First of all, did anybody pick up on the fact that Chaz Bono was in the first episode? He was one of the Polk’s, the one with the wife beater on. Knowledge is power!
At the end of this blog, there will be a TLDR version of what I wrote for your millennial reading pleasure.
It is going to be more of this style this week, so maybe the whole season will prove to be this way. My Roanoke Nightmare continues. Shelby is running, some lady is dancing (Lady Gaga?), and Kathy Bates is giving some speech to some people and just hammered something into a dude for some ritual. Shelby is just runny, but eventually stops when she sees a deer I believe. At the ritual, we find that the dude tied up is a deserter, and he stole some provisions. Yeah, that looks like Gaga. So he needs to pay penance, and they are putting a pig’s head on his head and Kathy is all yelling at him to speak and calling him a pig. Like his hands may be cut off. Either way, she deems that he be purified, and he’s getting tied up to this straight pole/limb and there’s a fire. Yeah. We keep hearing this pig like sound though, which is odd. Yeah, he’s getting burned, and then Gaga whispers to Bates, and they see Shelby, so she demands that they seize her. Cool. Run bitch, run. She makes it somehow to the road, seemingly easy and quickly enough, and almost gets run over by Lee. Lee took her to the hospital, and of course Shelby told the police what she saw, but the police couldn’t find anything. Shelby was also drug tested, but clean. Matt visits her in the hospital, and he wants to find somewhere else to stay, but she says no, she thinks it was the mountain men, and she can’t let them win, plus the whole money thing.
Roll Intro – It would have been cooler if she had been marked or something worse happened to her. And didn’t the one torch dude see her already, so why weren’t they looking for her instead of doing the whole sacrifice? Maybe I missed something because my head is really killing me, but I am connecting last week to this, and am slightly confused. I do like that maybe Kathy Bates will finally have a powerful role this season. She wasn’t very powerful in Coven, got got in Freak Show, and was rather ordinary in Hotel. All great roles, but not powerful really.
Lee talks about how Lee has full custody and how she feels bad, but Flora is brought there by daddy. Lee didn’t really want her there due to what was happening, but if she keeps a close eye on her, things will be fine….sure. So Lee offers to make her something to snack on, needless to say, Flora is out of her sight and has now disappeared. Go figure. Well, she can hear Flora talking to somebody, so that’s something. Flora has a “make-believe” friend named Priscilla, and she hangs out in this tiny little closet/crawl space. Lee asks her what they were talking about and Flora reveals that if she helps her, Pris will make her a bonnet, just like hers. How do they help? “Make it stop.” She is apparently tired of all of the blood. Then we hear some glass break, so Lee checks it out, and there’s a broken vase, and of course, a bonnet. Shelby and Matt have a boring conversation about what Lee is thinking. They decide to not move until they can sell at the very least, so they’ll fight back. At night, we hear a pig squealing outside, and Shelby is pissed and goes exploring with Matt in tow. Yeah, go back out into the woods at night, smart. There’s footsteps and then Matt and Shelby get separated. Are you fucking with me? There goes a pig running past Matt. These fucks finally meet back up and Shelby comes across a burning figurine, but huge, and a pig head and some pig parts, so that’s cool. Matt knocks it down and can’t put out the fire. Matt says that there was something demonic about it. Shelby is a bitch to the cop, and they are looking for the Polk Boys, and now they will have a squad car in their driveway. Matt says that Shelby was fierce. Isn’t that a term only gay men and women use when talking about somebody’s attitude? Just say…..Ryan Murphy……Man Ass. They lay down to sleep and Matt is woken up by the phone ringing. He goes to answer, there’s a lady saying “Please, they’re hurting me” but the phone isn’t even plugged in. He turns around to see an elderly lady, Margaret, who doesn’t want to take her medicine, so the nurses say that is backtalk, yes, the 2 ladies from episode one, and they shoot Margaret in the dome. Matt thinks that he must have been dreaming, and these nurses are spray painting M on the wall, for Margaret.
