Let's Do the Time Warp Again

S02E12

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Well we are just speeding through the decade now! Let's take this year-by-year:

In 1967, Kit and Grace and Alma are all living polyamorously with their two children. Things are tenuous, however, as Grace is becoming increasingly fixated on the alien creatures and their grand plans for them, while Alma just as urgently wants to never speak of the aliens again. When Alma starts to think that Grace is looking for a way to call the aliens back for them, she snaps and puts an axe into the back of Grace's skull.

In 1968, Judy and Pepper are basically running shit at Briarcliff and things are going as well as can be expected. Monsignor Howard then stops by to tell Jude that the Church has donated Briarcliff to the state and that he's also leaving to become Cardinal and also that he's feeling guilty enough to arrange Jude's release before he goes. That's when it all starts to go bad. Among the dozens of new state inmates is a butch boss who looks exactly like the Angel Conroy. Jude's grip on her sanity starts to loosen as this new inmate wreaks havoc and before we know it, Jude's completely lost it. The new director of Briarcliff informs her that Monsignor Howard left two years ago, Pepper is dead and there are no plans to release her.

In 1969, Lana speaks at a book reading and is haunted by the ghosts of her past – namely, Thredson and Wendy -- who give her shit for goosing her book with embellishments, sacrificing truth for a better story. She's also become quite the diva. Kit comes to see her, and after some pleasantries, we see he's pretty disappointed in her for not following through on her promises to take down Briarcliff. He informs her that Sister Jude is still alive; he knows because he saw her while visiting Alma, who was sent to Briarcliff after that unfortunate axing-Grace episode. Then, all of a sudden, Alma's dead, too. After identifying his wife's body, Kit approaches Jude, but she's too far gone to recognize him. Lana is sympathetic, but not so sympathetic that she's going to risk her red-hot literary career to do anything daring.

Finally, in the present day, Dylan Face tracks down what appears to be the last first-edition copy of Lana Winters's book in creation. He menaces the book store owner with tales of his plan to track Lana down, show her the book, reveal his identity and then shoot her in the head. The book store owner hands that book right over. Season finale week!

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It's 1967. We know that it's 1967 because of the embroidered/bedazzled calendar that hangs in the kitchen. The show kind of keeps us on the hook about where exactly we are right now, but I don't have to do that. We're at Kit's farmhouse. It's been two years since last we saw Kit, Grace and baby Thomas encounter a returned Alma and a Gender-Indeterminate Baby (it's a girl). They're all living together now in one big apparently-polygamous family. It dawns on us that we're hearing panting coming from the living room. Is it sex? Murder? It's American Horror Story, so it can only be one or the other. And indeed, after a sickening cracking sound, the thing we see is Kit Walker -- clad in a t-shirt and white underpants -- entering the frame bloodied and holding an axe. A dead body sits juuust out of frame. Oh, Kit. You poor dumb thing. Who talked you into doing that? One of the babies cries for Daddy from the other room. A freaked-out Kit calls out that Daddy will be there in a minute. To finish the job, maybe? What is happening? (Probably not. In a telling detail I missed the first time around, a tear streaks down Kit's face, joining the blood.)

After the break, it's still 1967, but in pre-axe murder times. We get a glimpse into life on the polyamorous farm. Alma washes the veggies and minds the children, while Grace obsessively sketches portraits of the vagina-faced aliens who abducted them. You get the sense that there's a division of labor wherein each of the women mothers her own child, but Grace is kind of dropping the ball with Thomas, who's running around the house with toilet paper. Also, Alma absolutely does not want to talk to Grace about the aliens and is pretty obviously not comfortable with Grace's obsessive interest in them. Kit, in the tradition of every man in this decade no matter how far down the hippie rabbit hole he's fallen (in this case, pretty far), doesn't notice any of this. He's too busy enthusing about the five of them heading down to such-and-such protest. I absolutely love the show's cartoonish presentation of the late 1960s here. It's just a pair of sideburns and a vague notion of "protest." Alma doesn't want to go to the protest, and Grace doesn't much care about anything but her drawings. Alma voices concern that the drawings might be too much for the kids to handle. Kit pusses out of a confrontation by simply taking Thomas off of Grace's lap and offhandedly complimenting Grace's talent. Alma is not pleased.

