2013 October 23 « HORROR BOOM

“Guess they’re trying to figure out where everything goes… hand me a saw.”

Almost everything we learned in “Boy Parts” was entertaining, set up some great future drama/conflict in the season, completely awesome, or all of the above. I can’t remember the last time I felt such a gleeful, happy, and probably slightly wild grin spread across my face for so much of the running time of an American Horror Story episode, which flew by even faster than usual. Half the time I forgot I had something in my lap to jot down notes, I was having so much fun. So let’s get off and running, since I’m also flirting with Episode 3 (“The Replacements”) airing before I can get this piece published*.

1. Misty Day is alive! She was burned at the stake, but tells ~~Violet~~ Zoe later that Mother Nature healed her.

“You play with dead things, you’re more than likely to join them.”
“Not all dead.”

2. Misty Day (played gleefully by our favorite possessed nun from AHS Asylum, Lilly Rabe) rocks. In the beautifully shot, satisfying cold open set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Edge of Seventeen,”, she gets a kick-ass introduction as two sleazy poachers incur her wrath by “killing one of beautiful creatures… so you can make them into shoes”. Using, as Cordelia called it, the power of resurgence, she brings an alligator strung up from a tree plus the one they just killed back to life; the hanging one suddenly twists and chomps down on the gun-wielding poacher’s torso while the other closes its jaws on the second poacher and drags him into the swamp by his head as he kicks and screams like a little girl. Later, when Zoe unwittingly summons her, she takes in a resurrected, damaged Kyle back to her shack in the swamp to heal him, asking nothing in return. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a great interview with Lily Rabe on EW.com you should definitely check out by clicking here.

3. Think you had a rough day? Well, poor Zoe’s day was really stressful. Her morning kicked off with two homicide detectives dropping by the Academy to question her and Madison about the bus crash. She’s clearly trying to hold in her panic and not doing a great job of it, but cracks like an egg when they produce a photo of her entering the hospital wing where she banged the rapist frat boy to death, and starts blurting out everything. Fiona is able to use a little witchcraft to salvage the situation with the cops, but tosses both Zoe and Madison through the air and into the walls, and ends her lecture with threatening both of them. “In this whole wide wicked world, the only thing you have to be afraid of… is me.” Before she has a chance to calm down, Madison takes her to the New Orléans Morgue which includes the dead frat boys, and they aren’t in such good shape; in fact, they’re mangled and dismembered. She’s even more horrified when Madison unzips the body bag containing Kyle’s remains, revealing his body is in several jumbled pieces with his head propped up jauntily in the middle. Zoe then has to not only help Madison assemble “the perfect boyfriend” (consisting of six different pieces, not all belonging to Kyle) with crude stitches, but go through a terrifying, trippy rite that included inhaling some smoke that makes both of them scream uncontrollably and having Madison slice her palm open. Nothing. Madison goes to wait in the car (but takes off, muttering, “Tough luck, bitch” when she thinks a passer-by might spot her with a joint) while Zoe says her goodbyes. She seems to be pulling herself together, then a security guard comes in, and she has to watch Kyle sit up and then brutally kill the shit out of the security guard before she can stop him. Zoe then has to clumsily get Kyle (whose demeanor is that of a wild animal that got poked with a stick one too many times) out of there and into the car, which he really doesn’t like; in fact he’s grunting and flailing around that so much poor Zoe (who is also weeping and blurting out apologies) is losing control of the car. Then, as if her nerves weren’t shot to hell already, a strange woman suddenly sits up in the back seat and says, “I forgive you”. Zoe screams and almost drives off the road. That woman turns out to be Misty Day, and the ride smooths out a little after that.

“You ain’t never gonna believe who’s back.”

