American Horror Story

Before I even start this recap, I should point out that I’ve now written over 30,000 words on this season of American Horror Story, and other than the fact that that qualifies me for admission to Briarcliff asylum, it means that I have very high standards for the parabolic plot arcs of this show. That’s why I'm totally flummoxed and disappointed by certain aspects of last night’s episode, namely the fact that Kit Walker (Evan Peters) had the unbelievable bad luck to cohabitate with two ax murderers. Ax murdering is not contagious: It is not the flu, it is not the herpes virus, it is not even AIDS. What a screwy, evil-mustachioed red herring to throw into the penultimate installment of your awesome torture-porn show, Ryan Murphy. Why do you play me thus? I already ate Catfish last night. I didn’t want to swallow the entire contents of the narrative ocean.

We dive right in: Evening, chez Walker. Inside Kit’s house are twin high chairs, a pair of whimsical-print dish rags, and a calendar telling us it’s 1967. Photographs on the wall of Kit with Alma (Britne Oldford) and Grace (Lizzie Brocheré) reveal that he’s now living an idyllic-looking polygamist lifestyle and raising a child by each woman. Unfortunately, Kit is huffing and puffing as he strains to dislodge an ax from a body on his living room floor. He steps into frame in underpants, splattered with blood, and plops down next to a stuffed sheep as a child calls from offscreen, “Daddy?” Kit tells the kid that he’ll be there in a minute and allows a single tear to slide down his cheek. He’s thinking, “I hope Grace, the known ax murderer, did this, because otherwise this will be an unfair manipulation of the viewers at home.”

After the credits, we find ourselves in the warm paisley afghan of Sister Wife life, pre-murder: Grace is at the table making charcoal doodles of the aliens who resuscitated her and gave her fertility treatments years ago, Alma is gathering produce from the garden and trying to wrangle their alien lovechildren, Julia and Thomas, and everyone’s wearing less flattering clothes than they were three years ago. Alma’s trying to plan their suburban farm, but Grace is completely absorbed in her creepy artwork and wants Alma to verify the praying mantis face of “the doctor” alien. “I don’t know if those were his mandibles! He was wearing a surgical mask!”

Kit enters, looking like he’s back from an audition for Godspell, all jazzed about the hippie march he wants everyone to attend as a family. Unsurprisingly, his ladies have reservations, and not just because they’re biracial polygamists with outer-space babies: toddlers at a march! So far from the potty chair? Alma asks Kit if Grace’s drawings might be “too much for the kids,” and later, as Kit makes a move on her, advises him to spend more time hooking up with his other baby mama because her preoccupation with the grays might be indicative of lingering ennui and romantic neglect. Grace is fragile — I mean, she murdered her family — so it makes sense that Alma, who seems comparably sane (cough) though she prefers to pretend the whole thing never happened, would be willing to give up her coital night to ensure that Grace doesn’t go bananas on the family unit.

Kit assents and brings his new sideburns into bedroom number dos, where Grace is still hunched over her sketchbook. She explains that the artist’s renderings are “for our children, [who] need to know where they came from.” She’d rather dwell on the alien experience than her own past, because she’s still haunted by “the memories of that black night — those feelings, when [she] lost control” of herself. Kit consoles her by telling her she’s a different person now, then rails her tenderly as Alma listens on the other side of the wall (a terrible design for living with multiple partners). Suddenly, the lights flicker, which as everyone knows is how aliens ring the doorbell. There’s a boom and a flash of bright lights, which causes Alma to lose her shit because she thinks she’s about to be stuffed full of more extraterrestrial fetuses. She screams for Kit — “don’t let them take me!” — but Grace comes to her first and they start to make their way toward the nursery while Kit grabs his gun. The curtains are on fire and a truck is screeching away from the scene, so it appears it wasn’t aliens after all, just another human hater taking issues with the Walker lifestyle.

When the cops arrive, Kit fingers “Billy and his friends,” the same gaggle of goons who cast shade on him for marrying Alma way back at the beginning of this weird saga. The police, however, think that Kit’s domestic situation is too weird to merit arresting anyone on his behalf. Alma’s “inconsolable” after the incident, but Grace remains unruffled, reminding Kit that she’s “strong” and only looking mildly wistful when he leaves her to tend to Alma. In the morning — or some morning thereafter — Grace is simultaneously teaching her son French while drilling him on his conception, which really needles Alma. “I’m done with the alien talk,” she tells Grace. “It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and you act like it’s a religious experience.” Grace, in the ugliest pants ever, confirms that for her, it was. The aliens gave them their super-amaaaaazing love-crowded life, their incredible children, and something to doodle about for decades. They bicker — Alma’s hung up on the painful metal probes she was raped with, Grace is still mooning over the aliens’ scientific advancement — while we keep cutting away to Kit hacking at some lumber in the yard. With an ax. Even though smart people who live with violent criminals usually just order a cord of that shit for, like, $15.