That night, Kit prepares to go to bed with Alma, but she's clearly ill at ease. She doesn't really respond to his sexual advances, so you know it's bad. She says she's bothered by Grace's obsession with the aliens, and Kit notes that she doesn't seem to ever want to talk about it at all. Alma thinks Grace is acting out because Kit isn't spending enough time with her. Kit kind of resents how Alma is attempting to parcel out his time with his two ladies, but Alma is clearly not doing this for some Machiavellian purpose. I think she honestly wants a harmonious household (and for Grace to quit it with the drawings), so Kit ultimately does go to Grace wearing those telltale underpants, which are now overcast with dread. (These are sentences you only get to write while recapping Ryan Murphy shows.) Grace is finishing up yet another drawing. Kit doesn't show much interest. Grace says they're not for her, but for their children, who have to know where they come from. Kit tries to calmly address her mania via Alma's concerns. Grace just sadly says that Alma wants to forget. But it's not the alien memories that trouble Grace. It's the memories of her going Lizzie Borden apeshit on her parents. She's worried she could lose control like that again, but Kit assures her she's a different person now. And with thoughts of clit-faced aliens and axe murder dancing in their heads, Kit and Grace make love.

Meanwhile, Alma's just in her own room just enjoying the quiet, when the lights flicker. Boy, that's gotta be one of the major drawbacks of alien abduction. Every light flicker must make you think it all ha -- HOLY SHIT THE BRIGHT LIGHTS ARE BACK. The buzzy alien sounds are audible, though maybe only to Alma. She screams for Kit, saying, "THEY'VE COME FOR US!" Grace gets to her first, helps her pull her shit together long enough for them to retrieve the children. Out in the living room, Kit's loading his gun and a Molotov cocktail crashes through the front window. Looks like this time it IS local hoodlums looking to terrorize the mixed-race couple (well, trio). Grace gets to stomping out the flaming curtains, Kit hightails it outside to chase the cowards and Alma can only cower on the floor, imagining a lifetime of this kind of fear hanging over her head.

A short while later, Kit is explaining to the cops how he's certain it was Billy Marshall and his band of dickless cohorts. Inside, Grace is wrapping a crying Alma in a blanket. The cop is overtly hostile to Kit, finally tipping his hand when he tells Kit he's heard about his family with two babies, "one Caucasian, one Negro," and how polygamy is "illegal in the state of Massachusetts." Hey there, Mr. Asshole Cop, I've watched enough David E. Kelley legal dramas to know that it's the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Kit returns to the house and Grace tells him that Alma is inconsolable in her room. He asks Grace how she's doing and she's like, "I'm strong, remember?" I think secretly Grace is enjoying how well she's comparing to Alma at this moment. She encourages Kit to go to Alma, but the look on her face says that she wishes he didn't want to.

The day (or a day), Grace is playing with Tommy and Alma is clearly on edge. When Julia cries out from the room, she brusquely tells Grace she's got it. Grace sees that Alma is pissed off and confronts her about it. Alma lays it down about the alien talk: she's sick of it -- sick of Grace talking about the worst experience of her life like it was a religious experience. Grace is like, "Well, it WAS!" The essential divide between these two women is spelled out as they argue: the aliens brought Grace back to life and gave her a child. They ARE the miracle workers. Alma, however, was happy at home in her bed when they took her away to probe-rape her, and when she came back, her husband had spent a year in an asylum and had a baby with a crazy French chick. Then it gets all I Heart Huckabees philosophical up in here. Alma thinks the aliens are senseless and cruel and random and never coming back (Isabelle Huppert slinks along in the background); Grace thinks the aliens are advanced life forms with a plan for all of them and are so totally coming back (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman listen in from the bathroom). Alma freaks out at Grace's certainty that the aliens will someday come back for the children. She doesn't want that, and if Grace does anything to make them come back... she's cut off from the rest of that sentence both by Grace and by the show's random foreshadowy intercutting of Kit splitting logs in the backyard. The conversation devolves quickly, as Grace talks about the aliens being drawn to Kit's pure empathy (that's one word for it), and Alma gets all finger-in-your-face-like "Don't tell me about Kit." Grace: "You think your life was so great?" Alma: "Before my husband came home with Lizzie Borden?" Grace: "At least I'm not raising my kid to be ashamed." Alma backhands her for that one, which she immediately regrets. She tries to take her hand to apologize, but Grace slaps it away. Once again, Kit comes in and has no ability to mediate conflict. He calls for a "family meeting," but Grace just picks up Tommy and goes out for a walk. Alma, meanwhile, just glares.

