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It's allll happening again. The crassness. The perversion. The contempt for the laws of God and nature. And that's just Adam Levine in the first five minutes. Yes, Our Show is back, and nobody's the same. It's 1964 in New England, and Kit Walker (played by Season 1's mopey undead teen Evan Peters) is working at a gas station and surreptitiously married to an African American girl. One night, she heads for the kitchen for some post-coital munchies, and while she's gone, aliens descend and the lights get bright and gravity inverts and probe-ables get probed.
Meanwhile, at Briarcliff Manor for the criminally insane, Jessica Lange is the morally rigid, sadistic Sister Jude; Lily Rabe her quivering understudy Sister Mary Eunice; Joseph Fiennes the kindly Monsignor Howard; and James Cromwell the man of science Dr. Arden. And since this is American Horror Story and the show's motto is still "Show everything, all at once," no time is wasted on speculation. Might Sister Jude hold a torch for Monsignor Howard? Her heavy-breathed fantasies of straddling him in red lingerie say YES. Think Sister Eunice might have a dark side? Well, she's into getting whipped and secretly in cahoots with Dr. Arden, who -- and I know you were wondering -- is absolutely experimenting on patients and removing their brains in order to study the nature of human evil. No more questions? Good.
So into this madness steps Sarah Paulson as Lana Winters, inquisitive reporter (with a secret lesbian partner at home, played by Clea DuVall) ostensibly writing a story on Briarcliff's dual role as sanitarium AND successful bakery (!!), but really she's there to get the goods on a newly-arriving patient who is said to have murdered three women, wearing their skin on his face, and thus earning the moniker "Bloodyface." When Bloodyface is led into Briarcliff in shackles, we see it's our alien-abducted friend Kit! Kit maintains his innocence (it was the aliens, man!), not that Sister Jude believes him, and he's introduced to the rogue's gallery of inmates, including Chloe Sevigny as "Shelly the Nymphomaniac," Mark Consuelos as the aggressively unpleasant Spivey, and Lizzie Brocheré as the seemingly kind and helpful Grace. (All this, and we don't even see top-billed Zachary Quinto in this episode at all, by the way.)
So Dr. Arden abducts Kit from his room on his first night and intends to experiment on his brain, while at the same time Lana gets Sister Eunice to sneak her into the asylum so she can find Kit and get her story. Lana gets attacked by... something, while Dr. Arden discovers an implanted microchip in Kit's neck... which proceeds to sprout arachnid-like legs and scurry away, so there's THAT running loose in this hellhole now. The morning, Lana wakes up strapped to a bed, and Sister Jude informs her that rather than let her leave and report what she's seen, she went and threatened her live-in ladyfriend with exposure (she's a schoolteacher) unless she signed the papers to commit Lana for treatment of her unnatural inclinations. So Lana will be staying for a while.
Oh, and there's also a framing story in the present day, where Adam Levine and Mrs. Channing Tatum are taking a sex-and-horror honeymoon tour of sites of famous atrocities, so obviously they're in the ruins of Briarcliff. You know how this goes: they have sex on an operating table, they find a secret door, something tears off Adam's arm, and as Mrs. Channing runs down the corridor, she comes face-to-face with the flesh-mask-wearing Bloodyface!
Featuring Doubt, as performed by Jessica Lange and Lily Rabe; the Multiple Miggs scene from The Silence of the Lambs, as performed by Mark Consuelos, Sarah Paulson, and Lily Rabe; and selections from the Beasts of the Southern Wild score for no goddamned reason.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on American Horror Story: A whole other story entirely that will have no bearing on Season 2, but just know that it was BANANAS.
Currently: Despite everything we may have heard about this season taking place in the 1960s, we begin in the present day with a pair of Lovers played by the self-satisfied cheekbones of Adam Levine and incredibly fortunate Jenna Dewan-Tatum. They're wandering around the trash-strewn brambles surrounding some sort of condemned building, though the camerawork is so tight that we can never get a good look at the place. Still, there's an abandoned baby doll hanging from a tree in the woods, so you tell me what kind of place it is. Adam -- or "Leo," I guess -- is taking Jenna's (Teresa's) photo and being all, "Oh babe, you're so sexy." He exposits that they're on the last stop of their "Haunted Honeymoon Tour," so we know this is an infamous locale of some renown. As happens to most happy couples in stories such as these, the danger gets them horny and Teresa beckons him inside, as he starts singing "Here comes the bride," because she's his bride and he's about to make her come. With his penis and stuff.
