AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW “Blood Bath.” Pictured: Chrissy Metz as Ima. CR: Sam Lothridge/FX
After a week’s hiatus, American Horror Story returns and as the title suggests, it’s bloodier than ever. While we’re still reeling from this season’s first major death (RIP Ma Petit), it seems it’s only the beginning of an onslaught of unhappy endings.
The episode begins with the Mott matriarch talking to a therapist, perturbed by her son’s recent behavior. It seems his sociopathic tendencies are not a new development: Gloria discusses how, as a child, Dandy proudly killed a cat after she complaining it had ruined her flowers. Some time later, a one-time playmate mysteriously vanished and was never seen again.
The audience never sees the therapist, though — should we be prepared for a shocking reveal down the road?
Back at the freak show camp, Jimmy returns from a search party for Ma Petit with her clothes. Unaware of Dell’s evildoing, the group concludes animals must have taken her. We’ve seen Jimmy torment himself over Meep’s death, so it isn’t surprising he’s devastated by the loss. Elsa’s violent tears, however, are less expected. Could they possibly be genuine?
“That’s quite a show you put on,” Ethel confronts Elsa in her tent, echoing our own skepticism.
It quickly escalates to a showdown between the two women. Some verbal sparring and slaps to the face later, Ethel draws a gun. She shoots, but the bullet bounces off of Elsa’s prosthetic leg, and Elsa is forced to reveal her secret past. Still, Ethel doesn’t relent.
“The curtain closes tonight,” she threatens Elsa. But, before she can fire another shot, Elsa throws a knife into Ethel’s head, killing her instantly.
The next morning, Jimmy finds Maggie crying in the main tent, surrounded by fellow freaks. She claims she was picking flowers for Ma Petit’s grave when a car crashed into a nearby tree … interestingly, driven by Ethel.
Of course, it’s a set up. We learn Stanley helped Elsa stage the superficial suicide. He tells her his job is to protect her, his client, but we know he’s probably in it for the body parts he can sell to the morbidity museum. A glance Maggie shares with Stanley seems to indicate she knows the truth, though Elsa’s crocodile tears convince Jimmy.
Back at the Mott residence, Regina, daughter of the long-dead Dora, arrives looking for her mother. Gloria continues to lie to protect her son, but Regina merely resolves to wait. If her mother doesn’t return in the next 24 hours, she’s going to the police, she says.
Dandy, meanwhile, sees his mother’s therapist, only to identify a murder scene in every Rorschach test he’s given. Bored by his visit, he agrees to go back to the doctor only if Gloria kills Regina.
“Regina wants to send me to the electric chair and if I go I’m bringing you to sit on my lap,” he tells her, calm despite the circumstance. He lights the family Christmas tree, the glow of its red lights making him appear all the more demonic.
Elsa misses Ethel’s funeral due to a trip to Miami, where she recruits a new freak: a morbidly obese woman named Barbara. She returns to find a depressed-again Jimmy drowning himself in liquor, angered by Elsa’s absence. He’s suddenly come a long way from slapping Paul in defense of her – now, he’s become completely disenchanted with the ringleader of the oddball circus.
But while Ethel’s death has Jimmy in mourning, it’s stirred something rebellious in Desiree. She rallies a few of the girls against Penny’s father, whom last episode deformed his daughter out of disgrace. Penny and her new posse kidnap him and exact revenge à la tar and feathering. However, Maggie intervenes before things take a turn for the deadly.
“If you do this, it will change you,” she pleads — seemingly a reflection of her own guilty feelings about her involvement with Stanley’s conning. But it’s enough to stop Penny … for now, anyway.
Maggie then tries to draw Jimmy out of his drunken depression, but it only upsets him. If the two were ever together, they definitely aren’t anymore.
At the Mott Mansion, Gloria hangs up on her therapist when he recommends she temporarily commit Dandy to an asylum. Dandy overhears though, and blames his mother for his own sociopathy.
“I was born of deadly sin,” he says, revealing his mother married her second cousin.
“Your father wasn’t the love of my life, you were,” Gloria replies. It’s hard to tell whether she means it in a maternal sense or a romantic one, but either way it’s a creepy confession.
In the eerie red glow of the Christmas tree lights, Dandy draws a gun and threatens to kill himself. When Gloria protests, he hardly hesitates to turn the gun on her. He shoots her dead, blood spattering the mirror behind her. He sheds a solitary tear, before composing himself once more.
The episode ends with a literal take on the episode’s title: Dandy bathing in a tub of his mother’s blood. It’s gross and disturbing, but also comically cliché — sort of a perfect encapsulation of everything that American Horror Story is.
Tidbits
- It appears that my wish for less musical numbers was heard! Not a single cover song plagues this episode … maybe that’s what makes it so standout?
- Where are the twins? They’re absent the entire episode without any explanation.
– Who is the therapist? Is the mystery of his identity important somehow, or am I reading into it?
The last American Horror Story: Freak Show, “Test of Strength”
The last three weeks of Freak Show have delivered on the suspense, but enough is enough. This week, we reach a boiling point at last, and by the end of the hour, our ensemble is one less.
