Posts tagged: American Horror Story Hotel

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E04 “Devil’s Night” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: Jennifer Salt
Director: Loni Peristere

Essential Plot Points:

• A handsome man with long black hair checks into the Cortez. Liz recognises him as Richard Ramirez, infamous and very dead serial killer, making his return for Devil’s Night. She shows him up to his room, where Mr March has left “gifts”. These turn out to be victims, one of whom Ramirez kills, then he pursues the other into the arms of March.
• One level down, John is woken by blood seeping down his crime wall. He goes upstairs and finds Evers, who, in an unusual moment of honesty, admits she hates Halloween. We flash back to 1925 and find out her son was kidnapped and murdered by Gordon Northcott, the Wineville killer. She bonds briefly with John over their similar losses, then leaves to continue her work.
• John’s family gently but firmly rebuff him and he’s left alone in the hotel. Unknown to him, Alex takes Holden home. Horrified by how cold her ageless son is, she fetches him some juice and, when she brings it to him, finds him drinking blood from the family dog.

• Holden asks her to take him to his “other mommy” and she returns to the hotel. There, she confronts the Countess who explains she “rescued” Holden from a life of neglect. The Countess offers Alex eternal life but she draws a gun on the vampire and flees.
• At the hotel, John decides to get very drunk. This is not the best plan ever especially as he gets talking to a woman he’s convinced is dressed as serial killer Aileen Wournos. It is, in fact, Wournos, and she attacks him when he takes her back to his hotel. John breaks free, subdues her and demands answers from Liz.
• She tells him about Devil’s Night, the annual event where Mr March invites the greatest serial killers in American history to dinner. John refuses to believe this, even after seeing Ramirez and Wournos on the guest register and walking past a man dressed as the Zodiac killer. But, it turns out, he’s invited too…
• Returning to his room and prepared to arrest “Wournos” he finds her gone and a tux with a note from Liz. With little else to do, he goes to dinner.

• There, he finds Ramirez, Wournos, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, all dead and yet all sitting around a table eating dinner with Edward March, another dead man. They bicker and argue and dose John with absinthe, cuffing him to his chair. They explain that March is “The Master”, the killer who taught them everything they know.
• Powerless, John watches as a victim is led in for Dahmer, who proceeds to lobotomise him. Later, Sally brings in another victim, a businessman she seduced outside. The killers all fall on him with knives and John begins to scream.
• Suddenly, he finds himself alone in a room being comforted by Sally. She assures him it was just an hallucination and he leaves. Behind him, unseen, the murder continues as March watches him go.
• Upstairs, the Countess infects Alex and watches the disease kill and rebuild her, weeping…

Review:

Weird as it sounds, this episode reminded me of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There’s the same sense here of Halloween being “Christmas”, with everyone taking the night off. Or as it is here, everyone coming out of retirement for a night.

But before we get to that, let’s talk briefly about the Countess and Alex scenes that bookend the episode. Chloe Sevigny and Lady Gaga do great work together here and there’s a real sense of the Countess as a well-dressed Mephistopheles, offering Alex eternal life. There’s a price, of course, but it’s not quite apparent yet. And neither is the Countess’s endgame. Is she looking to expand the family? Looking for more new blood? Is she recruiting soldiers? If so, why?

But the bulk of this episode is spent with John and, honestly, that’s a relief. A week off from Iris and Donovan and an (almost) week off from Duffy is surprisingly welcome and Wes Bentley and Evan Peters do not disappoint. The central dinner party is one of the show’s strongest moments to date for a very odd reason. It’s not horrific because it’s abnormal; it’s horrific because it’s banal.

This is the family dinner so many of us sit through. The stern parent trying to hold things together, the amiable uncle who keeps wandering off topic, the family member who drinks too much, the family member who says too little. All of them are here, recast as the American Family which is itself recast as a royal family of murder. It’s a fascinating, complex piece of writing that tries to place the Cortez in the centre of a web of horror unlike anything else on this season to date. It largely works too, held together by some brilliant scripting from Salt and Evan Peters’s endlessly chipper, terrifying central turn as March.

So, is John, a man who’s “dined” with some of the worst serial killers in history, there as one of the family?

The answer is either “no” or “not yet”.

The dinner plays very much like an initiation of sorts, John being shown what he is before he becomes it. There’s even dialogue that implies that. However, the episode also takes great pains to emphasise just how isolated John is. He’s cut off from his family now and his presence on the guest list for the dinner is a red flag that something is badly wrong in his head. It’s a credit to the show that we’re a month in, just now getting to answers and it feels measured and confident rather than like the episode is marking time.

That being said, the episode still walks a fine line. The idea of giving serial killers an ecology, and hierarchy, is clever and very well executed here. But it may leave a nasty aftertaste. There’s a danger of this playing as pat and forced. A feeling that these very real, very broken, human monsters are somehow excused by being presented in a fictional context.

They’re not. The episode walks right up to that line but, doesn’t cross it. Although not everyone may agree.

Complex, difficult and making brave choices all the way along “Devils Night” is one of the oddest and strongest episodes of the series to date. It also sets up major changes for the future, with Alex turned, John isolated and a possible murder at the Cortez. All of which means one thing; Devil’s Night is over and now it’s time for the residents and staff to get back to their dreadful, bloody work.

Happy Halloween everyone.

The Good:

• There’s not a single bad guest star here. So obviously Naomi Campbell had the week off.
• Seriously the guest cast are great, all with difficult material. All four impress but Lilly Rabe’s leering, twitchy trainwreck is the most memorable, especially as you see the tragedy of Wournos as well as the monstrosity. Very smart, subtle acting.
• “SUCK MY LEFT TIT, CLARK GABLE!” Also she gets to yell this which is absolutely a good thing.
• Lots of back story for Miss Evers, all of it tragic, all of it historically accurate. Nice to see Mare Winningham getting more to do.
• “This is my problem with police officers. All you care about is evidence. Evidence, evidence, evidence. Until that evidence no longer fits the narrative you need to be true. At which point the evidence becomes an illusion. A mistake. A TRICK. You’ve lived in my hotel long enough, John. You’ve seen enough evidence to know what’s impossible becomes very possible here.” This glorious speech is one of the lynchpins of the episode and the series. John is a rationalist, a man used to building his life on facts. He’s now living somewhere where reality is mutable. The other guests revel in that. He’s resisting it, for now. A brilliant summation of the battle for John’s soul and mind, and yet another great performance from Evan Peters.

• “We are the Mount Rushmore of MURDER. We have reputations. Codes of Conduct.” Likewise this line, which Peters attacks with the relish of a man eating an especially fine steak.
• “Like the Iliad, your stories will live on forever.” March isn’t just killing for fun, he’s killing because it’s a means of making the American story better, at least in his eyes.
• “This’ll buy me a year of being left alone, right?” “As ALWAYS.” What an interesting exchange. It suggests March has some measure of power over Sally (and whatever her drill-groined friend is) and gives us an idea of where Sally fits on the food chain.