Inside, Leo and Teresa explore and mack and deliver some much-needed exposition. Seems Briarcliff started out as the premier tuberculosis ward on the East Coast. 46,000 died within its walls. "They shuttled the bodies out via an underground tunnel called the death chute," Theresa says, before making Leo promise to do her in the death chute. Um... so to speak. More kissing, more exploring, more expositing. The Catholic Church bought it in '62 and turned it to a sanitarium for the criminally insane, earning a reputation for not letting anyone out. Its most famous resident was a serial killer named "Bloody Face," and what a coincidence, the lovers pass a crude graffiti of Bloody Face. They're both so glib about it! If only something harrowing would happen to them! Leo finds an operating room of some kind -- judging by the restraints on the gurney and the equipment in the room (still), this was where the electro-shock was administered. Theresa immediately wants to be strapped down to the chair and that's where they start doing it. I can happily say I've now seen Adam Levine lick his fingers as a lubricating strategy, so thanks for that. She stops him mid-thrust, because she hears a noise and she's getting off on the thrills even more than she is on him at the moment, so she wants to go see what it was. Maybe it's Bloody Face! She's so insanely horny by the spookiness of it all that she excitedly tells Leo she'll totally let him put it in her ass. You guys, I have missed this disgusting show. They come upon a door that's locked, but there's a mail slot, and she calls him a pussy until he sticks his arm inside to investigate. He pretends something's grabbing at him to get her to jump, which of course sets her engine revving all over again. She decides the sensible thing is for him to reach inside with his phone, to get a better look around and while he does that, she will offer moral support in the form of a blowjob. (Yes, yes, "oral support," fine.) And so they do, in one of the best ideas anyone can have while in a haunted asylum. Alas, we'll never find out if Adam Levine is a screamer or not (he is, come on), because something reaches out for him from inside the room and grabs ahold of his arm. He screams, she screams, the camera gets really hyperactive, and in one rather exhilarating flourish, whatever it is rips Leo's arm clean off. Theresa screams her way into our opening credits! Yay!
Once again, the AHS credits are the scariest thing going. Madness and body parts and religious iconography and nuns straddling bound patients, and someone crawling up a flight of stairs backwards and upside down, and then the ivory statue of the Virgin Mary SMILES AAAAHHHHH!
After the opening credits, we're placed in the year 1964, where one assumes the bulk of our story will take place. We're introduced to a gas station attendant named Kit (played by Evan Peters) who was, of course, our beloved ghostly teen Tate last season. Tate went and got himself a flippy little hairdo and a bit of a Boston accent for Season 2 and given how eagerly this show cribs from other sources, I'm kind of hoping the inspiration for Kit was arrived at after someone watched the Footloose remake. After dealing with a rather rude little family of customers, Kit closes up shop for the night and starts singing alone to "There Goes My Baby" in a way that suggests he has a baby he's going home to. The familiar ding that heralds a new customer rings and Kit calls out that they're closed. In horror-movie parlance, this is a huge sign of danger, but in this case it's just a fake-out. Not that Kit's d-bag friends are much better, as the spring on Kit with beers in hand. They swipe the gun Kit keeps to the cash box, saying they need it to go scare some n-word who messed with the little sister of one of them. Kit says absolutely not and is clearly not down with the n-wording of the featured friend, who looks like if Giovanni Ribisi weren't mentally disturbed. Sane Giovanni sees he's struck a nerve and starts needling Kit about how he's heard rumors that Kit has hired a maid, and then grab Kit's Hershey bar and starts making suggestive mention about the "chocolate." So he either wants to do Kit in the bum or he's heard that Kit's seeing a black girl. Either is possible. Both maybe!
