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Dr. Arden manages to survive Anne Frank holding him at gunpoint, and thanks to both the intervention of Devil Eunice (who disposes of the Shelley Thing ... um, right near a schoolyard full of children) and the -day arrival of Anne's husband, a regular ol' American guy looking for his regular ol' American wife who's been suffering from post-partum. By this time, Sister Jude has already sought out the services of a, for lack of a better term, Nazi hunter (played by Mark "Tio Salamanca" Margolis), but now it looks like Arden's in the clear and Sister Jude is about to be shitcanned.
Meanwhile, Dr. Thredson is all of a sudden acting HELLA sketchy and not really bothering to conceal it, starting with his bright idea that Kit should record a confession of the murders he's been accused of. You know, for therapeutic purposes. He then shows basically no concern for Grace and her impending sterilization (more on her in a second) nor for Not Anne Frank, whose husband brings her back the day because she tried to kill her baby. I'm surprised it's taken us to Episode 5 to get a frontal lobotomy, but that's the treatment Arden carries out on our Not Anne.
So Grace. Before she can be sterilized (and really, Sister Jude's got enough shit to deal with), she is visited in her cell by a certain blinding white light, and before she knows it, she's on an glowy operating table with a pregnant belly and meeting Alma, who apparently lives on the spaceship. And who also seems pretty cool about meeting the lady who just boned her husband. time we see Grace, she's in the common room, bleeding out of her nethers like she's had a miscarriage and croaking to Kit that his wife is alive ... just as Kit is hauled away on murder charges thanks to the confession that Dr. Thredson submitted to them.
Right. Thredson. He tells Lana he's taking her out of Briarcliff tonight, and so he does, and back to his Very '70s Pad for the night. You know, so she doesn't get caught. While there, he pours her a glass of wine and offers her a mint out of his skullcap-shaped bowl, while Lana admires his lampshade that has nipples on it. By the time she wanders into his "workshop," she doesn't really have a lot of time to avoid the TRAP-DOOR down into his shiny modern kill-floor, where she is reunited with (the frozen corpse of) Wendy. Meet your Bloody Face, everybody.
Oh, and a despondent Sister Jude changes into her civvies and slaps on six coats of red lip for a trip to the bahhh and a one-night stand.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!I neglected to mention this last week, but we've now gone two weeks without checking in with our modern-day friends. I guess this means Adam Levine and Mrs. Channing Tatum are not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead. But we've still got the Cult of Bloody Face to deal with, right? Anyway.
We open on Sister Jude in her travel kerchief, driving somewhere in the inky black of night. She arrives at a shadowy apartment building and enters the apartment of one Sam Goodman, played by Mark Margolis, familiar for any number of characters but most recently for playing Tio Salamanca on Breaking Bad. This meeting is very clandestine on both sides. Goodman does his work in secret, it seems, while Sister Jude is having this meeting unbeknownst to Monsignor Howard, having been sent by Mother Claudia. Goodman accepts no payment -- he does this for non-monetary reasons. She asks him if he lost someone in the camps, and he pulls up his sleeve to reveal his tattoo: "Everyone," he says. He lost everyone. She hands Goodman a file on Arden, tells him about the possible "Hans Grouper" alias, and that he might have been an SS doctor. The file is thin, just a home address, which might even be a lie. Goodman says it probably is. He explains Operation Paperclip to her and says Arden may well have been given a brand new identity by the U.S. government. The camera is really working in this scene, roving over the room at the maps and head shots on the walls, peering into the mirror. He asks if she has ever seen him without a shirt on, which we both find pretty gross. Goodman says an upper-arm tattoo of his blood type was the mark that Allied soldiers put on SS officers. She asks if she should look for it, but Goodman says no. (Too bad; that would've been a howler of a scene.) If Arden really is a Nazi, Goodman says, the last thing you want to do is corner him.
Speaking of! Anne Frank chases a bleeding-from-the-leg Arden into Sister Jude's office, but only Devil Eunice is there, probably planning another pair of cracked glasses of something. Anne wants to prove to Sister Jude that Arden is who she says he is -- a monster. "You should see what he has in his lab," Anne says. At this, Arden fixes Eunice with a look and orders her to go. Anne, gun still to the back of Arden's head, says she can wait a few more minutes, after waiting all these years. Bad idea, since Frank is now behind her with a gun to HER head. Fun's over.
