining my life?”, Fiona is visibly hurt, but replies evenly, “I’m here. I’m staying. So why don’t we make the best of it?” We hope they do–they’re going to need everything they’ve got when a pissed-off Marie Laveau shows up looking for Delphine Lalaurie.

7. Things sure liven up at dinner time. Also, maybe it would be a good idea to ban sharp objects. Spoiled telekinetic movie star Madison Montgomery, human voodoo doll Queenie, clairvoyant Nan, and Zoe are served dinner by Spalding. Queenie tells Madison to be nice to Spalding (after she calls him ‘Jeeves’) because he has no tongue. Madison immediately responds by asking him if he used his tongue for something wicked, ‘or maybe you just really suck at going down’. They snipe at each other (Zoe barely gets a word in and just stares with her jaw hung open) with Queenie calling Madison a “D-list, botox bimbo,” and Madison using her mind to flip Queenie’s soup all over her shirt. Queenie jams a fork into her own hand and twists it; Madison squeals in pain as her hand bleeds. Nan has to finally talk Queenie into going for a walk to cool down after Queenie holds a huge knife to her own throat and threatening to cut it. “Well,” Madison sniffs, “that was disturbing.”

There’s a storm coming….

8. Fiona knows how to throw a sick field trip. (“Jesus. Go change your clothes. Wear something… black.”) She takes the current group of students–who (except for Nan) don’t know that Fiona is the Supreme until Nan mentions it and she confirms it–for a breezy stroll, filling them in on some New Orléans history and places such as the Popp Fountain that were declared a safety hazard after Hurricane Katrina and closed it off. “What do we do if we can’t get in?” Zoe asks. “Tear the wall down,” Fiona replies. In one of the few scenes where Fiona isn’t lighting a cigarette, smoking, or stubbing out a cigarette, they crash the Lalaurie Mansion tour*** after Nan hears a voice she later tells Fiona belongs to “the lady of the house” whispering help me.

“To our future together.” -Marie Laveau

9. Don’t piss off Marie Laveau. The backstory (also told by the tour guide) that ties her to LaLaurie is that one of her lovers was tortured and killed by LaLaurie. Marie pretended to offer a love potion to LaLaurie that will stop her husband’s ‘infidelities’, and she makes the mistake of inviting Marie Laveau into her mansion and gulping down the potion, which is a potion, but not one having to do with any kind of love. After LaLaurie chokes and falls to the floor appearing to be dead, we only hear that her body was never found. That’s because Laveau had her chained up and buried alive (probably because death was too good for her), leaving her soul to burn in hell–in the preview for Episode 2, “Boy Parts”, we briefly see LaLaurie assuring Fiona that hell is real, because she’s been there.

“The light hit him just fine.”

10. Don’t piss off any of the women on the show, or get in their way, and even if you’re another female character, watch your mouth around Fiona and sure as hell don’t call her a hag. She’ll casually flick her wrist (without even looking up) and the next thing you know, your back is slamming into a wall across the room. Don’t tell Madison she’s not “hitting her mark” if you’re directing her; she’ll cause a lighting rig to drop on your head and kill you. Though she’s got a more even temper, we know Queenie can fuck you up. I think Nan was trying to help out in general when she clued in Fiona to the fact she could dig up LaLaurie and make her Fiona’s ~~bitch~~ slave. Piss Cordelia off, she can slip you a ‘restorative potion’ that would put you in a coma for a few days (or weeks) as Fiona caught her doing. Zoe has only killed one man on purpose with her, er, female power, and boy did he deserve it (as did every frat boy on the bus who participated in gang-raping Madison– I cheered when she flipped that bus over, though partially because it was such a cool, seamless effect), but I’m pretty sure she’s going to become a force to be reckoned with. All you had to do to be tortured/killed by LaLaurie was A. be the wrong color and B. show up.