That night, Alma sleeps to Kit, who can't seem to sleep at all. He gets up and heads to the living room, where Grace is sitting on the floor, drawing more aliens. They talk in scriptwriter talk about how she never sleeps, but she thinks she's slept for most of her life and she doesn't want to waste another minute, and also love means never having to say you're sorry. She turns to face Kit and tells him she loves him and Alma and their miracle babies. She's not rueful, but rather openly hopeful and optimistic, happy in the way that people who honestly think they are blessed are happy. Still, she says, she won't live in fear, not like Alma. "The future is coming," she says, "we cannot hide from it. We have to engage with it. We have to embrace it." That embrace comes in the form of an axe to the back of Grace's head, courtesy of Alma. She throws another hack in, just in case. Kit throws her to the ground, screaming, "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE?" Alma yelps that Grace was going to call the aliens back for their children. She couldn't let that happen. Then she just starts repeating, "We have to hide, we have to hide," over and over like a crazy person. Again, this show gets crazier and crazier, but its central message -- simple (or simplistic) as it is -- remains the same: institutional repression leads to madness and violence and carnage. Every time. Kit, splattered with blood, goes to be with Grace as she bleeds out. Alma retreats into a corner. He kisses her head and then, with a familiar sickening crack, he pulls out the axe. We're then treated to a repeat of the cold open, this time with Alma visible off in the corner. Kit doesn't know what to do. He calls to the babies (Thomas, I think) that he'll be right there. The tear falls down his cheek. His world has come apart. He still looks good in the underpants, though.

After the break, we're at Briarcliff. It's 1968 and despite the fact that it's Briarcliff and Judy and Pepper are unjustifiably stuck there among the drooling masses, things are actually going pretty well. Or maybe I just put more stock into board games than most people. Jude and Pepper and some of the loons are playing some bastardized version of Candy Land that involves dice and playing cards in addition to the familiar color-block cards that are traditional to the game. "Gumdrop Mountain is mine, chickens," Judy declares, in a line that instantly makes the shortlist for best of the season honors. Across the room, the poor reception on the TV is making it hard to follow President Johnson as he announces the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Judy and the card sharks are more interested in the goings-on in the Peppermint Forest. I guess social justice takes a back seat when you've been effectively removed from society. One of the crazies, Percy, starts pounding on the TV and Jude hollers at him to knock it off. She observes to Pepper that his lithium levels are too high and "Dr. Miller" should be informed. Pepper nods like she's making a note of it for later. So I guess Judy and Pepper are, quite literally, the inmates running the asylum. Monsignor Howard stops by to ruin everyone's good time, and despite Judy's best efforts to ignore him (including passive-aggressively expositing that she was re-named "Betty Drake" after the Monsignor faked her death), he asks to speak to her privately. He's got news: he's leaving Briarcliff. He's off to become Cardinal of New York, which pretty much fits with the Church's position of letting employees ascend through scandal. Jude offers her dark congratulations and lights up a cigarette. He also informs her that the Church has donated Briarcliff to the state, which will now use it as an overflow facility. Nothing ominous about that! Finally, the Monsignor has decided to leave Briarcliff with a clear conscience, which means he's arranging to have Judy released. "The cruelty ends here," he says, both going farther than I ever expected in acknowledging his own role in perpetuating cruelty and yet angering my all the more by having the nerve to look beatific about it. "The cruelest thing of all, Timothy," Jude says with a shaky voice, "is false hope." But he promises her, pledges to "make a believer" out of her.