We get out answer after Kit returns home to his chicken farm (okay?) where he greets a lovely black girl who he addresses as Mrs. Walker. She calls him Mr. Walker and they are married and in love, but society is hostile to them so they must keep a low profile and you're already pissing me off, 1964. Pull your shit together. Poor Kit can't even wear his wedding ring outside the house. He wants to go public, but she's too afraid. The world may change one day, but not today. So instead, they're just going to have some frisky-yet-sweet sex before dinner. For some reason, the music for these scenes is either a knockoff of the Beasts of the Southern Wild score or the real thing, and I can't quite explain why either would be here. Lord knows why I'm making a fuss about the music when Kit is getting progressively nakeder. Afterwards, there's glowing to be done, but alas, the roast is still in the oven so Mrs. Kit does her wifely thing (hey, the sexual revolution comes later, I guess) and tends to it in the kitchen. Suddenly, lights illuminate the bedroom from the outside and Kit springs to action, thinking the local crackers have come to harass. He throws his clothes on (BOO!) and grabs his shotgun, yelling to his wife (Alma?) to stay in the kitchen. (For the record, she doesn't respond and we don't see her again.) Kit's in the yard, yelling for Sane Giovanni to show himself when another bright light shines on him, this time from above, in classic alien abduction formation. So... that's on the table now. Alma yells for help from inside and Kit races to find her. The house is already looking ransacked, the light keeps shining, there's some noise that blasts Kit's ears out, and all of a sudden, he's lying on the floor of his living room... and that's when the gravity stops working. He's up on the ceiling, then back on the floor and (after the telltale sound effect of a Polaroid camera whine -- a la Texas Chainsaw Massacre) we see some flashes of Kit strapped to an alien table, being poked at by long, extraterrestrial fingers.
The thing we know, it's a bright, sunshiney day and Sarah Paulson is driving her convertible up to the gates of Briarcliff Manor, now in its heyday. She introduces herself to the guard as Lana Winters (the "a" in Lana is flat, rhyming with Hannah) and says she's with the Gazette working on a story. Oh dear, the Gazette has lost so many reporters who've gone snooping for stories in places like these. But she's let on in anyway and starts roaming the grounds. She's started from behind by cried of "Play with me!" coming from Pepper, a microcephalic who is very obviously supposed to resemble Schlitzie from Tod Browning's Freaks, complete with the knothead ponytail and unibrow and girlish dress. Pepper is also the latest of Ryan Murphy's developmentally disabled characters which he likes to trot out, make fun of for a bit (because, you know, everybody should be mocked equally) and then show that they can be just as mean and awful and human as the rest of us. It's all a part of Murphy's black-hearted little worldview that, while I get it on an intellectual level, it's still sometimes hard to enjoy. Anyway, Pepper hands Lana a flower and is then scolded by Sister Mary Eunice (Lily Rabe, who played the dead mother ghost in Season 1) to leave the nice lady alone. Lana says she was just being friendly and harmless, but Sister Eunice informs her that Pepper is not, indeed, harmless. She drowned her sister's baby and sliced its ears off. See! Just as terrible as the rest of us! Welcome to Briarcliff, Lana.
Sister Eunice takes Lana on a tour of Briarcliff, including the spiral staircase that seems to exist only so crazy people in hospital gowns can shuffle up and down like zombies ("Sister Jude calls this her Stairway to Heaven"). Speaking of Sister Jude (Jessica Lange, obvs), she's in her office, in the process of shaving the head of Chloë Sevigny, whose character is officially named Shelley the Nymphomaniac, so we can all have a bit of fun with that. Sister Jude is not happy that Sister Eunice has barged in here and exposed her harsh disciplines to a reporter like this, but she sends Shelley out to the common area to show the other patients her "newfound immaculacy." "You think I'm full of shame and regret for what I've done now, Sister?" Shelley rails. "You could shave me bald as a cue ball and I'd still be the hottest tamale in this joint!" Oh man, is Chloë Sevigny ever perfect for Murphy's brand of on-the-nose monologuing. Jessica Lange, it should be noted, is serving up a hard-bitten New England accent, reminiscent of Meryl Streep's work with the Bronx accent in Doubt. Alone with Lana, it's contentious from the start, with Lana naturally inquiring about what Shelley did that necessitated this particular form of discipline and Sister Jude deflecting all questions. She thought Lana was here to write a story about their bakery. Because apparently, in addition to housing the criminally insane, the Briarcliff nuns also make a mean molasses bread. I can't WAIT for the episode when something truly gruesome gets baked into a pie.