After the break, Anne wakes up in a straitjacket. She's alone in her room with Sister Jude, who informs her that Arden was taken to the hospital. Anne asks her if she saw the creature in Arden's office. Sister Jude asks her what she "thinks" she saw there, which bums Anne out because obviously this means the Shelley Thing was gone before anyone got to look. Sister Jude kind of slaps her out of her wooziness and says she's serious: what does she think she saw? Arden will be back very soon, possibly with the police, or the Monsignor or both. Anne will wind up on his operating table and Jude will wind up tossed out on her ear, unless they can prove Arden's guilt. Anne tells her to go into Arden's lab and find the thing for herself. Sister Jude said they already looked, and we see her and Frank combing through every corner of the lab. Not only was the Shelley Thing not there anymore, but the whole place looked scrubbed clean, which seems like a tall order even for Devil Eunice. Isn't cleanliness supposed to be to Godliness? Have we been lied to all these years? Maybe the Devil is just an insane neat freak. I'm getting off the point. Sister Jude wonders to Anne if maybe the creature escaped on its own, but Anne doubts that very much since the thing had no legs. Just then, Devil Eunice stops by, saying there's a man in Sister Jude's office. He's looking for his wife.
Cut to the office, where the man -- Mr. Brown -- shows Jude a photo of the family: him, his wife Charlotte, and their baby son David. Charlotte is "Anne Frank." He says the baby is a sweet little guy but he's got colic, so it's been very trying. Sister Jude is absolutely crushed by this revelation that Anne is indeed the liar she initially thought she was. Brown tells her that it all started when she read the Diary and saw the play when she was pregnant. It became a fixation for her, as she was the same age as Frank and also was told she resembled her. Jude asks about the tattoo, which really seemed to convince her. Brown tells her about walking in on Charlotte inking herself. We see this moment, delivered on soupy, overexposed Super-8 style footage, which is so in line with this show's Try Everything aesthetic that I would chalk it up to simple excess. But excess or not, the effect is SO unsettling, if only for the unanswered (unaddressed, even) question: if this is Super-8 footage, who is filming them? Not to mention that the footage is accompanied by a high-pitched whistling sound effect that I most often associate with 1950s movies about flying saucers. Plan 9 From Outer Space type stuff. Brown says once the baby was born and started crying all the time, Charlotte got increasingly agitated. She felt powerless. She'd start leaving the house to go research Auschwitz at the library. She became obsessed and ignored her family. More Super-8, as we see Mr. Brown discover Charlotte's classic Obsessed Person's Room of Obsession. Think any serial killer's wall of newspaper clippings. Or Carrie Mathison, really.
"Sounds like a classic case of post-partum psychosis," interrupts Dr. Thredson from the doorway. Sister Jude rolls her eyes at about the same moment I do and bemoans the arrival of "Dr. Buttinski." And, look, not that post-partum isn't the screamingly obvious diagnosis, but I love how Thredson can just declare it so officially off of a secondhand eavesdrop. He's just such a terrible doctor. Brown snaps that his wife isn't a psychotic. She's just a very emotional woman who just needs to come home. Thredson thinks that could be dangerous, but Sister Jude, whether eager to wash her hands of this liar woman or merely in kneejerk opposition to Thredson, says, "Did you hear what he said? The man wants his wife at home." And it's the 1960s, so whatever the husband wants in this situation, he gets.
A little bit later, "Anne" is being led downstairs. She sees Sister Jude and remarks that they put her in this uncomfortable dress, which she doesn't much like. Jude says it'll help "ease the transition," and brings Mr. Brown forward. She continues to insist that she's Anne Frank, but as her husband calls her Charlotte and begs her to come home to her baby, she gets nightmarish flashes of her old life: husband, baby, home, all accompanied by the harsh camera style and whine of the soundtrack. It's incredibly effective in conveying how terrifying this feels to "Anne." She begs Sister Jude to help her, which Jude says is what she's doing. She appeals to her about Grouper, but Sister Jude doesn't believe her anymore. "Anne" looks at the photo and the horrible domestic memories come back to her. "My baby?" she asks her husband, and though she still seems super uneasy and traumatized, he leads her away.