Some time later, Jude and Pepper are actually having a bit of fun, working in the bakery and listening to some Hendrix on the radio. The fun's about to end, though as a cattle call of mental patients is pushed into the ward -- this would be the overflow that the Monsignor spoke of. And who does Judy spot among the gaggle, but our old friend the Angel Conroy. Only not quite. It's Frances Conroy, of course, and she's got the familiar dark hair and pale complexion. But she's no longer dressed for a New Orleans funeral, instead wearing the familiar prison blues and a sad cardigan. Most tellingly is her face. Gone is the expression of kind pity, replaced by the cold, hard pragmatism of a lifer. Does she even look like the Angel Conroy to anyone else but Jude? Is this just a leftover jolt from the ECT playing a delayed joke on her psyche? We never really find out. But from the moment she sets eyes on this new woman, Jude's hard-won crown as the Queen of Candy Land vanishes forever. This is the beginning of the end. So Jude starts freaking out, all "I didn't call for you," and of course the Prisoner Conroy is only responding as a prisoner would, staring at her with dead eyes and telling her cronies to get a load of the Briarcliff queen bee. She advances on Jude and tells her there are two ways this can go: she can either sign on and rule the roost alongside her or just be "another dumb cluck." Frances Conroy is an utterly different person here. It's astounding. The accent work is subtle, the lower register of her voice is terrifying -- it's a complete transformation. It's the stuff that guest-actor Emmys were made of, if the guest-actor Emmy was in any way a meritocracy. Anyway, Jude's too paralyzed with fear of the Angel of Death to respond, even when the Prisoner Conroy puts a cigarette out in her loaf of bread. (Not a euphemism.)

Later, Jude ascends the staircase with Pepper and warns her of the dark clouds rolling in. She's going to be lucky to get out of here once the Monsignor's orders come through. Pepper cautions her not to put too much stock into Howard's promises. Jude assures her that she looked into his eyes and believed him. Pepper: "There's nothing there." Jude looks down from the landing at the influx of new patients. More souls to take care of. The irony is obvious but not un-poignant: Sister Jude has finally lived up to her calling to take care of the sick and tormented. As she looks down, Alma Walker looks up at her. A new patient. A new soul that needs saving.

Later on, Jude's heading back to her room, chatting amiably with Jorge the orderly, promising to pray for his mother's speedy recovery from such-and-such. The important thing here is that Jorge is played by Andrea's husband from Beverly Hills, . And that this is his only line in the episode. Sad day for a proud teen drama. Anyway, Jude gets let into her room only to find Prisoner Conroy in there, greeting her with a husky, "Hello, gorgeous. I'm on top." Bunk beds, see. Jorge tells Jude that everybody has to double up now and shuts the door. Jude still thinks this is the Angel going under deep cover and so continues to rail that she doesn't want her here. But Prisoner Conroy is on some lady-prison power trip, claiming everything in the room -- including Jude -- hers. She backs Jude into the corner, making sexual advances in her gutter voice and it's all so unsettling, but it's also kind of brilliant that for two seasons now, we've had this buzzy, brilliant TV show that has featured two women circling 60 facing off the kind of pitched dramatic battles of will that are almost always reserved for men. Jude tells Conroy to stay away from her. She's maybe now coming around to the idea that this isn't the Angel but still someone to be wary of.