The Bad:

• Holden’s dull. It’s not entirely the actor’s fault either. The character is meant to present as cold and flat and he absolutely provides. Which makes Alex’s love for him seem a little obsessive which, in turn, is the point. But still, the Holden scenes should be the emotional core of the series but as this episode shows, they’re increasingly its flattest note.

The Historical:

• This episode’s guest cast include some of the worst serial killers in human history. Whether or not using them as fictional characters here, or giving them a common backstory, is in good taste is up to you. Here’s who they are; research further at your own risk.

• Richard Ramirez terrorised Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1984 and 1985. A burglar, rapist and killer his horrifically violent crimes left 14 dead and countless more traumatised. He died, as the show states, in 2013.

• Aileen Wournos killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. She claimed all the murders were self defence and that her victims had all raped or attempted to rape whilst she was working as a prostitute. She was found guilty of six of the murders despite this and sentenced to death. She died on 9 October, 2002. Charlize Theron would go on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Wournos in 2003 movie, Monster.
• The Zodiac Killer operated in Northern California in the ’60s and ’70s. He killed five people but claimed to have killed 37 in total. He was never caught, despite a vast manhunt and a series of mocking cyphers and letters he sent to the papers. These continued up to 2007, although the veracity of the later letters is unclear. Several people have claimed to be the Zodiac and the case remains unsolved and open. David Fincher’s 2007 movie Zodiac explores the case in some detail. It also formed the basis for Dirty Harry and was a pivotal part of 2012 movie, Seven Psychopaths.
• John Wayne Gacy murdered and in some cases sexually assaulted 33 victims between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois. An apparent pillar of the community, who even worked as a children’s entertainer, Gacy received the death penalty and was executed on 9 May 1994.

• Jeffrey Dahmer, nicknamed the Milwaukee Cannibal, raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer was found to have cannibalised victims, committed necrophilia with some of their corpses and kept parts of their bodies. He was beaten to death in 1994 by a fellow prisoner.
• The Wineville murders in 1925 were real too. Gordon Stewart Northcott killed three people and was implicated in the murder of a fourth. Events related to that case formed the basis for the 2008 movie Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie.
• Now’s a good time to talk about the inspiration for the Cortez too. It’s loosely based on the Hotel Cecil, a real, infamous LA hotel that has a bloody history. Richard Ramirez stayed there in 1985 and fellow serial killer Jack Unterweger did the same in 1991. It’s persistently rumoured to be the last place that Elizabeth Short, the victim of the Black Dahlia killing, visited. It was also the site of the death of Elisa Lam in 2013. That incident in particular seems to have served as a major inspiration for the course of this series. It also forms a central part of the complex, interesting mythos of fiction podcast, Tanis.

The Random

• Playing Richard Ramirez is a serious move against type for Anthony Ruivivar but it pays off. He’s best known as Carlos, the magnificently grumpy probationary paramedic on Third Watch. However he also turns up in Starship Troopers, Tropic Thunder and voiced Bruce Wayne and Batman in Beware The Batman.
• Lilly Rabe, who plays Wournos, is a familiar face to AHS fans. She’s appeared in “Murder House”, “Asylum”, “Coven” and “Freak Show” as well as here. Her other work involves recent, sadly cancelled SF series, The Whispers and playing Petra Moritz on three episodes of The Good Wife.
• John Carroll Lynch, who plays Gacy, is a veteran character actor. You’ve seen him most recently in a stunningly good turn as Eastman in “Here’s Not Here”, episode four of this season of The Walking Dead. He was also Varlyn Stroud in Carnivale, Bud Morris in Body Of Proof and of course Twisty The Clown in “Freak Show”, the previous season of American Horror Story.
• Seth Gable’s work as Dahmer here is a world away from what most genre fans will know him for. He had a memorable run on Arrow as Count Vertigo but registered most strongly as the heroic Lincoln Lee on Fringe.

• Shot of the episode is this. A gothic nightmare leading a child away across a sunlit beach. Brilliant and horrible and weird.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

• Read our other reviews of American Horror Story: Hotel
• Lady Gaga Reveals Striking New American Horror Story Hotel Image
• American Horror Story: Hotel – New Cast Portraits

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E03 “Mommy” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: James Wong
Director: Bradley Buecker

Essential Plot Points:

• Duffy has become obsessed with March and returns to his room. He essentially swears fealty to the politest, most urbane serial killer of his age and a delighted March realises he has a new weapon. One he’ll need when Will Drake reveals his plans to destroy the floor that March and Miss Evers haunt.

• We see events from Alex Lowe’s point of view. She admits to being more in love with Holden, her son, than she ever was with her husband. She talks about how her son smelt of Lavender and how hard it was to deal with the circumstances of his disappearance. As she does this, we see her effortlessly deal with a measles case. We also see her attempt suicide in the wake of Holden’s disappearance and speaking at family therapy in the present day. There, despite Scarlett’s protestations, she refuses to believe her daughter saw her brother at the Cortez. Until she mentions he smelt of Lavender…
• Back at the hotel, Claudia Bankson is stabbed to death by Max, the man Sally sewed into a mattress in episode one.
• John answers another call, this time to a gossip site. There he finds more journalists brutally slaughtered and realises they were killed because they “spread lies”. He returns to the Cortez just in time for Gabriel to collapse hysterically on him.
• Back at the hotel, Duffy seduces Will Drake with an eye to killing him in order to stop the renovations. At the last minute the Countess appears and silently tells him not to.
• At the hospital, Max apologises for the murder, claiming he thought it was the woman who sewed him into the mattress. Realising he means Sally, John returns to the hotel to arrest her. On the way out, Sally seduces him and they briefly make out. Unknown to John, the drill demon from the first episode spasmodically appears in the lift, as though linked to Sally somehow. The lift arrives at the ground floor and Sally’s gone, leaving John alone.
• Donovan returns and Iris tries to persuade him to move in with her. Donovan verbally destroys his mother, suggesting she kill herself.
• Later, Donovan is sleeping, and feeding, rough when he spies a high-end car with a woman standing near it. Sensing easy prey, he gets ready to attack her but is tased and thrown in the car.
• At the Cortez, Alex serves John with divorce papers. The detective breaks down, sobbing, as his wife explains that it isn’t that she doesn’t love him, but rather that they both need to move on. He begs her to stay and Alex reluctantly goes back to his room. Seeing the research on the wall, she realises how much stress he’s under and the pair begin to have sex. John suggests they have another baby and Alex leaves, disgusted. On the way out, she sees the ghost of Claudia (boo!) and finds Holden (Hooray!).
• Upstairs, the Countess seduces Will Drake who admits he’s creatively burnt out. And, more importantly, gay. Duffy interrupts them and flies off in a rage. Will leaves and as he does so, the Countess points out he’s enjoyed the night more than he expected to. She explains to a startled Duffy that she lost all her money in an investment scam and needs to marry Will Drake, and steal his cash, before they can kill him.
• Nearby, Iris has persuaded Sally to help her commit suicide.