As the Browns retreat from Briarcliff, Thredson tells Sister Jude she's making a mistake. She tells him it's none of his concern. So instead he transitions to something that is his concern: Kit Walker. He demands to know about this "barbaric rumor" he's heard about sterilization. "It's not a roomah," Sister Jude says as she ascends the staircase. From the ground floor, Thredson gets haughty with her about how she's not a doctor and thus not authorized to conduct a medical procedure without consent. In response to that well-argued point, Sister Jude just looks down on Thredson, turns her palms up to him in the internationally recognized gesture for "IDGAF" and moves on to the rest of her day.
Speaking of Kit, he's still in his solitary cell, talking to Grace in the adjoining room. They can't see each other, but he imagines her to him, touching her face and her arms. They lament their imminent fate -- he talks about how he and Alma always wanted children. Grace says she doesn't regret what they did. Sister Jude is the one to blame, Grace says. "I think she's the devil." Footsteps approach and they both brace for what's to come.
It's Devil Eunice who opens Kit's cell, only to tell him that Sister Jude changed her mind. She said he showed signs of "true redemption," I guess during that last chat where he got all weepy about his probably guilt. Which makes Sister Jude's dismissal of Dr. Thredson's concerns even better, as she could have easily just told him she changed her mind but didn't want to give him the satisfaction. "You're being released from solitary," Eunice says. "Yay." Devil Eunice mirthlessly saying "Yay" is on Top 5 moments of the season, and it's a very competitive list. "What about Grace?" Kit asks, and Eunice assures him he hasn't forgotten about her.
Kit is led away and indeed Eunice moves on to Grace, but while Grace foolishly starts talking about how much she actually missed the awful food in the cafeteria, Eunice is like, "Oh no, you're not allowed food for 12 hours before the procedure." See, while Sister Jude saw redemption in Kit, she got no such sense from Grace. Devil Eunice smirks to Grace that she'll need to rest up as she goes under the knife first thing in the morning. Grace starts to freak and screams to be let out, to no avail. The camerawork, again, is bananas in this scene, sometimes peering down from like 20 feet above, the cell taking on impossible dimensions. Finally, when Grace is all thrashed out and lying on her dirty mattress, we see a light beam in from outside the door. A bright light. A too-bright light. An awfully familiar too-bright light. The camera pushes in on Grace's face, then to her eye, close enough to see the reflection of a bulbous-headed, spindly limbed creature nanoseconds before we cut to commercial. Gurl, u gettin' abducted, gurl.
"Dominique, -nique, -nique" says it's time for meds in the common room. Lana's looking pretty despondent and zombified right about now, and as she stares out the barred window, we see the POV of something advancing behind her. The soundtrack gets all intense and scary, and Lana jumps at the hand on her shoulder, but it's only Dr. Thredson. Cheap scares! You almost got me, show! I will now give no further thought to the symbolic meaning of such a shot sequence! Anyway, he's all "We're leaving here tonight, you and me. Meet me by the staircase after dinner." Sounds like a clever, well thought-out plan.
Thredson then strides down to his office, where Kit is waiting for their session. Kit's all worked up about how Grace is getting sterilized, but Thredson very plainly says it's not his problem. Because far be it from Ollie Thredson to interfere in Sister Jude's sovereign business. He's here to help Kit complete his very therapeutic therapy, wherein Kit realizes that he really did kill those women. The step, in Kit "giving [him]self-permission to believe it" is to commit a full confession to tape. Thredson has conveniently brought a recording device for this very occasion. Kit wants to make sure that if he does this, Thredson will tell the courts that he belongs in Briarcliff and not the electric chair. Thredson says yes, but only if Kit confesses like he really means it.
...Okay, here's the deal. I know I probably should have been playing the Which Main Character Is Bloody Face? parlor game since episode 1, but I'd been having so much fun with the show that it honestly never occurred to me. Obviously we'd find out that Bloody Face was really Gwyneth around episode ten or so, and that would be that. So I understand how the rest of you are totally justified in your gloating that you Called It (!), but understand that I kinda never gave a shit. HOWEVER. As soon as Ollie Thredson laid out this hella sketchy plan in the name of therapy, even dumbass me realized something was up. Obviously the guy is a family member of one of the victims or somebody else with an agenda to fuck over Kit Walker and send him to the electric chair hey you know who would have just such an interest in seeing Kit Walker executed for the Bloody Face murders the real Bloody Face OH WAIT. Anyway. Anyway, Kit goes along with this, because as an intellectual, Kit makes for a great underwear model.