Cut to a few days later or so, and Jude is unnerved, not able to concentrate at Candy Land -- clearly not the confident player-coach we saw before. Prisoner Conroy comes sauntering into the common room with her lady posse, staring down the other inmates. She leers at Alma, who flees to the other side of the room. She then approaches poor Percy and harasses him about taking his pills. She'd previously instructed him to squirrel them away, see. And she can't have him challenging her authority in front of everyone else. So, quick as lightning, she pulls out a shiv and sticks him in the gut. During the commotion, she does that prison movie thing where you pass the weapon from person to person through your entourage so you don't get caught with it. Percy ends up bleeding out on the floor while Jude stares at Conroy, who blows her a kiss.

thing we see -- as time begins to not really matter/exist -- Jude is in her cell bed, waking up to the Angel bending over her and, with the Prisoner's voice, asking for a kiss. Jude pushes her away, screaming, "I don't want to die!" Did this happen? At all? No idea, but Jude's clearly losing her marbles. The orderlies rush down to her room to find Jude beating on her roommate, screaming, "She's Death, I've seen her before!" It's not Conroy who she's beating on but rather some heretofore unseen prisoner. New roommate? How long has it been since she was assigned Conroy? Was she ever assigned Conroy? Does Conroy exist? Jude's mind is deteriorating faster than we can address these questions.

Jude's finally dragged in front of the new director of Briarcliff... who is in her old office, no less. She's in a straitjacket and possibly drugged. The director, Dr. Miranda Crump (which feels like it might anagram into something but I don't have the time to work it out), asks Jude if she knows where she is and who she's speaking to. Jude doesn't, exactly, but she knows enough to fake it and to say only of her assault on her roommate, "I don't like her." Don't give them any ammo, Jude. Crump notes that Jude has been through five roommates in two months and hasn't gotten along with any of them. This fast-forwarding of the timeline seems as much news to Jude as it is to us. Has she been losing time? She manages to just nod along with Crump's request that she make more of an effort to get along with her roommate, but then she brings up Monsignor Howard. She asks Crump if there's been any word from him about her release. Crump looks confused and finally realizes who Jude's talking about. Timothy Howard has been Cardinal of New York for two and a half years now and there have been no efforts to secure her release. Jude seems to think she spoke to Timothy just on Monday. Crump says she's confused and Jude rages out. She calms herself and them tells Crump to ask Pepper, as she was there. Crump again doesn't know until Jude reminds her: "The pinhead." This jogs Crump's memory; she says Jude was quite upset when Pepper passed. "Pepper died, Betty," Crump says, showing her Pepper's file. "The winter of '66, shortly after we took over."

Okay, bear with me as I try to work out the timeline as best I can. The chyron at the beginning of this segment clearly said 1968. Pepper apparently died in 1966. Monsignor Howard left Briarcliff in the care of the state "two and a half years ago," which means it's NOW 1968. So the Candy Land Diplomacy was never real, nor, seemingly, was Jude's hopeful conversation with the Monsignor. The Prisoner Conroy may or may not be real or at least may or may not look anything like the Angel Conroy. Like... no wonder Jude's gone crazy. I might too, having to keep all this straight. Judy starts to cry because she honestly doesn't remember that Pepper died. Dr. Crump is sympathetic, though of course her only remedy is to promise to have the doctor up her meds. That should definitely help. Oh, Jude. You really wanted to be the Queen of Gumdrop Mountain.

After the break, it's 1969, and we've left cozy Briarcliff behind for a bookstore filled with admiring (mostly female) readers, eager to meet the one and only Lana Winters, author of the 10-week bestseller "Maniac: One Woman's Story of Survival." After a rapturous introduction, Lana -- smiling, confident, no traces left of the haunted woman who escaped Briarcliff -- sits down to read from her opus. The prose isn't quite tortured, but it's rather insistent on heavy-handed metaphors and superlatives. And that's before she gets to the part where she just starts making shit up; unless we missed the episode where Thredson brought home another victim to kill in front of Lana. As she gets to the stuff that she clearly fabricated for effect, the figure of Ollie Thredson stars heckling her from the audience. "That never happened!" he objects. Lana, defiant, says that it's what he told her he WOULD do if she didn't comply. "It's still a lie," he says, accusing her of selling out to move more units. Lana says her job as a writer is to tell the "essence of truth." From the other side of the room, Wendy decides to join the party, castigating Lana for de-sexualizing their relationship in print by calling her a "roommate." "That part of my life wasn't pertinent to the book," Lana rationalizes. "It would have distracted the reader from the central theme." Thredson pitilessly accuses Lana of caring only about the fame. Stung by this accusation (coming from her own subconscious, obviously), Lana is speechless, and we see she's been kind of zoning out this whole time. Of course, this is interpreted as a very deep moment of truth by the moderator and the women in attendance, because "The Emperor's New Clothes" doesn't require a complete charlatan to apply.

