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So we’ve reached that point in the season where shit starts going haywire. And man, it really went for it. I don’t even know what to do with any of this right now. Zoe went to work on rehabilitating Kyle through teaching him English and the ways of being a human again. She has some success! But then Madison decided to bond with the only other dead person she knows by having sex with him (!), which I can actually understand. What I can’t understand is the part where Madison decided to invite Zoe and her deadly vagina to have a threesome with her and Kyle… and Zoe went for it because her deadly vagina can’t kill already dead people’s genitals. I’m going to need to think about that for a while.
Fiona sleeps with the Axeman and the morning after he reveals that he has loved her since she was an eight-year-old victim of mean girl bullying. First, it was a fatherly love, but then when she became hot and powerful as an adolescent, his feelings toward her changed. She is humiliated and repulsed at first, but she comes around. They are totally dating now. They deserve each other.
Madison doesn’t stay a secret for long. Cordelia ends up touching her, resulting in a vision of Fiona slitting her throat. Delia takes this to Zoe, explaining that if Fiona learns about Zoe’s power, she’ll be . She conspires to team up and kill Fiona together. Zoe wants further confirmation, so she finds Spalding’s enchanted tongue in the storage closet where the spirit board was (everything’s in that thing!), reattaches it and then interrogates him. His enchanted tongue cannot lie, so he gives up the goods on Fiona. Then, it looks like Zoe murdered him by stabbing him through the heart, but who knows. Why would you give up Denis O’Hare this early?
And tragically, the buddy comedy duo of the fall season comes to an end this week, as Queenie decides to defect from the Coven by handing LaLaurie over to Marie as a kind of initiation fee into her crew after LaLaurie admits to a new horror from her past. RIP to the BFFs of the TV season. Marie ends the episode by smearing LaLaurie’s blood all over her face as a magical youth serum, so there was a practical reason for wanting LaLaurie besides revenge.
Hank has all the weapons in the great state of Louisiana laid out in his hotel room in preparation for Miss Robichaux’s killing spree. Good fucking luck, guy.
No Misty Day this week. Boo.
Mindy Monez’s only goal in life is to someday hit the Frostop drive-thru with Gabourey Sidibe and Kathy Bates at three a.m. You can tweet with her @garnisheater.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Flashback to a simpler time, when Kyle still had all of his own body parts and the ability to sing classic Toto songs with perfect diction whilst drunk in a tattoo parlor. His dude-bro buddies are also enjoying being alive, but they are getting Asian and Gaelic tattoos of questionable meaning in lieu of singing "Rosanna" with him, because tattoos are cool and Toto is an "incredibly gay band." To each his own, I suppose, but anybody who disparages Toto deserves to be blown up in a bus accident if you ask me. Kyle also calls Toto "amazeballs," which is the perfectly dumb word for him to say. (Toto actually is amazeballs, though.)
Kyle can't get a youthful mistake tattoo like all the other frat boys because he aims to be taken seriously as a city engineer after college. (Also, his mom would "kill him," which I don't care to translate into incest terms.) He wants to make sure the levees never break again, and step one is not ending up here someday. His friends think that's totally cool. Aww, rapist friends can be solid bros when they want to be!
In the present, chained-up garden gnome Kyle is apparently gaining some sentience. He recognizes the Irish tattoo on his arm as his friend's tattoo, and the Asian tattoo on his ankle as that of his other friend's and clearly realizes that he has been Frankenstein'd together from the severed limbs of his fallen comrades. Kyle is devastated, but before he can really process a full-on meltdown, Zoe appears in front of him with a pistol hidden behind her back. This oughta go well.
Speaking of the undead, Madison is having a hard time. Her thoughts read like a Thought Catalog piece on millenials, who are supposed to be entitled and narcissistic due to getting too many unearned trophies in their childhood and being too performative about those defects due to the advent of social media. You know the ones; 60% of the internet is people bitching about millenials or people defending millenials at the moment, and AHS is no different. Madison is philosophizing to a lit candelabra while smoking on a staircase and it's all very Art Direction by Meatloaf, in a very self-aware and genuinely funny way.
Madison used to avoid pain or pesky feelings of any kind while she was alive, an easy task with all those pills, bottles and eager young men at her disposal to distract her. But now that she's lingering in between death and life she can't feel anything, which apparently feels bad. So this whole thing's an enigma. She tries what's always worked for her before, and chugs pills and booze, devours every witchy ingredient in Fiona's bag of tricks, burns her hand with a lighter, eats numerous Pyrex containers of turkey and carbs. She still feels nothing. But, there's one thing she hasn't tried yet and that's sex. And this is a Ryan Murphy show with no show tunes in it, so, sex should do it. Though, really, Madison – try showtunes!