So while Kit Walker is laying down tracks one through 12 of his hit album Hey, I Murdered My Wife -- Would the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Please Execute Me Now?, that very wife is appearing to Grace from her new home on the Cylon base ship. The images dissolve into each other pretty quickly, so it's hard to keep track, but it looks like Grace is naked and strapped down to a table with saran wrap, just like Kit was in the season premiere. Alma is there as perhaps a liaison on behalf of the aliens/Cylons/circus people. She tells Grace not to fight it, as that will only make it worse. Alma is also naked, and pregnant, I should note. Alma tells Grace her name and then backs away, to make room for the alien, which I'm just going to call Vagina Face for the sake of symmetry. Grace screams, and it's not super clear what the alien does to her, though a shallow cut does appear on her stomach. Whatever it is, she's scared as shit about it.
Sister Jude's in her office, trying to get ahold of Mr. Goodman. To, you know, cancel her order of Nazi research, I guess. Unless she also hired Goodman to take care of Arden? I'm not sure the Mother Superior would have sent her to Goodman if that's the kind of thing he does. Anyway, Jude tells whomever's taking Goodman's messages to tell him that she gave him the wrong information. She hangs up and of course Dr. Arden is skulking in her doorway, asking what wrong information she's referring to. She avoids the subject and says it's not important. Just tell him you fucked up your pizza order, lady. This isn't difficult.
Anyway, Arden wants to talk about what Sister Jude saw in his lab, since he's positive she went around snooping. But after he finds out she didn't see anything, he decides to go on the offensive, telling her he plans on approaching the Monsignor to demand her dismissal for gross incompetence. After all, on her watch, a patient was able to obtain a loaded gun and then was sent home without so much as a slap on the wrist. Sister Jude manages to be genuinely conciliatory and wonders if they couldn't start afresh, but Arden is not about to be that gracious. He says unless she plans to prostrate herself on the floor and beg his forgiveness, he's going to move forward with his plans to shitcan her ass. "You're through here, Sister," he gloats as he limps away. "And you know it." The sad thing is, she does.
Arden returns to his office and takes off his pants to change the bandaging on his leg wound, keeping the percentage of episodes this season where James Cromwell has taken off his pants solidly above 50 percent. Devil Eunice shows up and Arden gets all modest, but she sensibly tells him to relax and that all the nuns here have had nurse's training. Look, even beyond all the campy mischief, Devil Eunice is just a better, more competent person than regular Eunice. I am so very not looking forward to her eventual exorcism. She apologizes for that "untoward" little incident the other night (you know, the one where she presented him with her "juicy" vagina), and he smiles and says they can chalk it up to the barometric pressure and never speak of it again. The pickup lines on this guy! He thanks her for protecting him last night by removing the Shelley Thing from his lab before anyone could check. She clarifies that she was protecting the both of them, since she feels like a part of his research, even if she doesn't fully understand it.
While they're having this discussion, we see footage of Eunice dragging the Shelley Thing out of the lab. Eunice then begins jockeying for position in the likely event of Sister Jude's dismissal. It's not like she has to make all that hard of a sell -- Arden clearly wants her to assume the position. ...Uh, so to speak. Anyway, Arden once again compliments Devil Eunice on her ability to carry Shelley all the way out to the woods all by herself. Yeah, well, he doesn't realize she has devil-strength. She kinds of laughs it off, saying Shelley "weighed very little."
