Posts tagged: American Horror Story

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E07 “Flicker” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: Crystal Liu
Director: Michael Goi

Essential Plot Points:

• Will Drake (remember him?) and his son Lachlan (seriously, it’ll come to you), are overseeing the renovations to the Cortez. Will is alerted to a large plate of steel built into the walls and orders it to be removed. The two workmen who cut through it find a corridor beyond, that, “smells like death”.

• They go in.

• They are almost instantly killed.

• Meanwhile, John is checking into a psychiatric hospital and a fairly cruddy one at that. Alex tries to dissuade him but he’s adamant. He’s also clearly even more unwell than before. In the first of numerous flashbacks this week, we see why. John burst into the case room, got into a fight with his former partner and found they had a lead; the hospital he’s just got himself admitted to.

• At the Cortez, the Countess and Iris find the dead workmen and the opened wall. Iris is in awe as she realises, for the first time since she’s known her, the Countess is frightened….

• AAAAAAAAND FLASHBACK! 1925 Hollywood and the Countess is a young showgirl who attracts Rudolf Valentino’s eye on the set of Son Of The Sheik. The two fall for each other and the Countess becomes part of a mostly polyamorous relationship with Valentino and his wife.
• Shortly after this Valentino is apparently killed. The Countess hears this at the opening party for the Cortez. Numb and grief-stricken she tries to kill herself but is saved by March. She later marries him, discovers his murderous tendencies and enables them, fleeing from any hope she may have had in the arms of the Valentinos.

• Months later, Elizabeth visits Valentino’s tomb to lay a single rose on it. Valentino and Natacha meet her, and explain that they were turned into vampires by FW Murnau. Murnau, the director of original vampire movie Nosferatu, discovered the true vampires while filming. They turned him and in turn he offered to turn Valentino and his wife so they could escape the onset of the talkies and stay young and beautiful forever.
• Valentino and Natacha turn the Countess as, unobserved nearby, March sees everything. Later, he kidnaps Valentino and Natacha and walls them up in the Cortez hallway uncovered at the start of the episode.

• In the present day, John tricks his way into the secure ward at the hospital. He finds the room his partner visited and is amazed to see it inhabited by a young girl. He talks to her and she admits to participating in every 10 Commandments killing. In flashback we see her turned by the Countess after her father left her in a car outside the Cortez in 1986.
• John breaks out with the little girl, who introduces herself as Wren. He assures her he can stop, or kill, the 10 Commandments Killer.

• At the Cortez, the Countess has dinner with her dead original husband. March is in a jovial mood and responds to her news about marrying Drake with a cheery confession about Valentino and Natacha. Horrified and increasingly murderous, the Countess realises her first loves have lived in horrific squalor right under her nose for centuries.
• Nearby, the Valentinos murder a group of strippers and, newly refreshed, check out to go out on the town…
• Near the hospital, Wren asks for more assurance from John. He gives it and tells him she likes him one more time than sprints out into traffic and is killed.

Review:

This episode had the potential to be very annoying. AHS: Hotel’s pacing has been a consistent problem throughout the season, the show often going fascinating side roads but always doing so at the expense of the main plot. This episode – the secret origin of the Countess – looked set to do the same thing.

Except by and large it doesn’t.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way up front this week. The 10 Commandments Killer plotline has some major developments, all of which feel either two weeks late or two weeks early. Wes Bentley’s still turning in great work and this week John gets to do actual, if very unbalanced, detection – which is fun. But the sneaking suspicion that the 10 Commandments Killer and John are the same man really needs to stop sneaking and start being very, very overt. When what was the main plot of the season four weeks ago becomes a mild annoyance that gets in the way of the flashbacks, you know something’s gone a touch wrong.

That – aside from the horribly annoying Central Casting Australian strippers who get murdered off screen – is about it for the bad this week. The good is legion, and starts and ends with Gaga. For the last few weeks we’ve seen the awful side of the Countess; throwing Donovan out, murdering Tristan, abandoning Ramona, seducing Alex, naming her own son Bartholomew, the whole bit.

This week, we get the other side of the story. The Countess, we discover, was a chorus girl in Hollywood during the meteoric career of Rudolf Valentino. Seduced by Valentino and his wife, she falls madly in love with them both. Just in time for him to apparently die.