Sister Jude goes on to talk about Shelley's nymphomania diagnosis and how it's a bunch of hogwash. Lust, she says, pure and simple. "Mental illness," she tells Lana, "is the fashionable explanation for sin." You can see how she charmed the Church into giving her this job, then. She notes that Lana is named like Lana Turner, the movie star. "There's a trainwreck of a soul," she sneers. She much prefers Jennifer Jones, obviously. She beckons Lana to sit and when Lana starts flattering her, as all good reporters must, Sister Jude deflects the praise to the vision of Monsignor Timothy Howard, the "real visionary" behind Briarcliff. She obviously has much admiration, even affection, for the Monsignor. "Oh, we have such dreams for this place," she sighs, in something close to ecstasy. She tells Lana that the bakery is but one part of a strategy for helping these diseased minds. Monsignor Howard speaks of the 3 Ps: Productivity, Prayer and Purification. Lana asks whether most of their patients are remanded by the state and while Sister Jude talks about the charitable nature of the Monsignor, taking in wards from the "gutter," Lana's making notes like "hiding something?" and "Lies [underlined twice]." They're interrupted by Sister Eunice, who's all in a tizzy that "the bad person" is arriving. She actually puts her hands up to her mouth so Lana can't decipher her Irish whisper. At this, Sister Jude thinks it's time to take Lana on that bakery tour, but Lana is up in her grill with about a million eager questions at once (and at the same time handing us some valuable exposition): she heard this was the day that the serial killer of women known as "Bloody Face" was being transferred to this asylum. The nickname came from an eyewitness account of him leaving the scene of one of the crimes wearing a mask made of human flesh. Lana was hoping to get a chance to interview him. Sister Jude shakes her head and disgust and says, "You're not the least bit interested in our bakery, are you?" Lana keeps making her case for getting to the bottom of the mind of a killer, but Sister Jude is all, "I got your number, hussy" about it and then, in that amazing accent I'm already in love with, declares, "Yoah outta yoah depth, Miss Lana Banana." Renew this show for a third season!
Outside, the entire staff of Briarcliff waits on the front steps in uneasy anticipation of Bloody Face's arrival. Sister Jude strides out in slo-mo and I guess Miss Lana Banana wasn't too objectionable to her, because she still gets to stand out front and take notes. Sister Jude's words to Lana about the killer hang over this scene, as she exposits that he's being turned over to their care by the states until it's determined whether he's fit to stand trial. The prisoner is led out of the car in shackles, but the camera is positioned at such dramatic angles that we can't see his face. Is it the thus-far-unseen first-billed Zachary Quinto? A scenery-chewing Denis O'Hare? The shocking return of Dylan McDermott? Nope... it's Kit. Alien-abducted, wife-adoring, cute-haircut-retaining Kit. As he passes Lana, he shoots her the classic "Help me, I'm innocent doe eyes." This is how prisoners get people to marry them, isn't it?
After the usual de-lousing procedures/cheap excuse to see Evan Peters's butt, Kit is strapped to a bed and sedated heavily. When he wakes up, Sister Jude is at his bedside for a little meet-and-greet. Right away, he turns to her and says he's innocent, but of course she's not the least bit interested in his claims. She tells him while he's here, he will repent to the only judge that matters: Almighty God. He tells her God doesn't exist -- not a god who could create the things he's seen. Sister Jude has heard his story about "little green men" and finds it preposterous. It won't fly here. "They weren't human," he pleads. "They were monsters." "All monsters are human," she snaps at him and before she leaves, she turns back for one shot, asking him if "her dark meat slid off the bone any easier" than his other victims. It's a shockingly cruel slur and Kit spits in her face for it. "You're gonna wish you hadn't done that," she sneers, and indeed, it earns him quite a few lashes from what appears to be a caning cabinet in Sister Jude's office. No good nun doesn't have a well-stocked caning cabinet!
, bouquet of flowers appears on screen and with those beautiful flowers is an envelope, and in that envelope is a card and the card reads: "Dear Joe R: We heard you were recapping this season. We hope this gift brings you joy. We love you and appreciate your support. -- AHS." ...Okay, that didn't happen, but it might as well have, as we enter the ward's common room to the peppy, Gallic strains of "Dominique," made famous by singing nuns and that one scene in Mermaids. This version has a more spooky edge to it, so you can imagine how effective it is. Kit wanders the common room and takes in the various freaks: Pepper's there, of course, as is an old man playing checkers and having fits, a Miss Havisham-esque old lady and Shelley, who is all over Kit's open-backed gown and promises him a good time in the "hydrotherapy room." I don't even know what that is, but if it leads to Shelley fucking Kit while he's being waterboarded, that... actually sounds about right for this show. Kit's obviously overwhelmed and wants to make it all stop, and the one thing it looks like he CAN make stop is the music, so he makes a beeline for the record player. He's stopped by a woman with big Tim-Burton-character eyes and a friendly demeanor. Also a terrible hairdo with stringy bangs, I guess so we all know she's also crazy. She tells Kit any one of these loonies will rat him out for a piece of candy, so is turning the music off worth the caning he'll get. Apparently it's a rule that as long as the common room is open, that song plays. I APPROVE. The woman -- who's name is Grace and I don't feel like waiting for someone to say it -- tells Kit he can trust her because she's not crazy. Might I refer you to your aforementioned hairstyle?