Oh God, favorite part alert! So there are all these kids playing in a schoolyard, and it's idyllic, with all the autumn leaves on the ground and everything, so you know something awful's about to happen. Two girls round the corner of the school to partake of the water fountain, and one of them hears something that she thinks she should investigate, on account of her not realizing she's on this show. She walks over to where a set of stairs descend to the basement of the school. At the bottom landing, the girl gets a good look at the Shelley Thing in the light of day. Legless. Blistered. I'm pretty sure tongue-less, but also there is a fucked-up teeth situation. But it's not how she looks. It's how she sounds. This rattling, wheezing, inhuman crackle when she breathes. Like she's crumbling from the inside out. The little girl screams and runs to her teacher, saying there's a monster. The teacher heads over to investigate, followed by the students. And while a lesser show might have done the she's-not-there fakeout, the Shelley Thing is most decidedly still there when the teacher looks. Teacher screams. Kids scream. Everyone runs away. And the last thing we see before cutting to blessed commercial is the Shelley Thing crawling up to the top of the stairs, hopefully to roam the streets forevermore. Everybody thank Devil Eunice for making that scene possible.
After the break, Sister Jude sees Charlotte Brown, the former "Anne Frank," being led back into Briarcliff, screaming and thrashing. Dr. Arden looks on and is quite troubled by her reappearance. He finds her in her cell -- in a scene filmed so all we see is Arden's silhouette from the doorway projected onto the concrete wall. The direction in this episode is showy as hell, but this is the rare series whose subject matter can accommodate it. Anyway, Arden lords over her as she cowers in the corner and scoffs that she's not too tough without her gun.
Meantime, Sister Jude's in her office, asking the husband why he brought her back so soon. He's at the end of his rope already. He thought if he brought her home, she'd get better, but her problems have only intensified. We see Creep-o-Vision of Charlotte throwing a glass at her husband and later dealing with a crying baby by trying to smother it with a pillow. Her husband tells Sister Jude how scared he is, for him and his child. He says Charlotte needs the care of a good doctor, like the one who spoke to them the other day. Sister Jude gets pissy, as she always does when someone requests Thredson's services, but she calls for Frank to bring him in.
Lana is cowering underneath a staircase, waiting for the clock to tick to 6 PM. Right on time, Dr. Thredson appears with his box full of things -- I guess it's his last day -- and tells her the grand plan is to, um, just walk out the door. Lana's all, "That's it?" But Thredson has magic powers of misdirection, like when he lights the front guard's cigarette to distract him as Lana exits the door.
Elsewhere, Mr. Brown sadly shuffles down the corridor towards his wife's cell, but as he goes to open the door, Arden exits. Brown notices the cane and guesses that this is the doctor his wife shot. He apologizes on her behalf and thanks him for not pressing charges. Arden icily agrees with Brown's assessment that his wife is out of his mind, but he says he has no plans to seek punitive measures -- not when there's a much more "humane" remedy available. Brown doesn't say anything, but he's clearly listening. Arden says they could perform the procedure tonight, in fact, and have Charlotte go home with him a "new woman." What's most reassuring about this plan is how Arden has to keep wiping away the blood that is dripping off his vampire teeth when he talks about it.
Out in the parking lot, Dr. Thredson -- clearly up to something terrible, I think we all realized by this point -- loads Lana into the passenger seat of his car. Frank catches up with him, though he doesn't see Lana as the trunk of the car is up. He tells Thredson that "Anne Frank" or whoever is back and her husband is requesting him specifically. Thredson, in all his psychological white-knightery, tells Frank that he doesn't work here anymore. "As a matter of fact, I never did," he says creepily, telling Frank to tell Sister Jude he said that. "To be more accurate," he goes on, "you could even say that 'Oliver Thredson' never existed at all, because he's an alias I gave myself to cover up whatever crazy-ass shit I'm really up to." "In fact," he goes on, "you might say we just ate Uter, and he's in our stomachs right now." Frank doesn't pick up on any of Thredson's real or imagined cues and returns to the building.
And because this show wastes absolutely NO time on bullshit transitions, we're already in the operating room for Charlotte's lobotomy. As I said in the recaplet, I'm shocked that it took until episode five for this show to get to a lobotomy. You'd think that would have been the first item on the checklist. (Also, I always thought that Melrose Place would forever hold the crown of campiest show to ever feature a frontal lobotomy as a plot point, but even Kimberly Shaw's alternate personality "Betsy" can't top this show at its campiest. Bravo, Ryan Murphy.) Anyway, poor Charlotte. The camera is fully sideways at this point, because why the fuck not? In the guise of comforting a nervous Mr. Brown, Arden boasts that he's performed so many lobotomies that it's become as routine a procedure as filling a cavity. Comforting!
