Wow, what an ending! That’s what we’ve been waiting for all season, for our freaks to stand in solidarity and in opposition to the powers that be. Sure, an increasingly psychopathic frozen-food heir who has an ass like two Pillsbury cinnamon buns fresh from the oven and stuck together with far too much icing is orchestrating the powers that be, but whatever. When Edward Dildohands got hauled away by the cops for killing all those ladies at the Tupperware party, it was the first time all season I thought, Damn, I can’t wait to see what happens next week.
In fact, almost everyone behaved in very logical ways last night. It seems like, with only four episodes left, we’ve entered into the story’s endgame and things are a little bit more organized. Elsa didn’t do much but wear the most killer black-and-white jumpsuit with matching sun shades that I have ever seen in my entire life and I would like photographed from every angle so I can hang all the framed photos in the guest bedroom of the country house that I one day buy with all the proceeds from my many television program recaps (it will happen in the year 3054). I have no clue where Elsa gets all these amazing looks, but I have stopped questioning it.
Bette and Dot were also very smart. When Elsa and Stanley came and found them, they were very skeptical of just how Elsa figured out where they were and why they were there. Sure, they went along with everything, but both of them had expressions of distrust, and you know, if you can get simpleton Bette to mistrust you, then your shit is seriously busted.
Those two sat on a surgical table and talked about whether or not they wanted to be separated, and Bette said she would give up her life for her sister and everyone cried, and I was all #TeamBette, and it was really sweet and wonderful. Then they did the smart thing and got out of that shack in the middle of the swamp and went back to the freak show to try to win over Edward Dildohands. I hope that when they were about to leave the house, Bette paused their body before the front door and was like, “You know I’m only doing this so I could get you to leave because Stanley was going to hire a gay hooker to be our doctor and he was just going to kill us, right?” and Dot looked her right in the eye and said, “Duh!”
Speaking of Edward Dildohands, I was actually feeling for him this episode. Now, all Evan Peters has ever done on American Horror Story is pout and scream. That is really it. Pout and scream, pout and scream. It’s like he’s Veruca Salt (the Roald Dahl character, not the amazing ‘90s band, though Ryan Murphy would love it if he were the latter). But this time when he screamed, I got it. Eddie has been left with nothing — his mother is gone, his father is no good, the home the he loved is being dismantled, his appetite for drink is ruining his relationship with Esmeralda, he’s too wasted to please a room full of horny housewives, and Ima Wiggles is a little bit too into eating his pudding.
Things are bad for Eddie, so when Bette and Dot profess their love for him, you want him to melt into their double-wide embrace. But he doesn’t. He tells them that he is in love with another. That is true, but it also seems like he wants to warn them off of him because he feels so unworthy of any affection right now.
It’s funny that both Jimmy and Dell both see dead Ethel’s ghost when they get really drunk. I wish I had some of that Toledo DNA in my body so that when I got too tipsy, Kathy Bates would be there with her wretched accent and her chin merkin to berate me for having an awful life.
Yes, it’s good that most everyone was acting the way they should be, and we were exploring some real emotion, and everything was humming along nicely. But I still have some problems, and it’s the little things that add up and get to me. The biggest one is: Was that or was that not Malcolm-Jamal Warner who visited Desiree at the camp? Well, that, and who the hell has an indoor pool in Florida? All those ladies are floating around in the water and the pool is indoors, in one of the few states in the nation where you can have a pool outdoors year-round. Do you know how swampy and balmy and chlorine-y that room would smell? It would be like the dank pool at the Boys Club I took swimming lessons in as a child that had naked old men swimming laps in the class before us, and we always had to watch them get out of the pool with the water dripping off their jiggly butt cracks.
And how did Dandy even kill all of those ladies? The cause of death is uncertain and, unless he was shooting them, wouldn’t all the other ladies have teamed up on him when he attacked the first one? Wouldn’t they have at least run away and scattered a bit so that someone would have gotten away? It seems impossible that he could dispatch half a dozen women so quickly and easily that it wouldn’t even muss his cravat.
At first I was like, “How did Dandy just find that party, and why did he kill all those ladies?” but it makes sense that he was tailing Edward Dildohands and that’s what happened. But still what I don’t get is why Dandy is so mad at him. Yes, he took the twins away, but I have never been convinced about Dandy’s love for the twins, why it was so intense, or where it came from. We never saw him react to them leaving or anything, and that was like three episodes ago. Now we’re supposed to believe he misses them so much that he’s going to frame Eddie for murder? Like two weeks later he’s finally getting around to this burning, passionate hatred?
Let’s also not forget about his Siamese-twin human puppet, which was, let’s be honest, one of the craziest and creepiest images the show has given us all season, but did he just cut it down afterward? It’s not in the playroom anymore. Did he get rid of it? Where did it go? You don’t just show us something like that and then pretend it never happened.
The one thing, the one little detail about the whole episode that just didn’t make any damn sense was everything that happened with Regina. I get that Dandy thinks that he’s God now because he’s killing people and getting away with it. That seems to make sense now that his mother, that sick moral compass of his, is out of the way. I get that he tells Regina he killed everyone and let her go so that she would bring the cop and he could get the cops to work for him for his master plan. I’m onboard, that all makes sense.
But we’re seriously supposed to think he’s going to offer a cop — some jamoke whom we’ve never seen before and don’t know or could even guess at his motivations — $1 million and just turn shoot Regina right in the head before he even checked to see if the money was real? (And the talent Murphy has dispensed with this year, with Patti LaBelle, Matt Bomer, and Gabourey Sidibe all barely even getting roles!) The speed and decisiveness of the cop’s gun made me chuckle a little bit because I couldn’t decide if it was genius or reckless storytelling. That the turn of the plot would hinge on this deus ex machina whom we may or may not ever see again. But maybe I should give Mr. Murphy and company the benefit of the doubt. At least, by the end of the episode, we were finally getting somewhere interesting.