"I'm Just a Girl Who Cain't Say No"!
Zoe approaches Kyle with the gun, intent on killing him. She apologizes for not letting him go when he died, and things get complicated when he appears to recognize what a gun is and is unmistakably terrified. It's harder to kill a person than a zombie. Zoe hesitates, and he grabs the gun from her and turns it on himself. Zoe has a change of heart and stops him from blowing his brains out just in time. The gun goes off and shoots a hole in the glass ceiling (Metaphor! Nope.) of that atrium thing they're in, which just must cost a fortune to have repaired. Zoe assures Kyle that she doesn't want him to die after all.
Queenie and LaLaurie (welcome back, Kathy Bates!) are trying to get their midnight snack on, but Madison had a god-sized hole she had to fill with leftovers earlier, so the fridge is empty. Which can only mean one thing: It's off to the Frostop! I think this is one of our favorite AHS scenes ever, right? Let's not be contrarian about the glory of Gabourey Sidibe and Kathy Bates gal-palling at a three AM drive-thru just for the sake of it. There's a comedy beat where LaLaurie thinks the drive-thru speaker is demon for a moment, but when the voice behind the machine recommends super-sizing her meal it's clear he's speaking her language. Do they dare super-size? Oh yes, yes they do dare. Queenie has a great line about the funny ways life surprises you with a late night burger "with an immortal racist" sometimes, but LaLaurie has a job to do in this scene, and that is to bring Queenie to her storyline's conflict of the week: The other girls in the Coven will never truly accept her because she's black. Umm, what? OK. More on that later.
Hank calls Delia in the middle of the night and she knocks over about 16 things as she reaches for the phone, in case you'd forgotten that she's blind now. She hangs up on him (because he's a cheater, not because he's a MURDERER, which bothers me more and more every week). The camera draws back on his end and we see that he is a little out of it and sitting surrounded by dozens of very large and powerful guns that he has meticulously laid out all over his motel room. "See you soon, baby" he says. I still can't imagine this pissant loser killing anybody significant, but we'll see.
Delia's stumbling around looking for LaLaurie, but she's still off super-sizing and that takes time. Madison spots her at the top of the stairs, but, committed to remaining a secret, quickly hides. But it's all for naught when Delia almost takes a very bad tumble down the stairs and Madison pulls her back, her touch causing Delia to see a vision of Fiona slicing Madison's throat open. "FIONA." It's on!
Speaking of Fiona, the Axeman is showing her into his apartment for a drunken hook-up. It's a dump, and he apologizes for that, but Fiona's happy with just a jazz record, a glass of bourbon and the prospect of male validation. He quotes As I Lay Dying and she recognizes the quote in that way that only people on TV do, which always makes me feel inferior. I can't remember book quotes with all these movie quotes and song lyrics and internet memes clogging up my brainwaves, people. He lights her cigarette and sweet talks her real good – "a celestial creature like yourself" is something that is actually said – and she excuses herself to the bathroom to get ready for some hot mess lovin'. Everything falls apart in the bathroom, as more of Fiona's hair falls out, and there are cockroaches in the sink and a bloody dead body in the bathtub. This is why you always insist on hosting one night stands at your place, ladies.
Fiona re-joins the party, and upon her arrival he patronizes the female gender's weak-ass taste in bourbon, which just makes me hate this character even more. The Axeman sucks, right? It's not just the jazz thing, though that is a huge problem. It's that this is such a boring addition to the season, especially considering the fact that they have Angela Bassett at their disposal and yet, Marie Laveau has been a completely sidelined character so far. But here we are, listening to the Axeman prattle on about jazz, bourbon and his generalizations about women all over again. I get that Fiona needs a truly awful person to align with for the final battle, but that person couldn't have been someone else?