• Elsewhere, Donovan wakes up tied to a chair having his blood cleaned. His captor is revealed to be Ramona Royale. Ramona explains she was a B-movie star before the Countess found her and made her one of her own. They were in love for decades before Ramona met and fell in love with Prophet Moses, a rapper in the ’90s. She was about to turn him so they could live together forever when the Countess found them and murdered Mo’ and his crew to stop Ramona making more vampires herself. Ramona vowed revenge and plans on using Donovan to get it. When she finds out he’s been dumped, she throws him out in disgust.

• Donovan, with nowhere else to go, returns to the Cortez. There, Liz Taylor dresses him down, pointing out that even after everything they’ve done to each other, no one loves him like his mother. Realising this is true, Donovan races to his mother’s room and finds her dead. He opens a vein and brings her back as his progeny. The exact thing that Ramona did…

Review:

That’s better. After the lumpy self-indulgence of last week, “Mommy” puts Hotel back on track with an episode that moves every major plot along, has the most fun flashback yet and sets up some major changes.

First off, Detective Lowe’s worst day ever continues unabated. Not only does he catch another, distinctly Se7en-esque, murder scene but returns to the Cortez just in time for Gabriel to collapse on him. From there it only gets worse as he tries to arrest, then make out, with Sally and gets divorce papers served by Alex.

That last is especially interesting as it’s the breaking point for John. The scene in which he breaks down in tears is all the more effective because of how buttoned down Wes Bentley’s performance is and it’s a welcome grounding note for the entire episode. It also allows us a chance to take a serious look at the Lowe’s relationship and for Wong’s script to flex its muscles. This isn’t the usual dysfunctional marriage but rather two people who still love one another. The only problem is, there are things in their lives they love far more. John lives for his work, Alex lived for her son. John’s realisation that Alex is right – as well as history’s least well-timed suggestion of another baby – are hard to watch because they’re so pragmatic. The Lowes are normal people in the process of being broken by abnormal events. Whether any of them make it out is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

It’s especially interesting given what we learn about Alex this episode. Chloe Sevigny is never less than impressive but her time in the spotlight here is a season highlight so far. We see Alex from the inside; a woman aware of her unusual emotional choices but not concerned by them. She’s sensible, compassionate and completely stoic, like John. And, like John, she breaks. But where John collapses at the thought of losing everything, Alex breaks at the thought of getting everything BACK. Her discovery of Holden is an absolute left turn and not the only one this episode either.

The other ones arrive one plot over. The first is the revelation that the Countess is broke, thanks to bad investment choices she made. That, coupled with the reveal that she has other progeny who are alive and well, neatly undercuts the show’s largest potential problem; the infallible vampire. The Countess, we see this episode, is anything but infallible and her bad choices are beginning to impact on the other residents of the Cortez. Will Drake is an unwitting target while poor Donovan is snatched by Ramona, her old favourite, has his blood cleaned and is kicked out. Intentionally or not, he’s just been handed a huge bargaining chip and it’ll be interesting to see how he uses it, and with whom.

It’s Donovan who’s the centre of the biggest twist, though, vampirising his mother to save her life. The relationship between Irish and Donovan has been on the backburner for a while but that’s no longer the case here. Liz Taylor, in a typically brilliant moment, points out no one loves Donovan like his mother. He finally reaches out to her, but reaches across the barrier between life and death to do so. In other words, he’s just done exactly what Ramona did. The only question is, what price will he pay for it? It’s a brilliantly executed scene that changes the show’s perspective on the Countess massively. She’s no longer the Queen of an ivory tower but an uncaring monarch who can’t see the chaos at her door. It’ll be interesting, and no doubt bloody, to see what happens when that changes.

This is a way more confident, pacy effort than last episode that even gives Duffy non-awful things to do. The show’s claustrophobic setting is really starting to pay off and with Ramona set up in opposition to the Countess, battle lines are being drawn. I wonder what side Detective Lowe will be on. I wonder if he knows himself.

Next week! Halloween! (Again!) With some very surprising guests checking into the Cortez.

The Good:

• Tristan sharing scenes with March (Or Evil Dead Quicksilver as I think of him) is actually really fun. He can definitely stick around if he’s going to be March’s little murder groupie.
• John. Wes Bentley has a stupidly hard job here as the calm(ish) eye of the storm but he’s acing it. John really does feel like the lead in a more sensible, kinder detective thriller who’s taken the ultimate wrong turn at Albuquerque. He’s clearly doomed, but he’s not going down without a fight.
• Sarah Paulson. Increasingly the MVP this season. I’d watch an entire series of Sally the junkie ghost being miserable and tormenting people. It’d be the most depressing TV show ever made and cancelled after two episodes but I’d watch them.
• Angela Bassett. Because Angela Bassett is always amazing.

• Angela Bassett as, clearly, a Pam Grier analogue is even better. Especially the magnificently cheesy movie posters we get of her career.
• The 1990s hair that both she and Gaga are rocking for the HipHop massacre sequence.

The Bad:

• Naomi Campbell somehow manages to be even worse once her character is murdered. Which almost circumnavigates Awful and comes out the other side into Amazing. But doesn’t.

The Random:

• “You’re a Scorpio, which explains a lot.” Duffy in good line shocker!
• “How do you know all this?” “I googled you.” “…that sounds obscene…”  Love this joke so very much. It’s sold by the delivery from both actors too which is a nice piece of equal opportunity comedy.
• “I wanted to save kids. Other people’s kids.” Everything you need to know about Alex wrapped up in a single line. She’s a really complex, interesting leading lady and it’s a delight to see her get a chance to be in the spotlight.
• “Some days are bearable. Today is very hard.” Again, very simple language but so loaded with meaning and emotion.
• “Why are you wasting your time on junkies? We only hurt ourselves… Not like breaking one of the 10 commandments.” There’s a growing fan theory that John is the 10 Commandments Killer and has been effectively hunting himself. That would certainly tally with some events, and this line from Sally isn’t so much loaded as buckling under the weight of implication. But, for all that, I hope he’s not. John as a good man in a bad place is a lot more interesting than John as a serial killer waiting to come out of his chrysalis.
• “I don’t know who I am if I’m not your mother.” “Honestly if that is really true, you should kill yourself. You should do it even if it isn’t.” Just huge amounts of venom and obligation and love behind every line Donovan and Iris hurl at one another. If John is the lead in a detective thriller, these two are the cast of a lost Arthur Miller play and none of them are in the right, or safe, place.
• “Who the hell are you?” “Now you’re asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is who WAS I?” Ramona’s not only huge fun, she’s also an interesting exploration of the consequences of immortality. A woman with the resources to keep herself alive and in blood, she’s the first of the Contessa’s pre-Donovan creations we’ve seen. But how many more are there? Is Ramona leading an army?
• “I’d come to Hollywood with barely a high school education and no prospects. It wasn’t long before I was a star.” Another tiny, beautiful, grimly funny line.
• “And I’ve got a floppy appendage between my legs that keeps me from wearing pencil skirts. We all have our flaws… kitten.” Liz Taylor gets about three lines an episode. They are usually amazing. This is no exception.
• By the way, Liz’s reference to Laurence Harvey could be one of two people. Laurence Harvey was an actor who was Academy Award-nominated in 1959 but whose later career was very turbulent. Alternately, it may be a nod to Larry Harvey, the burned man who played a vital role in the first season