OR DID HE?

Because in the present day we get Will Drake renovating the hotel and discovering a large walled off section where Valentino and his wife, both turned into vampires by FW Murnau have been imprisoned for decades. The two faded undead starlets go on a rampage through the hotel that is, this being the Cortez, largely unnoticed until the closing scenes. Where two things happen.

The first is that the Countess discovers the man she loved and lost is still, kind of, alive and has been in her home for decades. The second is the Valentinos go out on the town, where, I like to think, they’ll fall in with the vampire children from a couple of weeks ago and fight crime. Or do crime. Probably both.

The Countess’s discovery of Valentino being alive is where the episode really flies, though. Not only is it the most effective since the heart-breaking Evers one, but it gives her the one thing she’s desperately needed; context. We see the Countess, young, innocent and mortal. We see the impact that losing Valentino had on her and the dark path it sends her careening down with March, who is on top moustache-twirling form this week by the way.

Most importantly though, we see what Iris sees. The Countess scared. The Countess off balance. For the first time this entire season, something has happened that is not in her control. And, worst of all, she’s FURIOUS about it. The end game for this season looks to be all out war between her and March, and everyone else and her. I doubt any of them will be standing by the time it’s done. But it’s going to be a hell of a fight.

The Good:

• The direction. Oh my God, the direction. Goi’s done good work on this series before but this episode is joyously, raucously inventive. The tango between Valentino, Natacha and the future Countess is a perfect example; sexy, playful, wildly over the top and just a little sinister as Goi switches between black and white and colour. The later sequence with FW Murnau stalking
  Valentino in the exact manner of an FW Murnau movie is even better. Just amazing, playful direction that always serves the script, never the director’s ego.

• Finn Wittrock! Owner of the second best name in showbusiness after Jack Noseworthy and as we see here, actually a very good actor. It’s been difficult to sit through most of his scenes as Zoolander 2.0 but, with Tristan very, very killed last week it’s nice to see him jump across to a new character. Especially as he’s so bloody good as Valentino. Suave, focused and playing noticeably older than he is.

• Gaga. Yet again, she steals the show. Derided as a piece of stunt casting when this season was announced she’s continually been the most impressive thing about the show. This episode is no exception, as we see the Countess as mortal, young and naïve, then old, embittered and furious in the present day. The show’s greatest strength remains her character and this episode in particular shows us that no one here is ever fully monstrous, even the Countess.
• Evan Peters. I would, at this stage, watch a period drama series about Evan Peters having fabulous parties and murdering or investigating the murders of the great and good. It could be like Dexter with more Charlestons. It’d be GREAT.
• Alexandra Daddario. Not just because she’s fun as the spiteful, venomous Natacha but because she’s in the middle of the oddest and most fun career trajectory I’ve seen in ages. She first got noticed as Annabeth in the Percy Jackson movies then rose to more prominence earlier this year in Dwayne Johnson disasterfest San Andreas where she played the smartest and most practical member of the cast. She’s done a ton of really fun, interesting TV work, including this and has the movie version of Baywatch up next. That’s going to re-team her with Johnson and in turn send her careening back onto the high-impact, high-cheese blockbuster side of things. It’s a rare treat to see any level of screen talent so comfortable in so many genres but she absolutely is.

The Bad:

• FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, JUST GET ON WITH THE DAMN 10 COMMANDMENTS KILLER STORYLINE ALREADY.
• SERIOUSLY.
• On a less block capital-y note, we do get a lot of interesting progress on that here. But the pacing on it is massively off. It either feels like the start of the endgame for that plot (which should land in an episode or two surely?) or like a mid-season big twist/reveal.
• The Australian strippers are, shall we say, somewhat on-the-nose in terms of characterisation. And by characterisation I mean they draw pretty clearly from the Big Book Of Australian Character Stereotypes. The fact no mention was made of Vegemite sandwiches and there was nary a “cobber” to be heard amazes me.