Later, Lana is signing books for the assembled masses. She's also being a total nightmare to her assistant, snapping at her to go across the street if necessary to fetch her a cold Tab. in line is a familiar face: Kit Walker. Lana is overjoyed to see him, and gets up to hug her old friend. She tells him she was so sorry to hear about Grace and that she meant to write, but... you know. That's right. It's not that Lana didn't VISIT. She didn't even WRITE. That's tough. Kit doesn't even bother to let her off the hook, finding the most amiable way to be like, "Yeah, that would have been nice." Lana hauls out the excuse that will outlive time itself. You've used it, so have I: "Things have been soooooo crazy!" Lana's managed to turn into that special brand of douchebag who can pivot off of regrets that she didn't acknowledge the murder of a mutual friend to bragging about selling the film rights to her book. Not a good look, Lana. Kit tries very, very hard to be happy for her as she yammers on about hoping to get Tuesday Weld to play her. He finally asks her to go get a cup of coffee with him.

Cut to the coffee shop, Lana droning on and on about being on Dick Cavett. Kit tries to casually ask if she's been back to Briarcliff, but she breezes past that with the news that she's going to make Leigh Emerson the subject of her book, particularly his seven-nun killing spree after he escaped Briarcliff. "I thought of calling it Santa and the Seven Nuns." Lana, you sound like a fucking moron. What's happening to you?? She has the sense to look momentarily abashed, but when she asks Kit, re: the book title, "Too campy?" he snaps at her. "WHY are you writing about him???" He's just another maniac. Lana says that's her niche now. Actually, she says "That's my canvass," because why the hell not be the absolute worst you can possibly be? She blathers about how she has a unique perspective on the "stunted male psyche" because she "lived it." That's a leap if I ever heard one. Kit reminds her of her promise -- to him, to Jude -- that she would be an actual reporter and take down Briarcliff. All she can say to that is, "Things change. People change." She defends the life she made for herself, the one she crawled out of the depths of hell to claim for herself. Which is fair enough and Kit acknowledges that. She says she knows very well she could just as easily still be at Briarcliff, "drooling in the bread dough with those other lunatics." He cautions her not to go too far -- his wife is one of those lunatics.

Cut to Kit visiting Alma in the common room at Briarcliff. Which... either Briarcliff's visitation policies have gotten very permissive with new management or else their DGAF levels are at record highs. Also at record high levels? Kit's sideburns. I swear, every time the camera cuts back to them, they grow another quarter inch. He tells her stories about the children and Alma looks sad. She asks him to bring them around time if only for a few minutes, but one glance around the room -- catheters being pulled out, sexings happening in full view of everyone, just general madness and filth -- is enough to get her to reconsider. She tells him she doesn't know how he survived this place. Hey, back then there was a jukebox and a demonic spirit with an impish sense of fun. Those were the days, man.

Lana's pretty horrified at this news. "I had no idea she was there," she says. "Not anymore," he replies, and the thing we see is Alma's dead body on the slab. Kit was called in to ID the body. The nurse tells him there was no warning at all -- her heart just stopped. Alone with his wife, Kit apologizes for failing her, and Grace and their kids. He pledges to make it right, somehow. Back at the coffee shop, all Lana can do is gasp about how she and Kit are the only two still alive. I guess she's earned the flash of pride that peeks out there, but it's still pretty unseemly. Kit merely corrects her: it's not just them. Jude's alive too. Lana brings up that OBVIOUSLY FAKE death certificate that should disqualify her from ever writing a book again. Nice job believing that utter hogwash, Lana. Kit tells her plain: "I saw her."