• Angela Bassett, who joins the cast this episode, is of course an AHS alumni. She’s also got a massive track record crammed full of excellent work. Her turn in Strange Days, which is now rather endearingly a period drama, is especially great. More recently, fans of Gerard Butler and/or Milla Jovovich blowing things up will have seen her in Olympus Has Fallen and Survivor.

• Bernie Madoff, the investor who bankrupted the Countess, is real. He’s also currently serving 150 years in prison for running an epically vast Ponzi scheme which led to $65 billion in losses for his clients. He’s a nice grace note here too, showing that while the Countess is immortal, she’s not infallible.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

• Read our other reviews of American Horror Story: Hotel
• Lady Gaga Reveals Striking New American Horror Story Hotel Image
• American Horror Story: Hotel – New Cast Portraits

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E03 “Mommy” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: James Wong
Director: Bradley Buecker

Essential Plot Points:

• Duffy has become obsessed with March and returns to his room. He essentially swears fealty to the politest, most urbane serial killer of his age and a delighted March realises he has a new weapon. One he’ll need when Will Drake reveals his plans to destroy the floor that March and Miss Evers haunt.

• We see events from Alex Lowe’s point of view. She admits to being more in love with Holden, her son, than she ever was with her husband. She talks about how her son smelt of Lavender and how hard it was to deal with the circumstances of his disappearance. As she does this, we see her effortlessly deal with a measles case. We also see her attempt suicide in the wake of Holden’s disappearance and speaking at family therapy in the present day. There, despite Scarlett’s protestations, she refuses to believe her daughter saw her brother at the Cortez. Until she mentions he smelt of Lavender…
• Back at the hotel, Claudia Bankson is stabbed to death by Max, the man Sally sewed into a mattress in episode one.
• John answers another call, this time to a gossip site. There he finds more journalists brutally slaughtered and realises they were killed because they “spread lies”. He returns to the Cortez just in time for Gabriel to collapse hysterically on him.
• Back at the hotel, Duffy seduces Will Drake with an eye to killing him in order to stop the renovations. At the last minute the Countess appears and silently tells him not to.
• At the hospital, Max apologises for the murder, claiming he thought it was the woman who sewed him into the mattress. Realising he means Sally, John returns to the hotel to arrest her. On the way out, Sally seduces him and they briefly make out. Unknown to John, the drill demon from the first episode spasmodically appears in the lift, as though linked to Sally somehow. The lift arrives at the ground floor and Sally’s gone, leaving John alone.
• Donovan returns and Iris tries to persuade him to move in with her. Donovan verbally destroys his mother, suggesting she kill herself.
• Later, Donovan is sleeping, and feeding, rough when he spies a high-end car with a woman standing near it. Sensing easy prey, he gets ready to attack her but is tased and thrown in the car.
• At the Cortez, Alex serves John with divorce papers. The detective breaks down, sobbing, as his wife explains that it isn’t that she doesn’t love him, but rather that they both need to move on. He begs her to stay and Alex reluctantly goes back to his room. Seeing the research on the wall, she realises how much stress he’s under and the pair begin to have sex. John suggests they have another baby and Alex leaves, disgusted. On the way out, she sees the ghost of Claudia (boo!) and finds Holden (Hooray!).
• Upstairs, the Countess seduces Will Drake who admits he’s creatively burnt out. And, more importantly, gay. Duffy interrupts them and flies off in a rage. Will leaves and as he does so, the Countess points out he’s enjoyed the night more than he expected to. She explains to a startled Duffy that she lost all her money in an investment scam and needs to marry Will Drake, and steal his cash, before they can kill him.
• Nearby, Iris has persuaded Sally to help her commit suicide.

• Elsewhere, Donovan wakes up tied to a chair having his blood cleaned. His captor is revealed to be Ramona Royale. Ramona explains she was a B-movie star before the Countess found her and made her one of her own. They were in love for decades before Ramona met and fell in love with Prophet Moses, a rapper in the ’90s. She was about to turn him so they could live together forever when the Countess found them and murdered Mo’ and his crew to stop Ramona making more vampires herself. Ramona vowed revenge and plans on using Donovan to get it. When she finds out he’s been dumped, she throws him out in disgust.

• Donovan, with nowhere else to go, returns to the Cortez. There, Liz Taylor dresses him down, pointing out that even after everything they’ve done to each other, no one loves him like his mother. Realising this is true, Donovan races to his mother’s room and finds her dead. He opens a vein and brings her back as his progeny. The exact thing that Ramona did…

Review:

That’s better. After the lumpy self-indulgence of last week, “Mommy” puts Hotel back on track with an episode that moves every major plot along, has the most fun flashback yet and sets up some major changes.

First off, Detective Lowe’s worst day ever continues unabated. Not only does he catch another, distinctly Se7en-esque, murder scene but returns to the Cortez just in time for Gabriel to collapse on him. From there it only gets worse as he tries to arrest, then make out, with Sally and gets divorce papers served by Alex.

That last is especially interesting as it’s the breaking point for John. The scene in which he breaks down in tears is all the more effective because of how buttoned down Wes Bentley’s performance is and it’s a welcome grounding note for the entire episode. It also allows us a chance to take a serious look at the Lowe’s relationship and for Wong’s script to flex its muscles. This isn’t the usual dysfunctional marriage but rather two people who still love one another. The only problem is, there are things in their lives they love far more. John lives for his work, Alex lived for her son. John’s realisation that Alex is right – as well as history’s least well-timed suggestion of another baby – are hard to watch because they’re so pragmatic. The Lowes are normal people in the process of being broken by abnormal events. Whether any of them make it out is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

It’s especially interesting given what we learn about Alex this episode. Chloe Sevigny is never less than impressive but her time in the spotlight here is a season highlight so far. We see Alex from the inside; a woman aware of her unusual emotional choices but not concerned by them. She’s sensible, compassionate and completely stoic, like John. And, like John, she breaks. But where John collapses at the thought of losing everything, Alex breaks at the thought of getting everything BACK. Her discovery of Holden is an absolute left turn and not the only one this episode either.