And the Random:

• “I couldn’t pick my butthole out of a lineup.” Liz is obviously still grieving this episode but Iris is there to pick up the sass slack.
• “I’ve just never seen you scared before.” There are a couple of really simple lines this week that are chilling. This is one of them.
• “I don’t understand. Why am I here?” “Because Gods have appetites.” This is another, especially given that Natacha and Valentino are mortal at this point.
• “Who is he?” “Just a hobo.” “You disapprove.” “I do. Why waste your time killing a destitute beggar?” The Countess embracing the different dark path to the one she was heading for is nuanced, tragic and again, told so elegantly here.
• “Nobody forced me to do anything.” Another perfect, tiny line that hits harder than us seeing Wren at the crime scenes.
• “You sound like my daughter, Scarlett. She’s around your age but she’s the oldest little girl I know.” Such a beautiful line that captures Scarlett perfectly. I hope we see her again before the end of the season.
• “But it’s him, not you. And it’s me, not her.” A lovely, ambiguous moment from John. Is he Wren’s dad? Probably not. Is he the killer? No clue. But this moment of clarity from Detective 1000 Yard Stare is both welcome and oddly touching.
• “Might I suggest when you murder him you do it off the property? It’d be damned awkward to keep running into him for all eternity.” “What makes you think I mean to do him harm?” “I’m dead dear, not stupid.” Never change, terrifying Ghost Quicksilver.
• Jessica Belkin does great, haunting work here as Wren. She’s also set to appear in the Scream Queens finale – proving that Ryan Murphy knows talent when he sees it – and, intriguingly, is listed as appearing in at least one more episode of American Horror Story…
• Rudolph Valentino, whose full name was the magnificent Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla was a star of the silent movie era. Best known for The Sheik, The Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse and his final movie, Son Of The Sheik, Valentino was an immensely popular figure. And yes, various Ladies In Black still visit the grave almost daily. One claimed to be the daughter of his unrequited love; another, more recent one is simply a fan. Regardless, Valentino still exerts a huge pull, even in death.
• FW Murnau was one of the pioneers of modern cinema. His Nosferatu remains one of the definitive versions of Dracula and vastly influenced every single vampire movie and story that’s followed it. The 2000 movie Shadow Of The Vampire takes a similar road to this episode, with Murnau (John Malkovich) enlisting an actual vampire (a scene-stealingly horrific Willem Dafoe) to play Nosferatu. It’s a slow burn, wildly eccentric movie but it’s worth tracking down.

• This week’s music choices are the best in the show’s considerable run of good calls. The ending is set to “Circles” by The Soft Moon but it’s the use of “Lullaby” by The Cure as the music for the Countess’ wedding that’s perfect. By the way, when you go look that up on YouTube? Be warned. The video is essentially four minutes of an arachnapobe’s worst nightmare. Have “Love Cats” on standby for straight after. It’ll help.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

• Read our other reviews of American Horror Story: Hotel

American Horror Story: Hotel S05E06 “Room 33” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: John J Gray
Director: Loni Peristere

Essential Plot Points:

• Flashback time – to season one! Turns out the Countess went to the Murder House for an off-the-books abortion. Her “son” was an horrific demonic creature that survived the process and killed one of Doctor Montgomery’s nurses. She named it Bartholomew. Awww.

• In the present day, John wakes to find Holden by his bed. The giggling boy leads him to the coffins where he sees Alex and blacks out. Alex goes to Liz for advice and they move the coffins before John wakes up. When he does, Alex claims John was hallucinating.

• Elsewhere, Liz and Tristan are, it turns out, very much in love. In a surprisingly tender and honest scene Liz thanks the world’s most thick-headed Zoolander-alike for “seeing the girl” and in doing so makes him infinitely more likeable than he’s been at any point prior to this.

• Meanwhile upstairs the Countess is having remarkably unsuccessful sex with Will Drake. It’s not really taking so she gets Tristan to “fluff” him up. Despite his reluctance, Tristan does so.
• Bartholomew the Demon Baby is kept in Room 33 and the Countess goes to see him before heading off to Paris with Will.

• Once she’s gone, Donovan and Ramona come to the hotel to murder the children. Ramona goes to the basement and is disgusted to find the coffins moved. She chats with Iris, impressed by her new lease on (un)life and disgusted by Donovan not wanting to murder the kids. Then, she heads up to Room 33 to kill Bartholomew.

• In the penthouse, Donovan runs into the ghosts of the two Swedish tourists from episode one. He explains to them that they’re trapped in the hotel now but can at least find a purpose there. He illustrates this with a story of Kara, a teacher who killed herself in the building and now enjoys eternity terrifying guests.
• Ramona gets attacked by Bartholomew who escapes. Liz tends her wounds and the two old friends chat, with Liz admitting that she’s in love.