The episode picks up where we left off last week when Jimmy arrived at the Mott residence looking for the twins. Disappointingly, there’s no showdown between him and Dandy. He finds Bette and Dot dressed to the nines and sharing an ice cream — clearly not the tortured prisoners he expected them to be.
Bette tells Jimmy how Dandy has treated them well, and his claim that it was he, not Jimmy, who had saved Jupiter from the killer clown. Jimmy remembers the night in the woods, and quickly recognizes Dandy not as any hero, but the wannabe clown who tried sawing Maggie in half. Upon this realization, Jimmy urgently begs Bette and Dot to come back to camp.
Bette, torn between Dandy and her sister, ultimately chooses her sister. She always will, she tells Dandy, and the two leave with Jimmy. The twins’ departure angers Dandy, and will surely send him into an even deeper, darker level of psychosis. Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before we know for sure: it’s the last we see of Dandy for the rest of the episode.
We return to the freak show tent where Jimmy makes his singing debut: a rendition of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are.” Is it great, or even necessary? Not really. But it’s preferable to another one of Elsa’s David Bowie covers, at least. The song serves as a soundtrack to a montage of scenes: Candy striper Penny cares for a still recovering Paul.
Dell drinks alone at the bar, looking for his two-episodes-dead prostitute lover. Stanley drinks there too.
Post-performance, Jimmy confronts Elsa about the twins, but Bette and Dot defend her with a made-up story that they had asked Elsa to let them experience the “finer” life.
Why would the twins choose to protect Elsa rather than admit the truth? Why, to blackmail her, of course. Bette promises they’ll keep quiet (and out of Hollywood) if she lets her tell jokes between songs, eat caviar for breakfast and dye her hair blonde. Dot solely requests 50 percent of the box office. Backed into a corner, Elsa complies.
(Side note: Dot eventually confides in Elsa that she wants the box office money for, unsurprisingly, the separation surgery. We don’t know just what Elsa’s going to do with this information, but it’s probably something horrible.)
The twins aren’t the only ones with blackmail on the brain – Stanley, having seen Dell at the gay bar, decides to use it against him. Stanley gives him 24 hours to bring him one of the freaks, dead, and Dell’s sexuality will remain a secret. Will Dell be able to carry out Maggie’s unfinished business? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, Ethel and Desiree have formed a friendship out of their shared hatred for Dell. The two arrive at their doctor’s office for another joint visit, but are greeted by a “closed for business” sign on the door. Inside, his daughter tells them he committed suicide. Unaware that Dell had threatened the doctor’s life (and his family’s), she blames the women.
“You killed him,” she shrieks at them. “Get out, you freaks!”
Late that night, Maggie and Jimmy lie in bed together talking, apparently an item (does Dot know?). Maggie still wants to take off, but Jimmy tells her now isn’t the time. It actually seems like now would be the perfect time, given the daily possibility of death, but perhaps Jimmy has more avenging and advocating for his fellow freaks to do.
Across the campgrounds, Dell tries to follow through on his deal with Stanley. He tries to kill Amazon Eve in her sleep, but she wakes. Eve is perhaps the only freak able to physically match the strong man, a poor decision on Dell’s part: She barely struggles to beats him into submission.
The next morning Jimmy resolves to talk to Dell.
“You take care of him or we will,” Ethel tells him.
Jimmy confronts Dell, who ultimately agrees to talk over drinks in town. The conversation veers far from the incident with Amazon Eve as the two take down shot after shot — it isn’t long before Jimmy gets sick. It’s all part of Dell’s plan it seems. With a brick in hand, he ambushes an incapacitated Jimmy in the alley outside. But Jimmy starts talking about Dell’s father and brothers: the “Toledo Lobster Clan.”
“You gave me these,” Jimmy tells Dell through tears, referring to his own deformed hands. “I want to hear you say it, you’re my father.”
Dell is silent for a long time before he finally caves, dropping the brick and embracing Jimmy in a hug — a long-awaited and emotionally cathartic moment, albeit another murder plot gone awry. The two return home at dawn singing drunkenly arm in arm. Dell brings Jimmy to his trailer, and tucks his son into bed for the first time. It’s both a funny and heartwarming scene — are we sure this is American Horror Story?
Candy striper Penny arrives home to her waiting father, but tells him she’s only there to pack her things. He warns her of the shame she will bring him, but she defends her love for Paul.
“What are you going to do, kill me?” she fires at him.
Not exactly. As it turns out, Penny’s dad has an “artist” friend happy to tattoo Penny’s face and fork her tongue, making her a bona fide freak all herself. It’s a shockingly sadistic form of discipline. Somehow, Dandy seems adorable by comparison. It’s American Horror Story, all right.
But the evildoing doesn’t stop there. Dell finally delivers on his deal with Stanley, cruelly tricking Ma Petit with a new dress only to break her neck when she thanks him with a hug. RIP Ma Petit.
The episode ends at the American Morbidity Museum’s unveiling of their latest acquisition — this time, no mere fantasy.
While it’s sad to say goodbye to the adorable Ma Petit, someone had to die, and soon.
We’d otherwise be ambling along on suspense alone, similar to last season’s long and disappointing road to the “next Supreme” reveal. Now if only there were fewer musical numbers.