Matt runs out to the Cop, and needless to say, they found no evidence of those people in the house. No shit. Mason shows up the next day to pick up Flora. Flora is playing her game of hide and seek, tie to go hunting her down. They finally find her upstairs talking in the little closet space. She’s talking to Pris and was offering her doll to Priscilla as a trade so that she wouldn’t kill them. “They’re going to kill us all.” Lies, Lee is still alive giving terrible interviews, dummy. But at least they are saving Flora for last. Needless to say, Mason is pissed and rushing her out of the house and says that Flora isn’t ever come back to this house. He is calling the judge, and I don’t blame him, and of course, Lee fell off the wagon getting tanked and breaking Shelby’s bowl. There are also 6 knives in the ceiling, but Lee says that she didn’t do that. Matt gets her to bed and tells her to get her shit together. Shelby calls up to Matt for him to come to her. As soon as he leaves, the 2 nurses are bedside by Lee who is passing out. Shelby sees a woman outside, and Matt sees her too, so time to go out and investigate. Instead of the lady, they find 2 doors that open up to a ladder that leads down to a cellar. Lee sees the women, but they disappear. She gets up walks down the hall, hearing something, and on the wall are some bloody danging body parts, and she looks in the mirror and there’s Pig Head. OK, that was fun.
Down the ladder, Matt and Shelby go, but they were trying to find the girl, to see if it was a trap. It is well-stocked at the very least, and a TV and a video camera. The girl led them there, so time to play the tape. Oh hello, Denis O’Hare, the man on the video. He says that there are forces that won’t let him sleep, and they keep showing him things and even got physical with him. Man, he looks rough. He won’t go back in the farmhouse. He is living in the cellar and claims that he not crazy, but rather an academic, an author. The date is October 11, 1997. He says that this recording may be his last. His name is Dr. Elias Cunningham, and he is a professor at Bradley University. He came there 2 months ago to do research for his true crime novel, similar to Helter Skelter. His first 2 subjects were Miranda and Bridget Jane, who we know now as the nurses. They spent all of their time together and worked at an assisted living facility in 1988. They were suspected of being behind 2 deaths of elderly patients. One was this old black dude, with a sweet beard. They quit their jobs before any charges were filed and went to North Carolina and opened up their own assisted living facility. The place they purchased, the farmhouse, hadn’t been occupied for almost 15 years. The family before, a dad, mom, 2 girls, they suddenly vacated and left everything behind. He says that this may have encouraged the sisters to buy the place on the cheap. They had a lot of applicants, but they had a unique set of criteria for accepting applicants. They wanted families who were tired of taking care of the old folks and could just store them at a facility like this. That and the first letter of their first name. We see one lady’s name is Una. One of the sisters shoves a diaper into an old guy’s mouth and he dies. They chose the people they murdered based on the letter system to spell out their favorite word, MURDER! These bitches are crazy and deranged. It’s giving me a clue. So Cunningham goes through Miranda’s diary and this whole thing was like a game at first, but then an act of defiance. October 29, 1989, the police were called to check on the facility, and by then, the sisters were gone, no personal belongings there, but the bodies remained, and the word MURDER unfinished on the wall. So they try to clean up the house, make it presentable, all of that stuff, but each time they covered up the letters, each time that they would look away, the word would reappear on the wall. By the way, it is just MURDE. So they tried wallpaper. Matt puts things together from the night of his “dream”. So he goes to the house and he starts peeling off wallpaper in that room and there it is, MURDE. Well, time to go back to the video to see what the good doctor had to say. The official story is that 2 nurses killed 5 elderly people and fled the country. He knows the truth, they didn’t leave, but were stopped instead before they could finish their work. Something in the woods, or in the house. Dr. hasn’t been in the house for days, but he has to go back in to see what it is. Then we see handheld footage in the dark in the house, and he says that he knows someone is in there. We get a quick jump scare, he demands that they show themselves, and then we see a being, possibly Bates, and the camera stops, a thud in real-time on the front door, and it opens and there a bloody meat cleaver buried in the door. Holy fuck that was a long, but great segment.