• Alex meets the Swedish ghosts, both near-foetal with horror near a dead body. A flashback reveals they both killed him and had sex with him, enjoying both. Alex sets them on John. They have horrific, bloody sex which culminates in John fleeing the hotel in terror and returning home.
• This goes as well as you might expect. Scarlett barely talks to her dad, who barely notices that both he and his wife have abandoned one of their children. He’s hardly done reassuring her when he’s firing at Bartholomew the demon baby who stowed away in his suitcase. Scarlett freaks out, entirely understandably, and Alex asks John’s old partner to look after. He does so and, hopefully, the pair of them go off to a kinder, nicer series where they can fight crime or something.
• After being thrown out by John, Alex finds an injured Bartholomew in the bushes.

• Back at the Cortez, Liz admits she’s in love with Tristan. The Countess seems to take it well after some reluctance and agrees to talk to Tristan. She has drinks with the two of them, explains that she will not stand for betrayal and kills Tristan telling Liz, “He’s yours. Bury him.”
• The Countess leaves to visit her child and finds Alex tending him. Awestruck by the other woman’s kindness, the Countess thanks her for saving her child. Alex replies that she did the same.

Review:

We’re on the home strait now and stuff’s starting to fall into place. A couple of plots get major advances here and the rest run in place. Here’s how that shakes down.

The Countess’s fall from whatever she thinks grace is takes up the lion’s share of the episode. This is the Countess as we’ve not been allowed to see her before: cold-eyed and brutal. The scene where she intimidates Tristan into having sex with Will is one of the series’ more unsettling moments but it’s the final scene with Liz and Tristan where she kills it.

Literally.

The kind, compassionate woman of the last episode is revealed to be an amoral toymaker. A feline presence who builds new toys, bats them around until she gets bored then puts them away again. In an especially subtle moment it’s implied that Liz has lasted this long because she’s not opted for a sex change operation or vampirism. She’s incomplete, the Countess can’t get bored of her.

But she can betray her. I’ve been very hard on Tristan because he was both a bad character and frequently a part of the slowest elements of any given episode. Here, Finn Wittrock is finally given stuff to do and runs with it. We see Tristan’s painful awareness of who he is, what he’s done. We see him transformed by a relationship we’re in the presence of for precisely 50 minutes and it absolutely should not work. It does and you care desperately about him, right up until the point he’s killed.

That offhand slaughter in turn informs the Donovan and Ramona plot. The Countess really is a monster and, unlike Bartholomew, her monster children are coming home to kill her. It’s a nice touch that Ramona simply walks in, and an even nicer one that she and Liz are friends. The war is coming and I honestly expect none of these people to come out alive. Even if one or two of them, Liz in particular, might just deserve to.

So the centre of this episode is a really smart, improbably affecting tragic romance that shows us just what a monster the Countess is. The rest is honestly something of a mess.

John shows up to do the same thing John’s done for weeks now with the added bonus of a remarkably nasty sex scene. Alex gets even less to do, and for the first time Chloe Sevigny’s measured, level delivery hurts the character. She plays as flat rather than bored by what’s going on and that, combined with John’s shriek-o-rama makes what was once the central plot of this show a dull sideline. Some closure here soon, please, very soon.

The real honkers come with the ghost plots though. Donovan’s explanation of the hotel is great but the Swedish tourists seem to have no purpose in the series than to get naked and sexmurder male guests. The fact they at least seem horrified by this is interesting but it’s undercut by the vast majority of their behaviour. AHS is a series that’s never shied away from sex and it never should. But for the first time this series it felt perfunctory and vaguely annoying. To make matters worse, the Kara story, as discussed below, feels like an excuse to point and laugh rather than actually move any of the stories along.

Oh and no vampire child apocalypse this week either.

With four episodes to go the pacing is starting to pick up but it’s very uneven. There’s some great stuff here, especially the Finn (who knew!?) and Liz scenes but the rest feels like its marking time. Here’s to the pace picking up next week.