Grace pushes her fantasy that the aliens are coming back for Kit, Very Special Kit with his Very Open Mind, which triggers Alma to remind her that she and Kit had a pretty dandy life living together as a regular couple before he brought home a murderer from the insane asylum. Oh, yeah? Grace counters, “at least I wasn’t the one locking myself away. Is that how [she] wants Julia to grow up? Ashamed of who she is?” Alma smacks Grace, immediately following it with an apology that doesn’t stop Grace from slamming a bunch of noisy kitchen instruments to the ground. Kit walks in with his wood and, seeing the plumes of bitchfight-smoke still hanging in the air, suggests a family meeting, which everybody declines. That night, he sneaks out from bed next to Alma and joins his more artistic lover in the living room. They’ve got the rainbow asylum connection and bond over the time wasted behind bars; Grace oozes treacly joy over their “miracle babies,” their precious life, and her love for Kit and Alma, but she wants to “embrace” the future, and that means that Alma needs to open her mi— GLUG.

Alma sinks it to her a few more times before Kit pins her to the ground, but it’s obviously too late (because, you know, axes). Alma cries that she couldn’t have the aliens return as their rude houseguests, and entreats him to hide with her from the little green men as Grace expires bloodily on the carpet. Now we’re back where we began, which is very tidy other than the fact that it makes no sense. Alma may have been in denial, she may have been sort of a closed clam about her emotions, and I wouldn’t have even put it past her if she wanted to poison Grace just a little, but I needed hella more buildup to this event. I can not only see the wizard behind the curtain here, I see the wizard up at 2 in the morning draining his millionth Corona and saying, “You know what, fuck it. I can’t keep writing dialogue for these three.”

How’s about we just skip forward to 1968 and beam ourselves into the Briarcliff common room, where Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) is playing Candyland with Pepper (Naomi Grossman) and a Whitman’s sampler of other, unfamiliar patients. As if to prove that it’s really 1968, the television is playing a news broadcast of a press conference announcing Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. Monsignor Timothy (Joseph Fiennes) enters the ward and addresses Jude, who informs him that “Jude is dead” — and though she’s not dead, she’s dominating Gum Drop Mountain, she does have a death certificate, as Monsignor Timothy previously informed Lana (Sarah Paulson) when she arrived to spring Jude from the joint. Jude has been renamed Betty Drake, she bitterly reminds the Monsignor, but eventually submits to leaving the card table to talk with him in a no more private corner of the room.

He tells her that he’s leaving Briarcliff to accept an appointment as Cardinal of New York, and that the church has donated Briarcliff to the state for use as an “overflow facility.” He also mentions that he’s getting her out of Briarcliff, and that “the cruelty ends here.”

“The cruelest thing of all, Timothy, is false hope,” counters Jude, but he puppy-dog-eyes her into believing that he’s sincere. Optimistic, Jude is smiling over her brioche station when some of the aforementioned overflow arrives, but her good humor is ruined and replaced by the willies when she sees that one of the new patients is a very handsome — while at the same time extremely evocative of Roy Orbison — Angel of Death (Frances Conroy). The Angel of Death doesn’t seem to know that she’s the Angel of Death, but Jude is sure of it and really unhappy at the prospect of meeting her demise right before she gets a taste of freedom. Even though they’re speaking different languages, her obvious fear makes it pretty easy for the Angel of Death Doppelg?nger to pin her as her personal bitch. Rattled, Jude tells Pepper “there are storm clouds brewing” and hopes that the Monsignor will get her out fast, but Pepper isn’t so sure, mostly because the Monsignor is a lousy person, and rarely does anyone return to Briarcliff to accomplish what they promised when they left. Alma shuffles in the front door with her state-issued toothbrush, because we had to do something with her character, right?

When Jude enters her cell for the night, she sees her new roommate, the Angel of Death Doppelg?nger, luxuriating on the top bunk. Jude’s dismay is profound: She doesn’t want to die, plus (like all terrible roommates) the AoDD has pilfered her smokes. “Everything in this cell belongs to me, and that includes you,” says the AoDD, which means that Jude’s got to really watch her leftovers from the Cheesecake Factory and her expensive shampoo. Roommates, amirite? She tells the AoDD that she wants nothing to do with her, to which the AoDD responds, “You’ll change your tune.” The AoDD attempts to seduce Jude, who declines and retreats to her crappy bottom bunk to turn into a human rock of tensed muscle until their joint lease runs out.