After the break, we're back with Kit and Alma's corpse. After stating his intentions to bury his wife on the family homestead/alien landing strip, Kit exits through one of Briarcliff's many overcrowded corridors. On his way out, he spots a wild-haired Sister Jude shooing fellow patients away from the TV so she can watch her stories. Kit tries to get her attention, but she's too far gone and doesn't recognize him. Instead, she babbles to him about how "they" stole the rights to her life story and put it on TV. She points at the screen: "The Flying Nun" is on. She claims that Sister Bertrille has "got the devil in her." Well, that's not a very gracious way for Jessica Lange to speak about the woman who beat her out for the Best Actress Oscar for 1984. "She stole my hat," she raves, explaining how Devil Bertrille flew out of Briarcliff, but it's okay, because Jude can fly without the hat and one of these days she's going to fly her ass right on out of here. Kit looks at her with heartbroken pity. She's gone. He puts a hand on her shoulder, says "I don't doubt it," and walks away.

Upon hearing this story, Lana is sad, but clearly not interested in risking anything of herself to re-enter the Briarcliff fray. And if Jude is that far gone, honestly, why should she? Lana's clearly become a premium asshole, but the fact that she's unwilling to face the hell of Briarcliff again is an understandable character flaw. Kit begs her, but Lana's not going to do it. Besides, she rationalizes, Jude more than made her bed at Briarcliff. Kit accuses her of being hard, but she snaps back that she's as hard as she needs to be to survive. See? I get it. Her beleaguered assistant then calls her away. Lana pays for the coffee.

As Kit walks out to the parking lot, gets into his rustbucket of a pickup truck and drives away, we go through an instantaneous time warp to the present. Suddenly, Dylan Face is in another parked car, smoking a lil' crack and psyching himself up for whatever awfulness he's about to get up to.

That awfulness involves a bookstore that's on its last legs. There are shelves and shelves holding maybe one or two books each, and the Betty Buckley-ish librarian is busying herself by putting stickers on those that remain to indicate just how cheaply you can have them. Dylan Face passes himself off to her as a "connoisseur" of first-edition printings and despite the fact that she says he's come to the wrong place for anything that fancy, he tells her the computer told him this was the only store with an autographed copy of Maniac: One Woman's Story of Survival. The Librarian knows the book, but tells him it's her mother's personal copy. "She credited that book with giving her the courage to leave my father," she says. "She called him her own version of Bloody Face." Strange as it may seem. Dylan Face isn't looking to take no for an answer. He's willing to overpay for it and he even tells her straight-up that Lana Winters was his mother. The librarian's like, "Don't shit a shitter, man. I was a women's studies major. The only child Lana Winters ever had was by rape, with Bloody Face, and he died at birth." Ah, more embellishments. He asks to see the book, the librarian obliges and obviously Dylan Face starts to rhapsodize once more about his mother's cruel neglect and yada yada yada. The librarian gets sufficiently creeped out by him and is all, "Okay. We're done. Bye-bye." But Dylan Face is getting more insistent now. She WILL give him this book, because it's his fate.

He tells her his plan, which is to buy the book, take it with him to Mother Lana's doorstep, ask her if she knows who he is and when she doesn't he can say, "I'm in your book. Only I didn't die." And then he will shoot her in the head. "Finally," he says, "I would have completed my father's work." The librarian at this point is shitting first-edition copies of Moby Dick. She pulls out a plastic sleeve, places the book inside and hands it to Dylan Face. We may not ever know if he kills this poor lady too, as the end of the episode spares us (and her, I guess). Here's hoping she's not currently at that great Women's Studies seminar in the sky.

Joe R is fully expecting everybody to die week. He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at joseph.reid21@gmail.com.