Stray Thoughts:

I was bummed out when it was revealed Denis O’Hare’s character has no tongue (since he got so many great lines as Larry in Season One), but Murphy has assured us that he will be speaking later on.
I also hope nothing horrible happens to Cordelia’s cat; Fiona didn’t seem to care for the pet much.
The show’s writers did their research on Delphine LaLaurie, even getting her daughter’s names and nicknames right. At the time the story takes place, she’s on her third marriage (and we wonder if the show will mention rumors that foul play was suspected in her first two husband’s deaths, adding “Black Widow” to her monstrous resume), and her husband, a doctor, was involved in her crimes. I’d go into more specifics that were depicted as faithfully as possible, but in the last two weeks I’ve read details about LaLaurie’s sadistic crimes that I sincerely wish I could UN-read as of this writing. The Minotaur is a creation of the AHS writers–and Murphy assures us he’ll return as one of Coven’s two seasonal monsters–but may shown in the cold open of “Bitchcraft”, such as the flayed faces, oddly shaped cages containing slaves whose limbs had been broken and re-formed to resemble animals, and lips sewn shut, among others, were all too real. As I said, I’m on information overload right now from the research I did, so that’s enough of that.

Predictions/Speculations:

We’re pretty sure ‘Misty Day’ (the witch with the power of resurgence) will turn up again, and unburned. In the scenes we saw of her actually being burned alive, Cordelia was simply recounting her story to the students. The news report that Fiona saw (and brought her back to New Orléans) mentioned she was missing and only rumored to have been burned alive. Also, she’s shown in some PR shots released for the October 16th episode. Keep your fingers crossed for more Lily Rabe!
Marie Leveau will bring back her dead lover who was killed by suffocating inside a severed bull’s head placed/sewn onto his shoulders… and that’ll be “The Minotaur” monster Ryan Murphy brought up (as this year’s Rubberman/Bloody Face), who will terrorize the Academy.

And here’s a couple spoilers I uncovered today I just couldn’t keep to myself (source: TVGuide), so SPOILER ALERT FOR FUTURE EPISODES BEGINNING HERE!

Zoe is going to constantly struggle with the decision–and consequences of– bringing Kyle back from the dead in kind of a Frankenstein-like state (which I guess is better than, say, a Pet Semetary or a Monkey’s Paw-like state) over the next several episodes. Worse yet, he won’t be able to communicate verbally.
The group of young witches-in-training will drop from four to three when [REDACTED] is killed by {REDACTED]
We’re going to get Queenie’s backstory in Episode 2 (Boy Parts) and got-damn, it should be good!
Jessica Lange will make LaLaurie her slave, and as a sort of poetic justice, give her to Queenie as a slave. All fucking hell is going to break loose (AKA: War between witch and Voodoo royalty) when Marie Laveau wants her ‘property’ back from Fiona. Those were just the highlights; click here to read the entire juicy article from TV Guide for plenty more yummy details and teasers. (END SPOILERS)

There you have it…and we promise to not wait until practically the last minute before posting these from now on. Thanks for reading AND for being so patient.

*Mrs. Horror Boom is the only one on the Horror Boom ‘staff’ (of two) that’ll watch it, after I told my husband about certain nasty plot details from Asylum last year, he got scared off… with good reason.

**I predict black nail polish is about to get even more popular, and this spring I was already seeing soccer moms at my nail salon casually getting pedicures with it.

***This tour of the interior does not actually exist, and if I missed it in my research and it does, it certainly doesn’t exist in the form shown in “Bitchcraft,” where the last stop on the tour is the ‘attic of horror’ with most of the torture chamber intact and the tour guide shares the information that Delphine Lalaurie’s beauty treatment wasn’t just slave’s blood, it was a poultice made from the pancreas of her victims–the beauty treatment and the Marie Laveau revenge are all creations of the writers… though Nicholas Cage really did purchase the home. You can read more about the history of the mansion here. Pleasant dreams…