Fiona impulsively kisses him, but as she does she notices that another clump of hair falls out and she loses her confidence. She lashes out and insults his roach-infested shithole and tries to bail, but he pulls a last ditch effort to make her stay, hilariously offering that this isn't just a one night stand – it could be their destiny! Haha. That only works on 16-year-old girls who don't know better, buddy. Fiona's heard it all before. Fiona pulls the it's-not-you-it's-me card, calling herself a "wretched human being" and, in one of the best line deliveries of the season, "a miserable goddamn bitch." She's destroyed every relationship she's ever had, and to Fiona, if her hair falling out has zapped the sexy from her, then this isn't even worth doing. She's like Madison in that way -- short-term passion and instant gratification is what she craves, but anything more enduring than that feels anathema to her. The Axeman's got her number, and switches focus from love to sex, and it works like a charm. Fiona's in. She gets all giggly and girly and lean-y as he tells her how his saxophone skills are very transferrable to sex – I get it, guy -- and they have passionate drunk jazz sex. I never thought I'd actually wish for a television character to have a deadly vagina, but I sure do right now.
Zoe has unchained Kyle and brought him upstairs for a little classroom time. She is teaching him about being a person again, mostly through the use of flashcards. She teaches him how to say "food." He can say the word, but I can't tell if he actually knows what it means. Until she says "bed" and he flies into an abuse PTSD rage and calls it "stupid" all on his own. Looks like he'll be a real boy by the end of the season! Before they can go any further, Madison shows up, all "who is this?" Oh boy. Zoe leaves the two of them alone to go to a meeting with Delia. Big mistake.
Madison crawls toward Kyle like he's a sexy puppy/delicious pizza combo. She compliments his new limbs, and congratulates him on being made out of "the best pieces," expertly curated by herself. Kyle slaps her away. Madison, hung up on the white light she missed out on at death, asks Kyle if he saw one. He doesn't have enough language to respond definitively, but it doesn't look like he saw it either. Madison's not sure coming back to life was worth the trouble if life is going to feel this empty and terrible, and we all know Kyle's been thinking that too. They hug, a modest undead support group formed.
Marie's salon. The show goes into a cloying Treme territory as a fish monger interrupts his dominos game to toss some fish heads into a bucket for Marie, but Queenie save us from any more of that by appearing in her doorway. Queenie needs no introduction – "A black witch come to town, I'm gon' hear about it." Queenie asks if the fish heads are for voodoo, but Marie coquettishly insists they're just for gumbo. Queenie's never had the pleasure of gumbo, which is tragic. Marie: "Not surprised. Livin' over there in Wonder Bread land they probably feed ya Shake N' Bake and watermelon for dessert." Heh. Queenie thinks they don't care that she's black, she thinks they just don't like her. Which, is that even true? Since when do they especially or particularly not like Queenie? I've never gotten that feeling. Do any of them like each other? I don't think they liked Madison much either, and Nan seems to annoy the hell out of all of them with her thought-reading and tattling. If anything I'd say Queenie is the least hated one in the group. Anyway, Marie knows she's on to something and manipulatively offers Queenie a place in her crew on one condition: She wants her to hand over [her new best friend] LaLaurie. If she brings her to Marie, Queenie will never have to feel "second best to some pretty little white girl" again, which is appealing to Queenie on many levels, most of which likely have nothing to do with anybody at Miss Robichaux's, I'd suspect.
Blind seer Delia reaches new heights of glory in her meeting with Zoe. She takes her tea with flask booze now! She curses freely! She offers booze to minors with minimal supervision! She calls Zoe "one hot shit witch," which means she's got a bullseye on her back. If Fiona figures out how powerful Zoe is, she's toast just like Madison. Fiona tells Zoe she knows Fiona killed Madison, so if she even suspects that Zoe is , Zoe is . Shaken, Zoe chugs Delia's flask as she takes in the news. But what to do? Delia: "We're going to kill my mother. Kill her once, kill her good, kill her dead." Now we're talkin'.
Zoe trudges upstairs, heavy with everything she's just learned, but when she opens the door to her bedroom, she gets another bomb lobbed at her. Kyle and Madison are trying to fill their undead voids with sex that up-against-the-wall sex people in movies love but that always looks like way too much work. Personally, I'd have kept trying with the food thing, but that's just me. And now, Zoe feels even shittier than she did before. Madison's kind of a pill.
Morning after at the Axeman's house. Fiona tries to go-go before waking him up, but he catches her in the act. They slyly flirt about the rotting dead body in the bathtub and how much they both hate cops, so they truly are meant for each other. Oh, also? The Axeman's been watching over Fiona since she was a small child. Fiona's like, excuse me?