Now that Kit's met one friendly, according to the laws of movies set in institutions; it's time for him to meet one enemy. This one comes in the form of a bullying prick with bad teeth (braces) named Spivey and played by Mark Consuelos and I already know I hate him because he's played by Mark Consuelos. He basically says three words to Kit and then starts punching him, causing a huge ruckus in the ward. By the time Sister Jude shows up to break it up, Kit's already-woozy ass is on the ground and the record has been stopped. She strides across the floor, past cowering patients who have learned to fear her lash and puts the record back on. Then she nods to the orderlies and they rush Kit and crack him over the head with a club. Commercial.
When we return, Kit's strapped into a straightjacket in solitary. Lucky for him, though, Grace volunteered for kitchen detail and brings him a plate of food. She also offers him a smoke through the grates on his door. They bond over the fact that they've both been falsely accused -- he of murdering his wife (among others), she of "chopping up [her] family." He says he's not crazy and she's like, "Too bad for you, because if they find you sane, you're going to the electric chair." Kit silently agrees that that would be bad.
Back in the common room, it's the day and Sister Jude finds Sister Eunice weeping by the checkerboard. One gets the feeling that a weeping Sister Eunice is not a rare sight at Briarcliff, but she's got a specific reason today. It seems "Willie," the man we saw previously playing checkers and twitching, took ill last night, was taken to see Dr. Arden and is now dead. Sister Jude angrily demands to know why she was not "infoahmed," and the thing we know, she's barging into Dr. Arden's office. He's played by the sometimes-kindly, sometimes kindly-but-secretly-sinister James Cromwell. Guess which way he's going with this character. So immediately it's made clear that Sister Jude and Dr. Arden are capital-E Enemies, both having been given autonomy over their fiefdoms within Briarcliff. Dr. Arden is in charge of all things medical, and he sneers at Sister Jude thinking she can intimidate him like she does her patients. There's also a science-vs.-religion thing happening, where Dr. Arden shows off some species of flower that he created using gamma-ray mutation, which opens up a whole host of possibilities for the rest of the season. He says its proof of the power of science over nature. Sister Jude isn't here to talk about flowers, though. She says four patients now, counting Willie, have disappeared under his supervision. He says they all died, pure and simple. Sister Jude doesn't believe him and finds it curious that all four patients had no family to speak of; nobody to mourn or ask questions. She wonders what became of the bodies and while Dr. Arden says they were cremated, we see a flash of someone handing a dish of raw red meat into the cell of an unseen creature, who gobbles it up. Ten bucks on a Dr. Moreau scenario down the line. Sister Jude gives Dr. Arden fair warning: she's coming for him, and "I'll always win against the patriarchal male." Absolutely. Feminism. Yes.
Speaking of feminism and the patriarchy, our scene takes us to the home of Miss Lana Banana, who is telling her female cohabitator, Wendy, (Clea DuVall, who is back in our lives in this AND Argo, so start celebrating) about her day and what a battle axe Sister Jude is. Lana is chain-smoking like any good reporter while Wendy's taking in a quick joint before dinner. She encourages Lana to go after the story, blow the lid off of Briarcliff like was done with Bedlam, win a Pulitzer. Lana complains about her editor at the Gazette, who doesn't know his ass from his elbow. She's going to write the story and send it out to Life or some such magazine. Wendy supports her 100%, and as the women get closer, it becomes even more obvious that they're partners, not roommates. Lana goes to kiss her, but Wendy gets up to close the blinds first. Lana thinks she's being paranoid, but Wendy has a teaching job to protect and she already has a tough enough time getting evolution into the curriculum. I know evolution was a pressing issue back in the '60s too, but that still feels like wedging a modern-day issue into bygone times, and if anything is going to annoy me about this season of AHS, it'll be that.