Meanwhile, Sister Jude is in her office praying to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. This is no hollow piety, either -- this woman desperately wants guidance and a righting of her ship. Frank interrupts her with word that Lana Winters is nowhere to be found -- he can only conclude that she's off grounds. Nobody thinks to tie her disappearance to Thredson leaving the hospital just now, but okay.
Jude just looks at him with an exasperated sigh, like "Hey, why not one more thing?" She sits down and tells Frank a story from her latch-key childhood. Seems she kept a baby squirrel for company (and, like, of course your worldview is gonna be incredibly pitiless like Jude's is if you invest emotionally in bastard creatures like squirrels at a young age). One day, she came home to find the squirrel dead; she'd forgotten to feed him for a couple days. So she laid him on table and prayed for hours, but when her mother came home, she simply screamed at the sight of it and threw it in the garbage. Sister Jude says her mom worked hard and came home exhausted, so she couldn't have known how cruel that was. She wailed to her mother that God didn't answer her prayers, and whiskey-swilling Mother replies, "God always answers our prayers, Judy. It's just rarely the answer we're looking for."
Throughout this whole impeccable monologue (seriously, Lange has never been better on this show), the camera has steadily pushed in on her anguished face. She tells Frank it's all over for her. He chooses not to contradict her but instead kindly tells her not to blame herself -- men will never accept a strong woman in charge. In his opinion, she never really had a chance. Why Frank! Way to buck the stereotype of your gender and working-class station in life to show an awareness of the patriarchy!
So as Sister Jude changes out of her habit and into her street clothes, becoming once again plain old Judy Martin, Arden places a cloth over Charlotte's eye and performs that sickeningly familiar spike-through-the-eye-hole procedure that has come to represent the lobotomy in our culture. Seriously, HOW DOES THAT WORK WAIT DON'T TELL ME. The music goes all crazy Douglas Sirk as the lobotomy switches to Sister Jude applying harlot-red lipstick at a dingy bar; back to the lobotomy, back to Judy Martin at the bar getting picked up by a strange man; back to the lobotomy, back to Judy lighting up a flirty cigarette. Two brand-new women being forged right before our eyes.
After the break Thredson returns home with Lana, who's like, "Cool! Thanks and all, but maybe I should go to MY home." Thredson -- who would like Lana to call him Oliver, so Ollie it is -- says that home is the first place they'll come looking for Lana. He tells her first thing in the morning, they will go to the police and get to the work of shutting Briarcliff down. He tells her to relax and he's going to "prescribe" a little something to take the edge off. She nervously says she doesn't want any more medication, but he's all, "I mean wine, silly!" Everything's great right now! Good times.
With Thredson out of the room, Lana gets some time to look around the place. Thredson's home is essentially Don and Megan Draper's swank '60s pad from Mad Men, so it's a pleasant view all around. Here's where the hyper-stylized direction of this episode really pays off, by the way. For once, the camera is flat and steady and relatively calm, which makes everything else seem WAY too still. And quiet. It's utterly chilling how quiet things got. She goes to make a phone call, but Thredson's hand comes from off-screen to hang up. "No calls," he says amiably. After all, he's at risk here, too. They can't get caught before they go public tomorrow. Lana says she was just calling a friend to ask after Wendy, but she finally sits down with her wine and accepts Thredson's flattery. He says she's going to win a Pulitzer for her piece about the asylum. "You're the person to tell my story." I feel like lightning should have crashed outside for that particular line. RED FLAG all over the place.
And the thing is, Lana totally catches on. She knows something is weird. But she's in the guy's house already and a freakout will do her no good, so she just kind of changes the subject and toasts to "taking down Briarcliff." Then ... oh, then. Then Thredson turns on the lamp, and the camera switches focus to the lampshade, which very clearly and obviously has two darkened areolae on it. And, look, I'm no expert in '60s home décor, but I am almost positive this clashes with basically everything in the room.
...Okay, not everything. It certainly goes with Thredson's mint bowl which we see, when he offers Lana a mint, is clearly the top portion of a human skull. Have we all caught up? Are we on the same page? Lana notices both of these things, but she's trying VERY hard to remain cool. At the same time, though, Thredson knows he's drawing her attention to these things. He has her, he knows it and now he wants the satisfaction of knowing she knows it.