The other ones arrive one plot over. The first is the revelation that the Countess is broke, thanks to bad investment choices she made. That, coupled with the reveal that she has other progeny who are alive and well, neatly undercuts the show’s largest potential problem; the infallible vampire. The Countess, we see this episode, is anything but infallible and her bad choices are beginning to impact on the other residents of the Cortez. Will Drake is an unwitting target while poor Donovan is snatched by Ramona, her old favourite, has his blood cleaned and is kicked out. Intentionally or not, he’s just been handed a huge bargaining chip and it’ll be interesting to see how he uses it, and with whom.

It’s Donovan who’s the centre of the biggest twist, though, vampirising his mother to save her life. The relationship between Irish and Donovan has been on the backburner for a while but that’s no longer the case here. Liz Taylor, in a typically brilliant moment, points out no one loves Donovan like his mother. He finally reaches out to her, but reaches across the barrier between life and death to do so. In other words, he’s just done exactly what Ramona did. The only question is, what price will he pay for it? It’s a brilliantly executed scene that changes the show’s perspective on the Countess massively. She’s no longer the Queen of an ivory tower but an uncaring monarch who can’t see the chaos at her door. It’ll be interesting, and no doubt bloody, to see what happens when that changes.

This is a way more confident, pacy effort than last episode that even gives Duffy non-awful things to do. The show’s claustrophobic setting is really starting to pay off and with Ramona set up in opposition to the Countess, battle lines are being drawn. I wonder what side Detective Lowe will be on. I wonder if he knows himself.

Next week! Halloween! (Again!) With some very surprising guests checking into the Cortez.

The Good:

• Tristan sharing scenes with March (Or Evil Dead Quicksilver as I think of him) is actually really fun. He can definitely stick around if he’s going to be March’s little murder groupie.
• John. Wes Bentley has a stupidly hard job here as the calm(ish) eye of the storm but he’s acing it. John really does feel like the lead in a more sensible, kinder detective thriller who’s taken the ultimate wrong turn at Albuquerque. He’s clearly doomed, but he’s not going down without a fight.
• Sarah Paulson. Increasingly the MVP this season. I’d watch an entire series of Sally the junkie ghost being miserable and tormenting people. It’d be the most depressing TV show ever made and cancelled after two episodes but I’d watch them.
• Angela Bassett. Because Angela Bassett is always amazing.

• Angela Bassett as, clearly, a Pam Grier analogue is even better. Especially the magnificently cheesy movie posters we get of her career.
• The 1990s hair that both she and Gaga are rocking for the HipHop massacre sequence.

The Bad:

• Naomi Campbell somehow manages to be even worse once her character is murdered. Which almost circumnavigates Awful and comes out the other side into Amazing. But doesn’t.

The Random:

• “You’re a Scorpio, which explains a lot.” Duffy in good line shocker!
• “How do you know all this?” “I googled you.” “…that sounds obscene…”  Love this joke so very much. It’s sold by the delivery from both actors too which is a nice piece of equal opportunity comedy.
• “I wanted to save kids. Other people’s kids.” Everything you need to know about Alex wrapped up in a single line. She’s a really complex, interesting leading lady and it’s a delight to see her get a chance to be in the spotlight.
• “Some days are bearable. Today is very hard.” Again, very simple language but so loaded with meaning and emotion.
• “Why are you wasting your time on junkies? We only hurt ourselves… Not like breaking one of the 10 commandments.” There’s a growing fan theory that John is the 10 Commandments Killer and has been effectively hunting himself. That would certainly tally with some events, and this line from Sally isn’t so much loaded as buckling under the weight of implication. But, for all that, I hope he’s not. John as a good man in a bad place is a lot more interesting than John as a serial killer waiting to come out of his chrysalis.
• “I don’t know who I am if I’m not your mother.” “Honestly if that is really true, you should kill yourself. You should do it even if it isn’t.” Just huge amounts of venom and obligation and love behind every line Donovan and Iris hurl at one another. If John is the lead in a detective thriller, these two are the cast of a lost Arthur Miller play and none of them are in the right, or safe, place.
• “Who the hell are you?” “Now you’re asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is who WAS I?” Ramona’s not only huge fun, she’s also an interesting exploration of the consequences of immortality. A woman with the resources to keep herself alive and in blood, she’s the first of the Contessa’s pre-Donovan creations we’ve seen. But how many more are there? Is Ramona leading an army?
• “I’d come to Hollywood with barely a high school education and no prospects. It wasn’t long before I was a star.” Another tiny, beautiful, grimly funny line.
• “And I’ve got a floppy appendage between my legs that keeps me from wearing pencil skirts. We all have our flaws… kitten.” Liz Taylor gets about three lines an episode. They are usually amazing. This is no exception.
• By the way, Liz’s reference to Laurence Harvey could be one of two people. Laurence Harvey was an actor who was Academy Award-nominated in 1959 but whose later career was very turbulent. Alternately, it may be a nod to Larry Harvey, the burned man who played a vital role in the first season

• Angela Bassett, who joins the cast this episode, is of course an AHS alumni. She’s also got a massive track record crammed full of excellent work. Her turn in Strange Days, which is now rather endearingly a period drama, is especially great. More recently, fans of Gerard Butler and/or Milla Jovovich blowing things up will have seen her in Olympus Has Fallen and Survivor.

• Bernie Madoff, the investor who bankrupted the Countess, is real. He’s also currently serving 150 years in prison for running an epically vast Ponzi scheme which led to $65 billion in losses for his clients. He’s a nice grace note here too, showing that while the Countess is immortal, she’s not infallible.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

• Read our other reviews of American Horror Story: Hotel
• Lady Gaga Reveals Striking New American Horror Story Hotel Image
• American Horror Story: Hotel – New Cast Portraits

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E02 “Chutes and Ladders” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: Tim Minear
Director: Bradley Buecker

Essential Plot Points:

• Will Drake decides to make the most of owning a building that looks like an art deco grenade went off inside it and hosts a fashion show with the help of Vogue editor Claudia Bankson (played by Naomi Campbell who is exactly as bad as you think she’ll be).
• John arrives at the hotel and runs into the show. He and Scarlett reluctantly sit and watch as Tristan Duffy, who is so hot right now, steals the show. Duffy is immensely, relentlessly high and barely in control. When Will confronts him backstage, Duffy slices his cheek open and quits modelling.
• Scarlett and Will’s son Lachlan sneak out. Lachlan shows Scarlett glass coffins at the bottom of the hotel’s empty swimming pool. Each one has a sleeping child inside. Scarlett, because she’s clever, recognises her brother.