4. We find out what we suspected: Fiona dug up Delphine Lalaurie because she wants to get what she has, and that’s eternal life, but her real focus there seems to be on anti-aging. What we didn’t expect is how miserable Lalaurie is; in the final scene of the episode, she tells Fiona she was hoping she was a witch, that way Fiona might know how to kill her. The only real trouble she causes (in this episode) is conking Queenie over the head with a candlestick* and fleeing the Academy, but she doesn’t get far. The next time we see Lalaurie she’s slumped, defeated, on a bench outside what used to be her home and is now a historical site including a “museum of horrors.”

Hell is real. I’ve seen it, down in that box.

5. The fictional Delphine Lalaurie got what the real-life Lalaurie deserved. Marie Laveau gave her immortality… after murdering her beloved daughters (and less-than-beloved husband) and stringing them up outside Lalaurie’s home. Marie, surrounded by her followers, tells her that her family suffered greatly before they died, but LaLaurie will suffer far worse, bound and buried alive for all eternity. There she lays, alive, for 180 years, seeing the faces of her dead daughters and thinking of what was done to them.***

6. During the final scene with Fiona and Lalaurie on the bench outside the museum, we find out Fiona’s issues with Cordelia might be more complicated than we thought. After Lalaurie mutters about how she loved her daughters, Fiona looks away and replies, “Maybe it’s better. At least in death, you can’t disappoint the ones you love.” Nope, no deep-seated issues there…

7. Speaking of Cordelia, we find out she and her husband Hank (who I doubt is going to be sticking around long– at least in one piece–after viewing the promo for episode 3) have been trying to have a baby. When fertility drugs don’t do anything but give Cordelia nasty side-effects, Hank urges her to use her magic so they conceive, but Cordelia tells him she can’t just use magic to get everything she wants, because then she’d be just like Fiona. This leads to…

8. The witchy fertility ritual for conception Cordelia and her husband perform leads to some hot, amazing sex. Cordelia, after apparently changing her min for the sake of her husband, performs a rite involving their both their blood, circles of salt, chanting, and large eggs that crack open to reveal baby snakes rapidly slithering out. The spell was dark, like Cordelia warned the seemingly clueless Hank, but they both seemed to really have fun. Which is good, because I know this isn’t going to end well.

9. When Mme. Delphine Lalaurie herself calls another woman an “evil bitch,” maybe you should steer clear of that woman. Fiona does no such thing and finds Marie Laveau (the evil bitch referred to) running a salon in the Ninth Ward called “Cornrow City.” Guess what? They don’t get along so well! In a scene packed with great lines, the two women purr threats and insults at one another, though the only actual damage done is when Fiona momentarily sets a rack of wigs on fire. Laveau keeps her cool, no matter what Fiona says, even when she tells Laveau she has something that the voodoo queen wants. Later in the season, Fiona may secretly wish she’d handled things a little more delicately, because…

10. Marie kept her lover around. You know, the one in the first scene of the season that Lalaurie shackled up in her torture attic and stuck a giant decapitated bull’s head on? He looks much scarier and stronger now; even Marie keeps him shackled up (apparently in the back rooms of her salon, where I’m assuming she also lives). “You’ll never guess who’s back,” Marie tells The Minotaur lovingly. Then she explains they have some business to attend to…

Stray Thoughts:

Sometimes dead is better.
Detective: Are you in charge here?
Fiona: I’m Fiona Goode, I’m in charge everywhere.
Did Angela Bassett find some kind of anti-aging spell for herself? She’s 55, and doesn’t look a day over 35. Just amazing.

*I’ll be fleshing (so to speak) this piece out and polishing it up after I get a basic version of it posted–as of this writing it’s 4:00 AM Wednesday and I need some sleep; lack of a normal sleep cycle was what cost me this posting delay in the first place. So, check back if you want to read one where I did research and fact-checking on some of the historical events, cultures, and real-life people referenced in the episode, among other additions.

**Which Ryan Murphy says there’s going to be some serious payback for coming up– having to be Queenie’s slave.

***If I hadn’t read so much about the real-life Lalaurie, I might even have felt a little sorry for her.