Claiming the wine went straight to her head, Lana excuses herself to use the restroom. She starts frantically trying to open locked doors, but the only one that opens leads her into a dark closet. By the time she finds the light, Thredson's in the doorway behind her. The room is a small little workshop, with tools hanging on the wall, lamps and such on the table, a full human ribcage with attached vertebrae over in the corner. Big pieces of dried skin all over the place, really. She's still somehow not screaming. He's all, "So you've found my little workshop," telling her about the lampshades he makes. Still not screaming but shedding horrified tears, she asks him what material he uses. His reply: "Skin." Then he presses a button on the worktable that releases a GODDAMN TRAP DOOR beneath Lana's feet, sending her plummeting to the floor below. For what EARTHLY reason would this guy possibly have a trap door in his WORKSHOP of all places? Is his plan for every one of his victims to enter his home and stumble upon his handiwork? Is this merely a failsafe against detection? Is EVERY room in this house equipped with such a device? American Horror Story, you have once again delivered delightfully nonsensical thrills.
Briarcliff. Kit enters the common room and finds Grace sitting in an armchair. She's catatonic and bleeding from between her legs. He assumes this is an after-effect of the sterilization operation, but she doesn't have time (or the energy) to correct him before the two cops from last week return with a warrant for Kit's arrest. They read the list of his victims, the last one being Alma Walker. Alma's name snaps Grace out of her daze. Kit tells the cops to talk to Dr. Thredson, but they inform him that it was Thredson who handed them his taped confession. LIKE, DOY, KIT. Grace is now desperately trying to tell the cops that it's a mistake, that Alma Walker is alive, but her voice is a sad, desperate rasp, not unlike Kate Winslet calling for the lifeboats at the end of Titanic. Kit hears her, though, and when she tells him, "She's alive," he begins struggling all the more. "I saw her!" Grace hollers as Kit is being dragged away. "Alma's alive! I saw her!"
Ollie Thredson's Pit of Despair. It should be noted that the décor in this subterranean pleasure dome is cold and white and very modern. Very Hostel. Very "end of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Lana wakes up to find her ankle chained to the floor. Just at the edge of Lana's reach is the frozen corpse of Wendy, causing her to scream out in grief. Thredson approaches from behind a plastic curtain, calmly saying he took Wendy out of the freezer, where she'd been for a while now. He's long since discarded the glasses and has donned, once again, a very Hostel attire -- dismemberment smock; threatening black trenchcoat. He talks about how he usually skins and beheads his victims, but he had to keep Wendy on ice -- literally -- for "our purposes." See, he intends to continue their therapy. Which, and I'm just extrapolating here, I think means that Thredson's killing taboo-breakers? Lesbians and interracial couples? Trying to keep the old social order? We'll see how that shakes out in the weeks to come. For now, he wants Lana to start by kissing Wendy's cold, dead lips. Morbid. Lana is shaking. He tells her not to worry. "She won't bite," he says, before donning the Bloody Face mask and pointing to the mouth: "I took her teeth." Lana sure as hells screams at that.
I have to say, for as much as I didn't see the Thredson reveal coming until it was almost upon us, I'm quite happy that all the terrible therapy I had clocked in the past weeks has added up to something.
Elsewhere, our pal Judy Martin wakes up in bed to her bar fella in perhaps the tiniest, dingiest boarding house room ever. Horrified at her actions, she gathers her things and hightails it out.
And still elsewhere, Mr. Brown returns home to find his devoted wife and calm baby (did the baby get a lobotomy too?) standing in front of a disassembled wall formerly full of newspaper clippings. Gone is Charlotte's investigation into the horrors of Auschwitz. Here to stay is the pot roast cooking in the kitchen. He's very happy. She says she couldn't be happier. And as he goes to throw out the junked research, our very active camera pushes in one the few remaining photographs on the wall. The Shining-style, we zero in on one group shot. And in that one group shot, one man. And that man is our friend Hans Grouper. Just over the left shoulder of Adolph Hitler.
Joe R can't believe it's only episode five. EPISODE FIVE. He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at