• Elsewhere, Scarlett’s mother tears a strip off an anti-vaxxer mother (Madchen Amick! Wooooo!) about letting her child get measles.
• John is lured into spilling the story of the last time he got drunk to Sally. He tells her about what seemed to be an apparent murder suicide with a father killing his family then himself. But as Lowe walked through the crime scene he realised the truth; the man’s power had been cut off and he’d brought a generator inside to keep his kids warm. They’d been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning and he’d killed himself when he found out. The following day, John’s son Holden had disappeared.
• Completing the awful, awful day John is having, he’s sent a bloodsoaked Academy Award by the killer. We don’t think the note attached says, “Keep this for a future episode”. But we’re not entirely sure.
• Duffy, searching for drugs, finds his way to the Countess’s apartment. He fights with Donovan there and storms out. He encounters the ghosts of Miss Evers, the laundress and Mr March, the builder and owner of the hotel. They force him to watch a murder and he flees into the arms of the Countess. The Countess is drawn to the new man and his rage. They have sex and she explains the rules about the “virus”. It turns out they’re not immortal and they cut rather than bite but they rely on blood for sustenance.
• Donovan returns and finds them together. The Countess, with a genuinely unsettling combination of kindness and cruelty, throws Donovan out and upgrades to the new model.
• Elsewhere, Scarlett sneaks out and returns to the hotel. She finds the coffins open and her brother, who has never aged, in a nearby room. He refuses to come home, saying the hotel is his home now. She takes a photo of him to prove he’s alive and he lunges for her. Terrified, she sprints away, but not before a laughing Sally terrifies her still further.
• At the Lowe house, she’s been gone for five hours and her parents are frantic. Neither believe her when she returns but John looks at the photo. Someone is on there but it’s too blurry to see.
• John, who has had quite enough of this thanks, goes to the Cortez to arrest Iris. She’s remarkably nonplussed and offers to tell him everything over a drink.
• We flashback to 1925 and Mr James March, a newly minted millionaire. Sick of being ignored by East Coast bluebloods, March sets up shop on the West Coast and builds the hotel as a perfect torture chamber. Obsessed with violence and death he ensured the building had disposal chutes for bodies, secret passages and everything a discerning murderer could need. He was aided in this by his faithful laundress, Miss Evers. It, of course, didn’t last and March killed Evers and himself as the police stormed his office…

• …Which is room 64. Where John now lives.
• As the episode finishes, Duffy revels in his new-found vitality by bringing a hipster to the hotel and having sex with him. To death.

Review:

There’s a lot to enjoy this episode, especially with the Lowe family. John, Alex and Scarlett are all refreshingly clever people who clearly haven’t read the part of their contracts that reminds them this is a horror story. Alex is insightful, principled and invested. John is driven, guilt-ridden and dogged and Scarlett is clever, resourceful and really very sympathetic.

They’re clearly all doomed.

Not just yet though. Minear’s script is at its best when it focuses on the Lowe family and there’s a measured, but rapid, doling out of answers that’s both fun and refreshing to see. I can’t remember the last time I watched a horror show where the lead got told exactly what’s going on two episodes in and, by and large, listened. He didn’t believe most of it, that’s for sure but he’s got the information and that’s an important part of all this.

The highlight of the episode is its bookend cover versions of The Shining’s bar scene. John being tormented by Sally is the most disturbing, and nuanced, thing we’ve seen so far. Sally, it seems, is both gaining some kind of nourishment from his sadness and genuinely feeling bad for him. It’s like she’s getting a passive high (or perhaps low) from his emotions and Sarah Paulson continues to be the most impressive part of this cast.

The later scene swaps her out for Kathy Bates’s Iris and shifts the power dynamic. Or at least, what John thinks the power dynamic is. Iris is already settling down into something tragic and nuanced and Bates does great work here telling the monochrome nightmare of the hotel’s birth. Plus, it means Evan Peters is on deck! Hurray! The best movie Quicksilver and arguably American Horror Story MVP has tremendous fun. He’s playing someone about halfway between Frank Doyle and Howard Stark and doing so with polite gusto and barely contained rage.

The episode’s closing flashback is beautifully shot and caps off an hour and a bit of some amazing work from Buecker. He relishes shooting the hotel from odd angles and perspectives, creating and focusing the feeling of dislocation hotels always have. There’s something off about his shots that’s wonderfully unsettling and somehow laced through with a real sense of fun. The closing flashback embodies this, giving him a chance to cut loose and putting Peters and the magnificent Mare Winningham front and centre. It’s a huge, horrifying fun sequence that’s a perfect high note to end the episode on.

And if it had ended there, you’d be looking at a four star review instead of a three star one.

Tim Minear is one of the greatest genre scriptwriters of his generation. He’s done amazing work across countless shows including Angel, Wonderfalls, Dollhouse, Drive, The Chicago Code and of course Firefly.

Everyone’s allowed an off day. This is one of his.

It’s not that the script’s bad as such, because the Lowe family stuff is bloody great (if not quite literally, yet). It’s that the episode, at a bloated 70 minutes, tries to do too much and spends way too much time with two new, crushingly boring characters. Naomi Campbell is… oh come on, you know what she’s going to be like here. It’s a performance so dreadful, so flat and yet so arch that it kills every scene she’s in.

Campbell is very bad at what she does but Finn Wittrock might not be. It’s difficult to tell, though, as his character stumbles onto the screen carrying the weight of the plot and every pop culture reference the show’s missed up to now. He’s a bad boy model and drug addict who wants to kill Kendall Jenner! He’s in a Lars Von Trier movie next year! KIDS! KIDS COME BACK! WE’RE STILL YOUNG! WE CAN BE YOUNG FOREVER!

You get the idea.

Duffy is very, very awful and judging by this episode Duffy and Naomi Campbell as…well… Naomi Campbell will be around at least one more episode. That’s bad news, especially if the show hands in another instalment that feels this lumpy and badly paced. Still, at least the soundtrack’s still great.

The Good:

• Wes Bentley, who somehow is playing an amazingly straight-arrow, close-minded guy who’s also immensely broken and sympathetic. AHS is a show that’s never been known for subtlety but that’s exactly what he’s bringing to it so far.
• Scarlett Lowe, Girl Detective! I love how this show writes her. I really hope Scarlett’s a major part of how all this gets resolved and lives to tell the tale.
• Kathy Bates and Sarah Paulson turning in truly incredible work throughout. Seriously, Paulson in particular is so good in this episode. Brittle, furious, tragic and completely unpredictable.
• Peters and Winningham as the chirpiest murderous double act in history.

The Bad:

• The pacing. There’s a great Lowe-centric episode here. It’s just surrounded with 20-plus minutes of crushingly dull Countess/Donovan/Duffy the new chestmeat non-drama.
• Every single thing about Naomi Campbell’s character.
• Every single thing Duffy says or does. He is so, SO dull. It’s entirely possible that’s the point. If so, congratulations? He’s hateful and kills the show’s momentum every time he’s on screen. Which is a lot.
• Random gratuitous gay hipster sex murder. Was there five minutes left in the day or something? Was the Sexy Death Quota not filled for the week?