The Good:

• The Liz and Tristan love story has a near impossible job. It asks you to believe these two characters, who’ve barely shared screen time, are desperately in love. And, amazingly, it manages it. Wittrock and O’Hare do stunning work, especially in their first season together and Hu’s script gives them both plenty to work with.
• The scene between O’Hare and Gaga is amazing, Liz’s courage and sweet human honesty a stark contrast to the Countess’ apparent sweetness. The ending is, of course, what it was always going to be but the fallout from it should be intense. Likewise Lady Gaga does amazing work, especially in the final scenes.
• The explanation for what the Cortez does to the dead is really interesting, coding the transitional nature of hotels into the ephemeral nature of the ghosts that haunt it. Which makes the Kara story even more of a vast misstep.

The Bad:

• The show teases a full bore, Evil Dead-style Wes Bentley vs Demon Baby fight and then shows us nothing. NOTHING. BOO!

• John. Just get it done. Seriously. Wes Bentley, bless him, has been looking startled and strung out for weeks now. Give the little chap something more to do.

• Kara’s story is five straight minutes of bad. Here’s why:

• Firstly it’s a bad story. She killed herself in the hotel and… found purpose by doing what every ghost does? Wow.
• Secondly the reference to the water tasting funny is a thinly veiled nod to the death of Elisa Lam in the hotel the Cortez was based on. That’s a little close to the knuckle for a death that’s just over two years old.
• Thirdly, and most importantly, is there any reason for Kara to be a plus-sized lady besides fat-shaming? Because if there is I’m not seeing it and if there isn’t that’s a major misstep.

And The Random:

• “How hard is it to get some GOD DAMN KALE AROUND HERE?!” Darren Criss gets a single line this episode (well he is dead) but DAMN it’s a good one.
• “Until you find a purpose you will be stuck in an unbreakable chain. Repeating yourselves over and over again.” Ghosts as recordings. The hotel as a place to at least distract yourself. Subtle and nasty in a way that a TV show featuring a monstrous demon baby really isn’t expected to be.
• “Don’t take this from me! This is MY BREAKDOWN and I’m gonna have it!” John Lowe finally loses it. It’s about damn time.
• “John! Good to see you’re finally truly checking into the Hotel Cortez!” Thanks Evil Dead Quicksilver! Evan Peters is glorious in this series. I hope we see more of him before the end.
• “Time PASSES FOR ME. You mention decades by the changes in hemlines…” Just a glorious, well turned piece of dialogue.
• “When you are what I am you don’t feel things the way normal humans do. An emotion’s like flavour in my mouth I can taste it. Joy tastes like strawberries; hate tastes like ice chips in a martini; and love… love is water. I enjoy them all except one: Betrayal. That has the taste of char on a piece of burnt meat.” Again, the fact that the Countess is a sensation junkie is a lovely, subtle little grace note.
• “Judging by how quickly you turned your nose up at an evening of backgammon and rose, to welcome you no less, I’m really not your girl.” Never change, Liz.
• “It’s a whole new you.” “Damn straight it is.” Iris doesn’t get much this episode but her newfound bounce should make the last few episodes really good fun.
• “Thank you, for seeing the girl.” Line of the episode. So sweet and honest and so nuanced in its explanation of Liz, her place on the LGBT spectrum and how comfortable she is there.

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 S05E05 “Room Service” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on FOX, Tuesdays, 10pm
Writer: Ned Martel
Director: Michael Goi

Essential Plot Points:

• Alex’s measles patient, Max, is taking a turn for the worse. As is Alex, desperate for blood and reduced to cramming blood bags into her face when no one’s around. Strung out and not thinking straight, she injects some of her own blood into Max’s IV.

• Donovan brings his mother to Ramona’s pad, informing her that she’s the perfect “inside man” and no one gets closer to the Countess. Ramona agrees to help.

• Donovan drops his mother back at the Cortez. Iris is in very, very bad shape and Liz attempts to help. Iris lies to Liz about what’s happened to her, and the world’s most relaxed bartender sees straight through it, feeding her blood from the Countess’s reserves. Iris is disgusted, but then asks for more.

• Meanwhile at Max’s home, Alex’s patient, the newly vampirised child, has murdered his parents. He then goes to school and turns his entire class who rampage across the school. When the police arrive, the vampire kids are the last people left standing and all of them describe the person responsible for the attack; a single, masked man. With no idea of the truth, the Police let them go.