Flashback to Miss Robichaux's and an eight-year-old Fiona being bullied by an awful older girl named Helen. She tries to coerce Fiona into dumping milk on her head, a kind of messier, witchier game of "stop hitting yourself," but the invisible Axeman comes to Fiona's aid by dropping a china hutch on Helen's head. At first, it was a fatherly love, but when Fiona entered her teen years and began walking around her bedroom topless, that of course changed. Everyone else only saw the "ruthless manipulator" but he saw her as "so, so much more." He fell in love. Fiona tries to tell him she doesn't believe in ghosts, which is pretty laughable considering her line of work. She allows a brief moment of passion and kisses him, but her intimacy issues quickly kick in and she slaps him and pushes him away. She awesomely makes him zip up her dress before she storms out of his life. For now.
Spalding wakes up tied to his bed in a hysterically funny chartreuse silk robe. He finds Zoe sitting across from him. She asks him how he feels, and he answers her "Fine," which means Spalding somehow got himself a tongue. That's weird! You see, Zoe found his still enchanted tongue in that storage closet where the spirit board was (that closet is like Mary Poppins' purse, I tells ya). It was still "wet" (ew) and "alive" (WHAT) due to Myrtle's enchantment. Myrtle kept the tongue after Spalding cut it off, but she was never "witch enough" to restore it. But Zoe is. She's one hot shit witch! She did a little spell, crammed it back into a knocked out Spalding's mouth, and now she wants the truth. His tongue cannot tell a lie. No, he did not kill Madison Montgomery. Yes, he knows who did. He fights it hard, but it was Fiona who killed Madison. He gives off shades of Russell Edgington as he goes on a defiant tirade about the wonders of Fiona and how he'll always serve her as his family has served this Coven for generations, but Zoe's drunk on power (and you know that will increasingly become a problem over the episodes) and she's had enough. She stabs Spalding through the heart. "You're done talking." He looks pretty dead, but I'm assuming Fiona or even Misty will resurrect him. It seems criminal to keep Denis O'Hare from speaking all season and then kill him off after three minutes of dialogue, right?
LaLaurie is slicing a ham in the dark, as you do. Queenie appears – the kitchen is their usual late-night rendezvous spot, after all – for some girl talk. "What's the worst thing you ever did?" She's clearly trying to get some justification for turning her new best friend (and her only friend, to hear this episode tell it) over to a bloodthirsty voodoo witch, and ooh boy, does she get it. We see another horrific LaLaurie flashback. Her husband had taken up with a comely young slave named Sally, and when Sally gave birth to a healthy young boy with "a complexion light as cream," LaLaurie couldn't let it stand. She offers the girl a promotion as her new handmaiden, and Sally is PSYCHED. The direction is off in this flashback, right? Shouldn't there be a shade of a fear in Sally's face? LaLaurie's husband certainly seems to know what's in store for his mistress. Not that he does anything about it.
In her bedroom, LaLaurie shows off all her beauty products to Sally. Most of them were total rip-offs, which remains true to this day. How prophetic! She does have one bottle, however, that is absolutely magic. It's a simple concoction made from the blood of a young boy, newly born, as youth begets youth. "I know who's been between your legs, whore. You needn't give that boy a name." Sally clutches her womb and collapses. The morning, she jumps to her death (or LaLaurie pushed her, who knows). Kathy Bates is doing that gleeful cruelty thing that she does so well here, and her work manages to be a lot of fun despite how horrifying the details of the scene are. I've seen a lot of people comparing these scenes to her Annie Wilkes performance, but I don't see the connection. Annie Wilkes didn't know she was cruel; Madame LaLaurie revels in it.
Queenie has heard all she needs to hear. LaLaurie tries make up for it by saying that they buried Sally with her baby – it was the right thing to do! And besides, back then you couldn't just let your husband's half-black bastards roam free, dangerous heirs to your fortune. Because yes, you know how slaves whose mothers were raped by their owners were always getting their fair share of the estate. Queenie astutely points out that LaLaurie has got a real fucked up sense of right and wrong, and LaLaurie agrees. She's all about taking responsibility these days. She's a brand new woman in a brand new century and she doesn't even want to torture black people anymore. She thanks Queenie for being her friend, for guiding her along her new moral path. It does speak to the strengths of this show that I am actually feeling a twinge of sympathy for LaLaurie in these scenes where she tries so hard to redeem herself. I know on an intellectual level that the era she lived in doesn't justify sewing people's mouths closed with a handful of shit crammed inside, but every once in a while, emotionally, she almost gets me. This is why you only stunt-cast actors who actually care about doing a good job.