The Random:

• “Let’s stay in. We could binge watch House of Cards.” Donovan, rubbish vampire after our own hearts.
• “I take it you live here.” “I do.” “How long?” “Too long.” See the script’s actually really good when it’s not focusing on the cast of flipping Zoolander!
• “There’s a part of you that wants to get lost, am I right?” Sally is CHILLING this episode. She’s definitely a threat but to who? And when?
• “I had two kids at the time.” Such a beautiful piece of dialogue. So weighted and delivered with such sadness by Bentley.
• “Skinny jeans are out, fringes are in, ponchos are forever. MAKE A NOTE.” Never change, Liz Taylor. Stay fierce.
• “Can a bullet take me out? A silver bullet or a stake?” “Bitch please, of course it can.” The only moment with Zoolander-Lite that works. It also neatly balances the power the two vampires have. They, much like Lady Me in Doctor Who, are superb rather than invincible.
• Evan Peters is an American Horror Story alumni of long standing. He’s also notable for his superb turn as Quicksilver in X-Men: Days Of Future Past and being Todd Haynes, chum of Kick-Ass, in Kick-Ass.
• Mare Winningham showed up last week but this week she gets to really cut loose. She’s also this week’s winner of Cast Member Who Was In A Cult Movie You Really Should See. In this case, Miracle Mile, which she starred in with Anthony Edwards of ER and Top Gun. They play a pair of not-quite lovers struggling to escape LA as a nuclear attack hurtles in. It plays out largely in real time and is very weird, very sweet and very grim. Go check it out.
• Madchen Amick is best known as Shelly Johnson on Twin Peaks. She’s also appeared in basically every high profile TV drama of the last 15 years.
• Must we? Alright alright. Finn Wittrock is best known for his turn as Young Tubal-Cain in Noah, the epically odd Darren Aronofsky movie. He was also Dandy Mott in American Horror Story: Freakshow and has appeared in Criminal Minds, CSI: Miami and Torchwood: Miracle Day. As, oddly, did Mare Winningham.
• Naomi Campbell has appeared in Ali G Indahouse, Fat Slags and Harry Enfield And Chums, and at present has recurring roles on both American Horror Story: Hotel and Empire. Her first movie role was in Cool As Ice. Google it, it’s a modern classic.
• Anyway! The music was great this week and included: “Spellbound” by Siouxsie and the Banshees; “Don’t Stop The Dance” by Bryan Ferry; “In A Lonely Place” by New Order and “Flower Duet” by Lakme.
• And the radio of death plays “Body And Soul” by The Benny Goodman Trio which isn’t good news at all…
• Oh, shot of the week is this. Lady Gaga, on a horse, being led into disco Valhalla by a bunch of sailors. You can almost see her ticking that off her bucket list.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

• Read our review of the first episode of American Horror Story: Hotel
• Lady Gaga Reveals Striking New American Horror Story Hotel Image
• American Horror Story: Hotel – New Cast Portraits

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E02 “Chutes and Ladders” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: Tim Minear
Director: Bradley Buecker

Essential Plot Points:

• Will Drake decides to make the most of owning a building that looks like an art deco grenade went off inside it and hosts a fashion show with the help of Vogue editor Claudia Bankson (played by Naomi Campbell who is exactly as bad as you think she’ll be).
• John arrives at the hotel and runs into the show. He and Scarlett reluctantly sit and watch as Tristan Duffy, who is so hot right now, steals the show. Duffy is immensely, relentlessly high and barely in control. When Will confronts him backstage, Duffy slices his cheek open and quits modelling.
• Scarlett and Will’s son Lachlan sneak out. Lachlan shows Scarlett glass coffins at the bottom of the hotel’s empty swimming pool. Each one has a sleeping child inside. Scarlett, because she’s clever, recognises her brother.

• Elsewhere, Scarlett’s mother tears a strip off an anti-vaxxer mother (Madchen Amick! Wooooo!) about letting her child get measles.
• John is lured into spilling the story of the last time he got drunk to Sally. He tells her about what seemed to be an apparent murder suicide with a father killing his family then himself. But as Lowe walked through the crime scene he realised the truth; the man’s power had been cut off and he’d brought a generator inside to keep his kids warm. They’d been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning and he’d killed himself when he found out. The following day, John’s son Holden had disappeared.
• Completing the awful, awful day John is having, he’s sent a bloodsoaked Academy Award by the killer. We don’t think the note attached says, “Keep this for a future episode”. But we’re not entirely sure.
• Duffy, searching for drugs, finds his way to the Countess’s apartment. He fights with Donovan there and storms out. He encounters the ghosts of Miss Evers, the laundress and Mr March, the builder and owner of the hotel. They force him to watch a murder and he flees into the arms of the Countess. The Countess is drawn to the new man and his rage. They have sex and she explains the rules about the “virus”. It turns out they’re not immortal and they cut rather than bite but they rely on blood for sustenance.
• Donovan returns and finds them together. The Countess, with a genuinely unsettling combination of kindness and cruelty, throws Donovan out and upgrades to the new model.
• Elsewhere, Scarlett sneaks out and returns to the hotel. She finds the coffins open and her brother, who has never aged, in a nearby room. He refuses to come home, saying the hotel is his home now. She takes a photo of him to prove he’s alive and he lunges for her. Terrified, she sprints away, but not before a laughing Sally terrifies her still further.
• At the Lowe house, she’s been gone for five hours and her parents are frantic. Neither believe her when she returns but John looks at the photo. Someone is on there but it’s too blurry to see.
• John, who has had quite enough of this thanks, goes to the Cortez to arrest Iris. She’s remarkably nonplussed and offers to tell him everything over a drink.
• We flashback to 1925 and Mr James March, a newly minted millionaire. Sick of being ignored by East Coast bluebloods, March sets up shop on the West Coast and builds the hotel as a perfect torture chamber. Obsessed with violence and death he ensured the building had disposal chutes for bodies, secret passages and everything a discerning murderer could need. He was aided in this by his faithful laundress, Miss Evers. It, of course, didn’t last and March killed Evers and himself as the police stormed his office…

• …Which is room 64. Where John now lives.
• As the episode finishes, Duffy revels in his new-found vitality by bringing a hipster to the hotel and having sex with him. To death.

Review:

There’s a lot to enjoy this episode, especially with the Lowe family. John, Alex and Scarlett are all refreshingly clever people who clearly haven’t read the part of their contracts that reminds them this is a horror story. Alex is insightful, principled and invested. John is driven, guilt-ridden and dogged and Scarlett is clever, resourceful and really very sympathetic.

They’re clearly all doomed.

Not just yet though. Minear’s script is at its best when it focuses on the Lowe family and there’s a measured, but rapid, doling out of answers that’s both fun and refreshing to see. I can’t remember the last time I watched a horror show where the lead got told exactly what’s going on two episodes in and, by and large, listened. He didn’t believe most of it, that’s for sure but he’s got the information and that’s an important part of all this.

