This is definitely the kind of guy you would trust to kill you on an operating table under the premise that aliens will hopefully swing by and resurrect you? No? Right.
For a show that so often succeeds at making every one of its diverse cast of characters morally complex, this week’s episode of American Horror Story: Asylum was disappointingly black and white.
As the climactic battle of good and evil draws nearer, everyone at Briarcliff Manor is being forced to choose a side. Episode nine of Asylum, “The Coat Hanger” (sounds like a Seinfeld episode, no?) directly continues last week’s mission of making sure the audience understands who is good and who is evil.
From a narrative stand point, the ninth episode of a series with 12 installments is the perfect time to start bringing the show to a close, but that doesn’t mean the show should have to lose its best element.
Granted, there are still a scant few who haven’t necessarily chosen a side – notably, Monsignor Timothy Howard – but all those characters that already have are not nearly as interesting anymore.
The best example of this transition can be seen in the how the show depicts the actions of the “good guys.”
Among Asylum’s apparent heroes is Lana Winters, who has been depicted from the beginning as a good person that falls into every bad situation she comes across. On “The Coat Hanger” Lana performs several questionable acts: upon finding out she’s pregnant with Oliver Thredson/ Bloody Face’s baby, Lana use the titular artifact to self-abort; later, she coerces a confession out of Oliver by threatening to abort the already aborted baby; finally, she plans to stab Oliver to death, again, with the coat hanger.
All of this is extreme and violent in only the way that AHS can deliver, but in making Lana out to be the heroine – especially after all the awful torture she’s been through – viewers never find themselves questioning any of Lana’s grisly actions.
Aside from obtaining the taped confession, all of Lana’s plans backfire – the baby is alive, and Sister Mary Eunice has let Oliver escape – so in the end, acting bad did not really afford her anything.
However, instead of this being a lesson to Lana not to let herself sink to level of Sister Mary Eunice or Oliver, her actions on the “The Coat Hanger” feel more like a presentation of the kind of contrived badassery that we can expect Lana to return to in future installments.
Even worse is the loss of ambiguity in Sister Jude. All season, her tortured psyche has carried the emotional core of Asylum. In the beginning, it was unclear whether Sister Jude was to be a hero or a villain.
Now, following betrayal after betrayal by everyone at Briarcliff, Sister Jude is interred in the institution for life, tossing around big talk about escaping just like every other poor unfortunate soul in the asylum.
As we find out on “The Coat Hanger,” Sister Jude’s near-death encounter with serial killer Leigh on last week’s episode has left her injured. Enticed, Sister Mary Eunice has jumped at the chance to frame Sister Jude for the murder of Frank the security guard.
Now, our apparent heroine Sister Jude now has only one mission in life – to destroy the demon.
(Side note: it’s around this point in the episode that Timothy strips Jude of her holy title, so we’ll be referring to Sister Jude as just “Jude” from now on – the Church on Asylum is a corrupt and evil place, and Jude has to separate herself from it in order to do God’s true work)
By the end of the episode, Jude is sharing a cigarette with Lana in the Briarcliff recreation room, the pair taking the first steps towards a partnership against evil. On the one hand, Jude’s character arc has been absolutely fantastic to watch over the course of the first nine episodes, but at this point, it seems like there is nowhere left for her character to go, besides the ultimate cliché of self-sacrifice.
Here’s hoping Asylum can be a bit more original than that.
Asylum’s other central hero is Kit Walker, resident do-gooder lacking any moral gray area whatsoever. On “The Coat Hanger” he makes a baffling pact with Dr. Arthur Arden, in which the pair plans to bring the aliens back to Briarcliff by killing Kit.
According to Arthur – who no one should ever trust, ever – the aliens will have to return to save Kit because he is at the center of their strange experiment. So naturally, Kit agrees to let himself die on Arthur’s operating table, believing that the aliens could possibly return with his wife Alma in tow.
The whole scenario is completely groan-worthy, even within the skewed internal logic of Asylum. There’s no reason for Kit to believe the aliens would bring Alma along and no reason for him to believe that they would be able to revive him.
Furthermore, why would he even believe that the aliens are actually what Arden is interested in?
Of all the show’s elements, the aliens are still the one major wild card. It’s unclear what side of the battle they stand on, if any, but it is perfectly clear that they are becoming a burden on the otherwise tightly plotted Asylum.
Meanwhile, while Arthur spends the majority of “The Coat Hanger” not doing anything particularly evil, the rest of Asylum’s baddies were up to all kinds of bad things.
Aside from lying about Jude’s involvement in Frank’s murder and helping Oliver escape, Sister Mary Eunice also took a back seat this week and let some of the other characters show their true colors.
Oddly enough, the most evil players on “The Coat Hanger” are fresh additions to the cast.
First, we are treated to the surprising twist that the man masquerading as Bloody Face in the modern-day portions of the show is actually Oliver’s son and likely the same baby that Lana is carrying.
It’s an interesting turn of events made even more interesting by the meta-twist of the son being played by none other than actor Dylan McDermott, who portrayed one of the morally ambivalent heroes from the original AHS.
Hopefully the 2012 storyline will tie in with the main 1964 storyline sometime soon.
The most interesting picture of evil on “The Coat Hanger” is the surprising return of Ian McShane’s psychopathic Santa Clause-themed serial killer Leigh, who appeared to die last week after his first cameo appearance.
Thankfully, he’s returned – McShane wonderfully chews scenery in this role, and every time he’s put alongside Jessica Lange’s Jude, sparks fly.
Having survived his wound from Jude, Leigh is now a part of Sister Mary Eunice’s cabal of evil. He fits the role nicely, first lying to investigators about seeing Jude kill Frank, and then playing off of Timothy’s greed and vanity as a means of escape.
Timothy wants so badly to move up in the Church that he looks right past the demon in Sister Mary Eunice and believes he can cure Leigh of his evils.
Of course, Timothy attempts to give Leigh a baptism and the murderer escapes, but not before crucifying the Monsignor.
With this act, Asylum shows us there is still some moral ambiguity on the show – will Timothy take this aggression as a sign that he needs to return to the word of God, or will he give into his own weaknesses and die? Both resolutions are implied by the appearance of the Angel of Death at the end of “The Coat Hanger,” but the true outcome remains to be seen.
While the increasingly black and white nature of Asylum may not sit well with fans of the show who have been enjoying its more ambiguous tones, it’s hard to fault a show for wrapping up its characters before the clock runs out on the series.
With the Asylum progressing into this new territory, here’s hoping the last three episodes can live up to the groundwork that’s been already been set.
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