Here we go with Fiona and the pills again. More of her hair falls out, and she stumbles, steadies herself, and reaches for an electric shaver. She's about to go G.I. Jane on that shit, but then the Axeman's sexy saxophone theme starts up in her head and she gets her sexy back. Looks like she's found a use for the Axeman. That makes one of us.
Zoe showers after her kill, and there's a visual allusion to Carrie with the blood washing down the shower drain which I'm pretty sure was intentional. Madison interrupts her and accuses her of being jealous of her having hot zombie sex with Kyle, and true to form, Madison seems a little too pleased with herself over both the sex and torturing Zoe with it. There is something perfectly mean girl in the ways she reveals her insecurities, isn't there? Zoe plays it off, saying she couldn't be with Kyle anyway because of her deadly vagina, and Madison offers that actually, since he's already dead anyway, he's probably the only person she could be with. Once you're undead, not even a Supreme death ray vagina can kill you, apparently. I'm having trouble grappling with the nonsense logic here. Madison says Kyle is the only thing that makes her feel things since she came back from the dead, and she's not giving him up. But hey, we can share him! Zoe is all "yeah right" about that idea, but Madison takes her hand and leads her to the bedroom, where Kyle is waiting for them on the bed. Madison sits down to him and they both reach their clammy undead hands out for her. Zoe's towel drops to the ground, and she gets into bed with two undead people for a threesome.
WHAT. That was some dumb shock value shit Nip/Tuck would do. Weird sex stuff only works if it serves a purpose that makes some sense. This didn't do either. Zoe's sexual coming of age was sufficiently represented by all her unharnessed power suddenly appearing and terrifying everyone. There's no discernible reason to put Madison's shit on her, and it's out of character for Zoe to accept it. And as for Kyle, Madison is using him a lot like his mother did, which adds another layer of awful to all of this. Zombies can't give consent! But really, the undead threesome doesn't deserve a lot of analysis. It was dumb. It was just a dumb writing mistake that happened, and hopefully we don't have to watch it happen again.
The Axeman is finishing his stupid saxophone set at a packed club, to rousing applause. Lunatics. Fiona is waiting for him backstage, ready to get more of her groove back. She offers to buy him a drink, and he looks her up and down in a lecherous manner and accepts. Fiona is practically bouncing off the walls high on the male gaze, so I'd say they are officially back on, y'all. Let's come up with a couple name for them! Axiona? Fionaxe? FAXEMAN?
Queenie has cleverly talked LaLaurie into going to Marie willingly through the promises of a new haircut. Ugh, Kathy Bates is so cute here. She's all nervous and excited about getting a new look with her new best friend, and this one actually does remind me of a prior performance. She's so Fried Green Tomatoes here, and I hate myself for it, but Madame LaLaurie, the most ruthless psycho in the American Horror Story history is breaking my heart.
They walk into an obviously closed Marie's, but LaLaurie doesn't seem to notice, such is her excitement. She marvels at all the hair products on the shelves, but Marie appears behind her, all "Been a while." LaLaurie is panic-stricken, and she turns to Queenie, not quite understanding yet what is happening to her, all we gotta get outta here, this woman is crazy! Queenie cops to tricking her and calls her a "dumb bitch," and the pain on LaLaurie's face just tugs all my heart-strings. Just think of her ripping out people's eyeballs, Mindy. Marie's henchmen grab LaLaurie, put her in shackles and throw her in a cage in the back. Marie gives Queenie a sharp hook-type weapon and lets her make "the first cut" while LaLaurie screams in protest and pleads for mercy. Queenie accepts Marie's challenge, and approaches the cage.
We close with Marie coldly smearing LaLaurie's blood all over her face just as LaLaurie had done with the blood of slaves so many times all those years ago. It even looks like she's using the same brush. Because that's the funny about revenge – it turns you into your enemy. Angela Bassett has looked 35-years-old for the past 20 years, though, so I guess you could argue that it's worth it.
In two weeks: Queenie shows some remorse and brings LaLaurie a burger! Fiona sees Madison! The Coven tries to kill Fiona! Fiona wants to kill Misty Day! Fiona and the Axeman smoke in bed, which is a fire hazard! OMG.
Mindy Monez's only goal in life is to someday hit the Frostop drive-thru with Gabourey Sidibe and Kathy Bates at three a.m. You can tweet with her @garnisheater.