The highlight of the episode is its bookend cover versions of The Shining’s bar scene. John being tormented by Sally is the most disturbing, and nuanced, thing we’ve seen so far. Sally, it seems, is both gaining some kind of nourishment from his sadness and genuinely feeling bad for him. It’s like she’s getting a passive high (or perhaps low) from his emotions and Sarah Paulson continues to be the most impressive part of this cast.

The later scene swaps her out for Kathy Bates’s Iris and shifts the power dynamic. Or at least, what John thinks the power dynamic is. Iris is already settling down into something tragic and nuanced and Bates does great work here telling the monochrome nightmare of the hotel’s birth. Plus, it means Evan Peters is on deck! Hurray! The best movie Quicksilver and arguably American Horror Story MVP has tremendous fun. He’s playing someone about halfway between Frank Doyle and Howard Stark and doing so with polite gusto and barely contained rage.

The episode’s closing flashback is beautifully shot and caps off an hour and a bit of some amazing work from Buecker. He relishes shooting the hotel from odd angles and perspectives, creating and focusing the feeling of dislocation hotels always have. There’s something off about his shots that’s wonderfully unsettling and somehow laced through with a real sense of fun. The closing flashback embodies this, giving him a chance to cut loose and putting Peters and the magnificent Mare Winningham front and centre. It’s a huge, horrifying fun sequence that’s a perfect high note to end the episode on.

And if it had ended there, you’d be looking at a four star review instead of a three star one.

Tim Minear is one of the greatest genre scriptwriters of his generation. He’s done amazing work across countless shows including Angel, Wonderfalls, Dollhouse, Drive, The Chicago Code and of course Firefly.

Everyone’s allowed an off day. This is one of his.

It’s not that the script’s bad as such, because the Lowe family stuff is bloody great (if not quite literally, yet). It’s that the episode, at a bloated 70 minutes, tries to do too much and spends way too much time with two new, crushingly boring characters. Naomi Campbell is… oh come on, you know what she’s going to be like here. It’s a performance so dreadful, so flat and yet so arch that it kills every scene she’s in.

Campbell is very bad at what she does but Finn Wittrock might not be. It’s difficult to tell, though, as his character stumbles onto the screen carrying the weight of the plot and every pop culture reference the show’s missed up to now. He’s a bad boy model and drug addict who wants to kill Kendall Jenner! He’s in a Lars Von Trier movie next year! KIDS! KIDS COME BACK! WE’RE STILL YOUNG! WE CAN BE YOUNG FOREVER!

You get the idea.

Duffy is very, very awful and judging by this episode Duffy and Naomi Campbell as…well… Naomi Campbell will be around at least one more episode. That’s bad news, especially if the show hands in another instalment that feels this lumpy and badly paced. Still, at least the soundtrack’s still great.

The Good:

• Wes Bentley, who somehow is playing an amazingly straight-arrow, close-minded guy who’s also immensely broken and sympathetic. AHS is a show that’s never been known for subtlety but that’s exactly what he’s bringing to it so far.
• Scarlett Lowe, Girl Detective! I love how this show writes her. I really hope Scarlett’s a major part of how all this gets resolved and lives to tell the tale.
• Kathy Bates and Sarah Paulson turning in truly incredible work throughout. Seriously, Paulson in particular is so good in this episode. Brittle, furious, tragic and completely unpredictable.
• Peters and Winningham as the chirpiest murderous double act in history.

The Bad:

• The pacing. There’s a great Lowe-centric episode here. It’s just surrounded with 20-plus minutes of crushingly dull Countess/Donovan/Duffy the new chestmeat non-drama.
• Every single thing about Naomi Campbell’s character.
• Every single thing Duffy says or does. He is so, SO dull. It’s entirely possible that’s the point. If so, congratulations? He’s hateful and kills the show’s momentum every time he’s on screen. Which is a lot.
• Random gratuitous gay hipster sex murder. Was there five minutes left in the day or something? Was the Sexy Death Quota not filled for the week?

The Random:

• “Let’s stay in. We could binge watch House of Cards.” Donovan, rubbish vampire after our own hearts.
• “I take it you live here.” “I do.” “How long?” “Too long.” See the script’s actually really good when it’s not focusing on the cast of flipping Zoolander!
• “There’s a part of you that wants to get lost, am I right?” Sally is CHILLING this episode. She’s definitely a threat but to who? And when?
• “I had two kids at the time.” Such a beautiful piece of dialogue. So weighted and delivered with such sadness by Bentley.
• “Skinny jeans are out, fringes are in, ponchos are forever. MAKE A NOTE.” Never change, Liz Taylor. Stay fierce.
• “Can a bullet take me out? A silver bullet or a stake?” “Bitch please, of course it can.” The only moment with Zoolander-Lite that works. It also neatly balances the power the two vampires have. They, much like Lady Me in Doctor Who, are superb rather than invincible.
• Evan Peters is an American Horror Story alumni of long standing. He’s also notable for his superb turn as Quicksilver in X-Men: Days Of Future Past and being Todd Haynes, chum of Kick-Ass, in Kick-Ass.
• Mare Winningham showed up last week but this week she gets to really cut loose. She’s also this week’s winner of Cast Member Who Was In A Cult Movie You Really Should See. In this case, Miracle Mile, which she starred in with Anthony Edwards of ER and Top Gun. They play a pair of not-quite lovers struggling to escape LA as a nuclear attack hurtles in. It plays out largely in real time and is very weird, very sweet and very grim. Go check it out.
• Madchen Amick is best known as Shelly Johnson on Twin Peaks. She’s also appeared in basically every high profile TV drama of the last 15 years.
• Must we? Alright alright. Finn Wittrock is best known for his turn as Young Tubal-Cain in Noah, the epically odd Darren Aronofsky movie. He was also Dandy Mott in American Horror Story: Freakshow and has appeared in Criminal Minds, CSI: Miami and Torchwood: Miracle Day. As, oddly, did Mare Winningham.
• Naomi Campbell has appeared in Ali G Indahouse, Fat Slags and Harry Enfield And Chums, and at present has recurring roles on both American Horror Story: Hotel and Empire. Her first movie role was in Cool As Ice. Google it, it’s a modern classic.
• Anyway! The music was great this week and included: “Spellbound” by Siouxsie and the Banshees; “Don’t Stop The Dance” by Bryan Ferry; “In A Lonely Place” by New Order and “Flower Duet” by Lakme.
• And the radio of death plays “Body And Soul” by The Benny Goodman Trio which isn’t good news at all…
• Oh, shot of the week is this. Lady Gaga, on a horse, being led into disco Valhalla by a bunch of sailors. You can almost see her ticking that off her bucket list.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

• Read our review of the first episode of American Horror Story: Hotel
• Lady Gaga Reveals Striking New American Horror Story Hotel Image
• American Horror Story: Hotel – New Cast Portraits