…and devour each other as they are consumed by inescapable madness.
When a show attempts to cover as much territory as American Horror Story: Asylum, viewers will always be caught between enjoying the good parts and being bewildered by the bad.
On episode seven of Asylum, “Dark Cousin,” this balancing act comes to forefront, as the show attempts to juggle most of its major plotlines in an oddly structured though generally enjoyable hour of television.
In the past several weeks I’ve lauded this show for how far it was willing to go into the psychology of its many characters and their tumultuous relationships, downplaying a large portion of the show’s supernatural elements.
That being said, I always knew that the demons, aliens and assorted creatures set up in the first three episodes would need to return to the fold eventually, and “Dark Cousin” is our first glimpse at how series creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk intend to marry these two divergent, almost contradictory aspects of the show.
There’s a strong emotional thread running through “Dark Cousin,” built off the sobering theme of acceptance in death. Even though there are plenty of cheesy moments to make you cringe, this episode takes us to one of Asylum’s darkest corners yet while also expanding the show’s mythology.
This idea is personified by the return of actress Frances Conroy, who played one half of the ghostly maid Moira O’Hara in the first AHS series. Here, Conroy plays the Angel of Death, a kind celestial being that can be summoned to take people away when it’s their time to die.
The Angel, though heralding death, also brings a sense of calm to every scene she enters, despite her ghostly appearance. This lends to the episode’s dark, depressive tone, and makes for some exemplary scenes.
On the other hand, the Angel’s crow-like wings – which pop up anytime she takes a life – are downright laughable. Every time the wings pop out it almost feels like the punch-line at the end of deeply disturbing scenario that wasn’t trying to tell a joke. Truthfully, the wings don’t really work with this new character, other than to drive the point home that she is in fact an angel.
These campy moments happen all throughout the episode to many of the characters, especially Sister Mary Eunice, the theological counterpart to the Angel. Despite Lily Rabe’s intense performance – her acting alone saves her otherwise cliché confrontation with the Angel – her telekinetic superpowers are laughably campy on an episode of Asylum that simply has no room for such moments.
Because of all these mismatched attributes, “Dark Cousin” is easily the strangest episode of Asylum yet, if only because the directorial choices make it such an odd viewing experience.
The structure is another noticeably off-kilter aspect of the episode. Instead of giving us a few characters to follow throughout and check up on once or twice every act (which would be the standard), “Dark Cousin” is built in layers, starting with Grace, then moving to Sister Mary Eunice, then to Lana Winters and Oliver Thredson, then Kit Walker and then finally to Sister Jude before wrapping up each segment’s loose ends in the final minutes.
It’s not quite as straightforward as that in its final presentation, but for the most part, this rolling format is present throughout the episode. As it chugs along, each character’s overarching story is touched on, with most of them stopping to meet the Angel at one point or another.
Sadly, many of the scenes are marred by seemingly inappropriate story choices and several moments of cheese-ball antics.
To be fair, Sister Jude’s storyline still manages to avoid all of this, once again placing Jessica Lange on a show-stealing pedestal. In keeping with the odd structure, Sister Jude doesn’t appear until a solid twenty minutes into the episode (without commercials that’s half the episode, mind you), after which she is the central focus until the very end.
Last week, Sister Jude lost her leading role at Briarcliff amidst the many, many ongoing scandals. Intent on proving Dr. Arthur Arden is a Nazi as a means of reclaiming her position, Sister Jude came to find her Nazi-hunter-for-hire bleeding out, apparently murdered by none other than Sister Mary Eunice.
Now, with nothing left to live for on and the guilt over her 1949 hit-and-run still eating her away inside, we finally see Sister Jude crack and consider suicide, which in turn calls in the Angel.
Given the weak first half of the episode, Lange’s acting in the latter section is worth the price of admission. Her distraught appearance and actions in the home of the girl she believes she murdered all those years ago is absolute gold, especially when it turns out the girl is grown-up and perfectly healthy.
Lightly supernatural, deeply emotionally disturbing – I say it over and over again, but this segment proves why Asylum can be so good, and yet the creators’ decision not to revel in it, instead attempting to force campy horror moments down our throats in the same hour of television just doesn’t make for balanced, enjoyable programming.
And when I say campy, I’m not just talking about supernatural powers either. “Dark Cousin” is chock-full of inexplicably brain-dead character choices, most of which land our heroes right back in Briarcliff.
Kit, for instance, has only a small role here, in a scene where we see him escape custody during a meeting with his lawyer. What’s his next move? He sneaks back into Briarcliff to save Grace – which I’ll buy – but he goes through the same door he wasn’t able to escape out of in episode three, letting one of Arthur’s creatures sidle in behind him.
Then, in a tidy two minutes, we see Kit find Grace, Kit kill a monster, Grace jump in front of bullet and die and then Kit get recaptured. It all happens just a notch too fast and feels cheap after the very interesting plot directions that Asylum was willing to go in previous weeks.
While Sister Mary Eunice’s magic powers are downright silly and the cannibal monster Kit encounters isn’t all that interesting either, the worst part of “Dark Cousin,” by leaps and bounds, is the totally lame ending the episode gives to the otherwise engrossing story-arc about Lana being kidnapped by Oliver/ Bloody Face.
Between episodes four, five and six, Lana’s capture and subsequent torture was arguably the best portion of the show, giving us not only a great story about Lana but a back-story for Bloody Face.
Here, however, Lana’s story goes from ironic to laughably contrived. The ludicrous series of unfortunate events that land Lana back in Briarcliff is a classic example of what happens when you tell a screenwriter they have two pages to reset the plotline.
After giving us a highly disturbing sex scene – and to be honest, I’m not even sure how this HBO-quality pornography ended up on basic cable – Oliver suddenly decides he has to kill Lana. Apparently, the whole idea that Lana is his new mother and that she will write his story is no longer important.
Lana momentarily summons the Angel, but instead succeeds in escaping from Oliver’s dungeon. After running through the woods, Lana jumps in a man’s car in hopes he will drive her to safety.
But surprise, surprise, this guy is crazy as well, obsessed with the fact that women are evil (because his wife left him, or something) and refuses to let Lana out when she gets uncomfortable. Then, driving really fast, the man shoots himself in the head, crashing the car.
Of course, Lana wakes up in Briarcliff and no one believes he story about Oliver. So, what exactly was the point of having Lana get kidnapped?
When it happened on episode five, Asylum had suddenly presented itself as the kind of show that wasn’t afraid to take chances. On “Dark Cousin,” however, we seem to have landed back on the wheel-spinning soap opera antics that typified the first AHS season.
A good deal of “Dark Cousin” is still fantastic to watch, especially the latter half, and hopefully Murphy and Falchuk plan on tying together Asylum’s narrative threads with the gusto they seemed to have just nearly captured.
Tidbits:
-Grace’s death was a waste. Obviously the writers were trying to make us feel safe because Arthur brought her back from the dead, but really, her character did nothing except get Kit in trouble from beginning to end, and she never really felt like a fully-realized person.
-Where is Monsignor Timothy Howard? He never seems to be on the show, and I still haven’t figured out what his role will be in the finale. Obviously, this is Sister Jude’s show, but Timothy is the only character she doesn’t talk back to. Why is that?
-The flashbacks to Sister Jude’s days as a jazz singer continue this week, with us finally finding out why she became a nun. It’s pretty great, although hilarious that no one even attempts to make Jessica Lange look 20 years younger for these scenes.
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