Who's ready for some sensory overload? Observe as Sister Jude simultaneously recites the "Hail Mary" and cooks up some decadent Coq Au Vin, while the show intercuts scenes of Sister Jude dressing, revealing a scarlet-red negligee to be work underneath her habit AND she's dabbing perfume around her cleavage area, all the while opera music is playing. I'm quite literally never going to be able to look at sautéing mushrooms again without feeling a little dirty. This is all in preparation for a secluded dinner with Monsignor Timothy Howard, played with all the handsome blandness you expect out of Joseph Fiennes. He compliments her cooking as unexpectedly decadent and calls her a "rare bird" both of which Sister Jude accepts warily, not knowing for sure they're compliments at first. She then gets to the point of her little dinner meeting: she wants to discuss Dr. Arden. She was under the impression that she and the Monsignor were simpatico on their mission statement here and their vision of "madness as a spiritual crisis; an absence of God." Dr. Arden is seemingly not a man of God at all; where'd he find him? Monsignor Howard is curt as he says that the Church approved him, and they're better equipped to judge his godliness than Sister Jude. "Your rare bird has a nose for rodents," Sister Jude says, and I cannot WAIT for a full season of lines like that. Howard goes into a whole monologue about how science can co-exist with God these days. They're living in amazing times -- they've almost put a man on the moon; a Catholic was elected President. "Anything can happen if someone wants it enough." Sister Jude wonders what they want other than to save souls and Howard takes her hand. He says his vision is that Briarcliff becomes such a renowned success that they are asked to be Cardinal in Rome. Sister Jude picks up on the plural pronoun and he says that she is his right hand, after all. Wherever he goes, she goes. At this point, the Monsignor keeps talking while Sister Jude starts unbuttoning her habit. He says that she will become Mother Superior, and he will become the first Anglo-American pope. More undressing, that red negligee making a return appearance. "You'd enjoy Rome," he says. Aaaand off comes the wimple! She's now straddling him, his piousness and ambition having proved to be an irresistible aphrodisiac. Of course, it's all in her head. When Howard tells her, about Dr. Arden, that he needs her to be a team player, her reverie is broken and they're just sitting at the table, clothed and chaste and at an impasse. Dr. Arden needs full oversight of his domain, Howard tells her. "You look after yours."
Well, at the moment, one very crucial member of Sister Jude's domain, Sister Eunice, is wandering about the woods with a flashlight. She's looking for something and while she searches, we see flashes of a conversation she's had with Dr. Arden, about a mysterious "they" who are "getting hungrier." Dr. Arden agrees and says they need meat. We see Sister Eunice is carrying two buckets full of meat (mystery meat, to be sure) and in the conversation with Arden, she asks what "they" are. He simply asks her to trust him and she does. He smiles at her in a way that tells me they're probably doing it. God damn it. Out in the woods, Eunice sees something and places the buckets down. Whatever she saw rushes to its meat serving and Eunice books it back towards the hospital. She runs into Lana on the way, as Lana was apparently just wandering the woods hoping she might run into somebody who might be kind enough to let her in. Back at home, Wendy was like, "Baby, I'm as baked as shit right now and even I think that's an all-time stupid idea." I also love that Lana is just smoking a cigarette, all casual, smoking arm propped up at the elbow, you know the pose. Just hangin' in the woods. Eunice is like, "Can't stay here, we gotta go!" Jittery little creature, huh?
I don't know what Sister Eunice is in such a hurry for. It does NOT look like a lot of fun inside Briarcliff. Kit is in his cell, trying to eat that nice plate of food Grace brought him without the use of his arms, on account of the straightjacket. So basically Grace brought him a big plate of Chinese water torture. Suddenly, the door opens. It's Dr. Arden, but in Kit's distressed state, he sees flashes of alien fingers. "You don't belong in here," Dr. Arden tells him, just before injecting a sedative into his neck. "Not when there's so much to learn." The act breaks with that whining, Texas Chainsaw Massacre Polaroid sound. Never gonna get enough of that.
Back to our modern-day lovers. His arm gone, Leo writhes in pain until Theresa straps a belt on as a tourniquet. Apparently the nearest town is five miles away and though she starts to drag him, she realizes calling for help might be the better option. Only his phone is back in the car, so Theresa has to make a run for it. She tries to get outside, but there are locked doors everywhere. She ends up booking it down a straightaway...
...Which transitions nicely to Eunice and Lana taking Eunice's shortcut back into the hospital. Lana wants to know what creature Eunice was feeding out there, and she threatens to ask Sister Jude if Eunice doesn't give her some answers. "She scares you to death," she observes of our Bambi-like nun. Lana says if she lets her look around for five minutes, she won't tell Sister Jude what she's seen.
Meantime, Dr. Arden wheels Kit into his operating theater, locks the door, and places Kit in restraints. At the same moment, Sister Jude lurks around the ward. At the same moment, Lana pokes around, looking for her story. Back to Dr. Arden, who speechifies to a woozy Kit all about this is the time of science, not the time of superstition, blah blah.