• At the LAPD, to the surprise of no one but Detective John Lowe himself, John is fired.

• At the front desk, Iris is accosted by two astoundingly foul hipsters who check in and proceed to make her life hell. The previously unflappable manager is reduced to tears and Liz helps her out. As they talk, Liz reveals how she came to the Cortez.

• In the 1980s, Liz was a pharmaceutical rep in a loveless marriage. Trapped by society’s attitudes towards her transsexuality, Liz used long trips away to let herself be who she really was. On one of these trips, at the Cortez, the Countess visited her. With remarkable compassion, the Countess walked the traumatised Liz through accepting who she really was and, as a start, asked her to fetch ice from the far end of the corridor.

• On the way back, Liz was spotted and assaulted by her two colleagues. The two men panicked, one demanding to know if Liz had AIDS and refusing to listen to her when she said she wasn’t gay. The other threatened to ruin her life at the office. Both were butchered by the Countess. She hired Liz as a bartender, allowed her to remain human and 20 years later, Liz is still in the same job.

• Newly inspired by her colleague’s honesty, Iris takes the hipsters their ridiculously complex room service. And murders them. Liz helps her dispose of the bodies.

• John wakes up in bed with Sally and has no memory of getting there. She claims he knows what he did and will do it again. Which sounds very murderer-esque doesn’t it?
• Alex arrives at the hotel and takes up her position as governess to the children. She sleeps in the same coffin as Holden, her wish fulfilled at last.

Review:

This is not the episode you might be expecting to watch. And, honestly, it’s so much better for that.

There are parts of this episode that behave. The bookends with Alex are nicely creepy and also subtly undercut the doctor’s previously established compassion and intelligence. This is a woman who not three episodes ago was dressing down an anti-vaxxer. Now she’s huffing blood like a desperate junkie. Clearly, the virus has major side effects, especially when you’re not prepared for it. And, based on this episode, Alex really wasn’t prepared for it.

What’s really interesting about her plot here is how little of it there is. She’s the instigator for another, major incident but by and large this episode sees her done. She’s back with Holden, will be with him forever and that’s all she ever wanted.

And that’s the point.

Whether it’s the Countess herself or the virus, Alex has become the purest, simplest version of herself. She doesn’t care about her work or the rest of her family, she just cares about spending eternity with her son. That level of obsession is horrifying all by itself but, as this episode shows, it also has serious repercussions for everyone else.

Because Alex may have ended the world.

At the very least she’s murdered a lot of people thanks to her desperation play with Max. That whole plot has been criticised elsewhere for being dumb but for us it plays as one of the most realistic beats in the show. Humans are irrational and odd and make stupid mistakes with no idea of the consequences. Here, Alex did a bad thing for a good reason and it’s backfired spectacularly. Worse still, what she’s done because of the virus and the obsession it creates. It’s a perfect little circuit of horror that’s going to be making everyone’s lives very difficult very soon and is one of the most interesting beats in the show to date. The sequence itself is horrific and untidy and shot with real menace by Goi. Plus, it looks like the virus has combined with Max’s measles which is the exact sort of, ‘You got peanut butter in my deadly virus!’ ‘Yeah! Well you got chocolate in my vampirism bacteria!’ situation no one wants.

But the real meat of this episode is in the last place you’d expect; Liz Taylor’s backstory. The way it’s revealed is lovely, as Liz steps in to help a floundering and newly vampiric Iris deal with a pair of awful guests. It’s subtle, and naturalistic and the fact that it’s taken Iris becoming a vampire to notice a colleague she’s worked with for decades is just one of several desperately sad moments.

What’s fascinating about this, aside from the amazing performances of O’Hare and Gaga in the flashback, is how nuanced and classy it is. Liz’s transsexuality is held up for ridicule by her colleagues but never by the show and, crucially, she’s never treated as a charity case either. Instead, the Countess, like a fairy godmother with one wing dipped in blood, simply helps her be who she’s always wanted to be. Gaga has never been better than she is here, the Countess becoming this huge wellspring of compassion and good humour that simply holds out a hand and waits for Liz to grab it. It’s touching and sweet and never once undercuts the agency of the character.

And then the Countess murders two men in cold blood.