Matt and Shelby just wanted out, so they approached the bank to see what their options are. The Bank wants to make no deal, and they agreed to buy the house “as is”. Shelby claims that the bank changed the address. The bank says it is what it is, and that they will buy it back at very competitive rates. Matt says that he didn’t think it could get any worse, but here comes Lee with Flora. Oh boy. Yeah, she just wanted to see her girl, and Matt and Shelby realize just how fucked this is. Lee just wanted to see Flora, but then I guess she just drove on back to the house, and Mason doesn’t know, obviously. Shelby gets Flora to go in the other room to work on homework so Matt can talk to his sister. Lee explains why she did this, and Matt is like, yeah, and this only making shit worse. Mason calls Shelby and she tells him that Flora is, in fact, there. Shelby tries talking him down a bit, and she does well, so he’s coming to get his girl back. Shelby then has the nerve to tell Lee that she understands why Lee did what she did, but that’s bullshit. Flora hears a girl laughing, so she is curious, and see her outside, and the girl waves her out visit. Well, Lee goes to say goodbye, but no Flora, of course. They start looking in the house, then the woods, a tree is marked with some bloody parts. Lee is crying and Matt and Shelby find her. Flora’s hoodie is like 70 feet up in a tree, but no Flora.
End Episode
TLDR Version – Shelby witnesses a human sacrifice in the woods, then makes it to the road and is rescued by Lee who brings her to the hospital. Lee brings her daughter, Flora, to the house for a visit, and she befriends, Priscilla, who is a ghost. A ghost who wants to kill everyone, and leave Flora to be last to die. Matt gets a phone call at night, but the phone is unhooked, he turns around and sees our 2 nurses, Miranda and Bridget, from the first episode, and they taunt and then kill this elderly lady, Margaret. The cops leave one officer there 24/7 to keep the family safe. Lee gets drunk as Mason doesn’t want Flora to ever visit there again, so Matt gets her into bed, and Shelby calls for him, and as soon as he leaves, the nurses show up. Shelby sees a being in the woods, and so does Matt, so they go out and investigate, and they find doors to a ladder to a cellar, with a videotape. On the video is Dr. Cunningham, who explains that crazy shit is going on, and he was researching the nurse sisters who killed 5 elderly patients, trying to spell out the word MURDER, but never got to kill their last victim. Dr. decided that he had had enough, and went in there to investigate, and calls out for someone, and we do see something as the camera goes crashing. Matt and Shelby find the painted letters MURDE, as they never disappear, even after cleaning. Lee sees some bloody parts on walls and Pig Head. A bloody meat cleaver ends up in the door. Lee then kidnaps Flora, but while they are dealing with the reality of it being illegal, Flora wanders off into the woods. They go out searching and find Flora’s hoodie hanging like 70 feet on a tree.
Final Thoughts – I gotta say, in my 9 Deuce discussion, I mentioned the connection to The Shining, and this spelling MURDER on the wall is yet another example. BAM bitches! This was actually better the second time watching it. I put on closed captioning to make out a lot of the opening sacrifice, which was done OK, but no real answers, more of a clusterfuck. We know that the guy is being punished because he wanted to escape. We don’t quite know who Bates or Gaga are yet, so that has my attention. Obviously, for me, the best part was Cunningham’s home video with all of that explanation. It was some of AHS’s best storytelling, and Denis O’Hare never lets me down. My concern is that we may not get much of him this season, which would be a shame. He has the most acting range out of anybody in the main cast, so you want to see him do more. At the moment, we need more info on why the sisters are trapped in the house, and if they can get that final R. We need to know more about Priscilla and what happened to Flora, who was supposed to be the final person. We need to know what powers Pig Head has, and for that matter, Kathy Bates. We need to know what the Polks know, as it seems likely that they will reveal some background info. We need to know how far back this goes, and what started it, and all of that stuff. So that’s cool.
All pictures used in this blog are for review purposes. They are the property of the FX Network, Ryan Murphy, and whoever else is involved.