Eunice leads Lana through the men's ward, where Spivey is acting up in his cell. "I made a mess, Sister," he says. "Want to see it?" And then Spivey flings poo through the grate at Eunice's face, a direct rip-off of homage to the (decidedly NSFW) Multiple Miggs scene in The Silence of the Lambs. So Eunice runs off, leaving Lana alone in the ward.
Back to Dr. Arden: "I hope you don't mind if I don't use anesthetic," he tells Kit, in that misleadingly calm voice of his. "It interferes with my readings." That right there is a GREAT, unshowy horror movie line. Good to mix those in with the howlers.
Lana creeps along. I halfway expect her to come across the animal-masked perverts from The Shining. She comes upon and open door and finds Shelley giving a beej to an orderly, who tells Lana she's not supposed to be in here. Lana: "I guess you better report me, then. Unless nobody saw anything." Obvs, Lana is looking for Kit. Shelley tells her they took him to solitary. She spots Sister Jude entering the ward at the end of the hallway and both she and Lana hide out in separate open rooms. Sister Jude snoops along but doesn't appear to catch Lana.
Kit asks Dr. Arden why he's doing this to him. Arden tells him it's his belief that the Devil lives not in hell, but in the recesses of the human brain. Evil is not a supernatural entity; it's part of us; and he's determined to learn as much about where it comes from and how it manifests itself as possible. And he means to do that my cutting into the brains of murderers, rapists, psychos and the like. Sounds like fun? Maybe not for Kit. He points to a cabinet full of brains in jars, obviously culled from patients. Boy, it's weird that Sister Jude didn't notice all those brains just sitting there backlit on the shelves like they are. Arden says ten of those brains put together don't match the evil that resides in Kit's "cute, blond melon." And how! Arden hooks Kit up to all sorts of monitors, he straps his head down, he props his eyes open with those Clockwork Orange clamps. Kit keeps getting PTSD flashes of his abduction, including both Alma and the Beasts of the Southern Wild music. He sees her scream "HELP ME!" and then get sucked up into the air. While Kit's getting these flashes (NEEDLE TO THE EYEBALL NOOOOPE!), Dr. Arden is puzzling over the details of Kit's alleged crimes. Not to pass judgment, see; only to understand methodology. Maaaaan offfff Scieeeeeence! Apparently Bloody Face's victims were skinned? From the feet up? Charming. Also, as a person who is forced to pause the episode multiple times as he recaps, it is my job to tell you that there is a shot of slender alien fingers creeping up between Kit's legs and towards his b-hole. Kit screams. Oh please, those fingers aren't thick enough to make anyone scream. Arden pokes around Kit's neck and find something hard. It's not a tumor. As we get flashes of the aliens scalpeling Kit's neck open to insert something, Dr. Arden scalpels at the same spot to remove the thing. It appears to be a microchip, hexagonal, about the size of a memory card, well outside of mainstream technology in the '60s (for humans anyway). Arden removes it and places in on a piece of gauze on Kit's shoulder. Suddenly, the thing sprouts six spider-like legs and scurries away! So we've got that running loose in the hospital. Super. Eye pokers and spider-chips. These aliens are really looking to freak me out.
While all this is going on, Lana's still wandering the halls. After walking past a door with visible claw-marks on the outside, she comes upon a door that looks mighty similar to the one that proved to be the final resting place of Adam Levine's arm. She opens the slot and peeks in, calling for "Mr. Walker." Suddenly, a creature rushes at the opening and grabs at Lana's head, slamming it into the door, knocking her out and sending us into the commercial break.
When we return, it's the morning, and a furious Sister Jude is reprimanding Sister Eunice in her office, presumably for letting Lana into the hospital. She's places their entire operation at risk, not to mention the Monsignor's life's work and lofty dreams. Sister Eunice is crying like an actual baby. Like a child who thinks her mother's yelling means she doesn't love her anymore. This is, like, clinical infantile behavior. Sister Jude goes on that maybe she was wrong to favor Eunice above all the others; maybe everybody else was right when they called Eunice stupid. Eunice calms down a bit and looks at the can that Sister Jude keeps slamming down on the desk. "Is that big enough?" Eunice asks. Ahh, right on time! Apropos of nothing sadomasochism! Eunice takes the inadequately hefty cane back to the cabinet (CANE CABINET! Anonymous Leather Club Pseudonym achieved!) and comes back with a cane that Sister Jude might as well call Big Betty or something similarly aggrandizing. Eunice then resumes her childlike crying and demands to be punished. Needless to say, Sister Jude is grossed out to the max, particularly when Eunice lifts up the back of her habit, pulls down her bloomers and bends over the desk, exposing her lily-white bum for maximum cane-age. She starts calling herself stupid and slamming herself down on the desk. Sister Jude finally pulls Sister Eunice's habit back down and slaps her once on the behind. She doesn't have time for this foolishness. But she warns Eunice that if she ever calls herself stupid again, she'll cane her bloody. Kinda throwing mixed messages all over the place, aren't we, Sister?