That’s where the horror comes in and Martel’s script does an extraordinary job of balancing the two. The Countess’s compassion for Liz is genuine, her willingness to kill for her (and to feed her, we presume), just the same. The Countess is a monster. But even monsters have good sides.

This episode is a deeply odd combination of intimate and epic and all of it works. As we head into the back-run of episodes there’s a sense of the show escalating and accelerating towards its conclusion. The fact it can do this through what amounts to a bottle episode is a hell of an accomplishment and one that bodes well for the rest of the season.

The Good:

• Denis O’Hare. Liz has been one of the best parts of every single episode she’s been in and her turn in the spotlight here is exceptional. O’Hare’s mannerisms, posture, everything changes as we see Liz gradually get comfortable with herself. That makes the confrontation with her colleagues all the more horrifying as you feel the brittle confidence she’s only just built up shatter. Phenomenal acting from one of this show’s consistently most underrated performers.

• Lady Gaga. Gaga has never been less than good this season but her scenes with O’Hare this episode are exceptional. There’s such compassion and kindness to her that, for the first time, you can really see why the Countess is such a successful “vampire”. She cares desperately for the people around her, and Liz, based on this episode, may be her favourite.
• It’s a wonderful scene because unlike very nearly everything else in this show it’s immensely kind and takes huge pains to treat Liz’s transsexuality with the respect it deserves. Given Gaga’s long-held championing of the marginalised it’s no surprise that she brings her A-plus game to this but it doesn’t belittle the work she does, or make it unwelcome. Just a great performance from an actress who’s been given an impossible job with this series and is pretty much nailing it every time she’s on screen.
• The change in focus. The large scale Liz detour, not to mention the Iris plot, both move the über-plot along without really trying too hard. AHS: Hotel was criticised a lot at the outset for seeming scattered but it’s starting to cohere now in a really interesting way.
• I did not see the vampire school stuff coming and wow there is no way that’s going to end well. At all. For anyone.

The Bad:

• Much like the “Is Glenn alive or dead?” question on The Walking Dead, the “Is John the serial killer he’s pursuing?” thing needs to be answered pretty quickly now. Even Sarah Paulson can only throw out so many, “Or DID you?!”-style lines before the bloom comes off the rose.

And the Random:

• “Ramona Royale, is she in?” “Sir it is 4 am.” “I HEAR SHE’S A NIGHT PERSON.” Nice to see Donovan, perpetual victim, get his head in the game.
• “I don’t know if that’s oedipal or just mercenary.” Angela Bassett isn’t in this episode a lot but she certainly gets the best line.
• “DRINK! It’ll make you feel AWESOME!” King of the tweener vampires, ladies and gentlemen.
• “You see everything when the world doesn’t see you.” Although this is also a belter from Liz.
• “I’m not homophobic.” “I’m not gay.” And with that single line, this show does more to bring attention to the LGBT spectrum than very nearly everything else on air right now.
• “There’s nothing like whispering a secret aloud. If only to yourself.” Another beautiful line from Liz.
• “You dress like a man, walk like a man. But you smell like a woman.” “It’s Paco Rabanne.” “It’s not your skin. Your blood.” There’s such kindness here and it’s cut with that last moment reveal of just what the Countess is. Stunningly good writing.
• “Oh honey. Goddesses don’t speak in whispers, they scream.” There is a lot of great dialogue this episode. All of it in the Liz/Countess scenes.

• Darren Criss! Glee’s Blaine Anderson is tremendous fun in a brief turn here as a magnificently hideous hipster. As well as Glee, you may well have heard him do voice-over work on stunning anime movies The Wind Rises and The Tale Of Princess Kaguya. If not, go and watch them. They’re beautiful.
• Jessica Lu! Who is also gloriously dreadful here. When not being murdered by Kathy Bates, she’s been great in Red Band Society and Awkward.
• Robert Knepper! Best known for his magnificently hideous work as T-Bag in Prison Break, Knepper’s also been killed by Jason Statham in Transporter 3, voiced Kronos in Percy Jackson And The Sea Of Monsters and appears as Antonius in Mockingjay Part 2. He was also, like Affleck, the bomb in Phantoms, yo.
• “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes and “Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode provide the soundtrack for Liz’s transformation and they’re perfect choices.

• Shot of the week is Alex and Holden in the coffin, an undead mother and son, forever together and forever the same.

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 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