After one last ad break, Lana wakes up to the stern face of Sister Jude telling her that she's had an accident. The camera pulls back to reveal Lana's strapped down to a hospital bed. "Something attacked me," Lana says woozily, but Sister Jude callously chalks that up to a writer's overactive imagination. She says Lana "took a tumble." She's got a long recovery ahead of her here at Briarcliff. "You can't keep me here," Lana insists. "People will come looking for me." Sister Jude's piousness turns even crueler as she says, "You think so?"
Cut to Sister Jude speaking to Wendy at home. Wendy wants to see Lana right away, as her close friend. "We're like sisters." "But you're not sisters," Sister Jude says, knowing exactly the score and exactly what she needs to do to push her advantage. She spots a photograph on the mantle of Wendy with her students and speaks cryptically of the sacred duty of molding young minds and how Wendy would never intentionally endanger those children. She speaks of Lana and her "inversion," her homosexuality.
Back in Briarcliff, Sister Jude tells Lana that we both know the nature of Lana's "so-called monster in the closet." She says that something in Lana knew she needed help and that's why she came here.
Back with Wendy, Sister Jude says that Lana was caught trespassing in her mental ward. She came there under false pretenses, having no intention of writing about their bakery. You guys, Sister Jude was really counting on that publicity for the bakery. I think she's honestly hurt. "She wanted an inside look at a mental ward," Jude says, "and I intend to see that she gets it." Obviously, Wendy won't stand for this, but Sister Jude lays her threat bare: either Wendy signs a document swearing to Lana's compromised mental condition or Sister Jude exposes their little "love nest" and ruins Wendy's life. A distraught Wendy reminds Sister Jude that she has no legal standing to commit Lana, remember. Sister Jude's response basically adds up to "Yeah, yeah, legal mumbo jumbo, we'll make it work for the sake of the narrative." Sister Jude's got the deck stacked in her favor anyway: either Wendy signs Lana's life away or Sister Jude exposes the lesbian affair and has Lana committed on that basis. Her back against the wall, Wendy asks for the pen.
Back with Lana, a disingenuous Sister Jude says, "We're gonna slay that monster together, you and I." As she leaves, Lana calls after her. "Come back here, you bitch!" Her screaming is fairly effectively muffled once the door is closed. Out in the hall, Sister Eunice brings Sister Jude a set of keys that she stole, despite clear stone-tablet-based directives not to. Jude's like, "I hope that was the only Commandment you had to break to get these. Sister Jude takes the keys and approaches the door with the slot. Inside, she finds no monster. Er... well, that's not necessarily true. She finds Dr. Arden, cleaning up with a mighty strong disinfectant. There are claw marks on the wall -- something's been living here. Whatever creature was in here, whatever attacked Lana, Arden's had it removed and is playing dumb about it, saying the room's been empty for months and he just needs it for storage. Sister Jude doesn't buy it for one second and promises to ferret out whatever he's hiding. Of course, Dr. Arden is ready with a story about how he used to have a ferret for a pet, until it bit him, so he broke its neck. Yada yada, Dr. Arden is sadistic. Sister Jude calls after him that her eyes are wide open and she'll figure out what he's up to. He just smirks his god-emperor smirk at her and walks away.
Arden walks past the body of Leo in the present -- just another of the handful of effects that have blended past and present here. Leo's in rough shape, possibly bleeding out. Meanwhile, Theresa is running for daylight down that straightaway when a figure appears at the end of the hall. She shines her flashlight on the bloody face of... well, Bloody Face. Mask made of human flesh and teeth and blood and awfulness. So... theories? Bloody Face is immortal? Bloody Face has a copycat? Something-something aliens? It's so hard to think with Theresa screaming like this.
Joe R will miss Taissa Farmiga very much, but otherwise: GAME ON! He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at joseph.reid21@gmail.com.
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