I don’t know what Ubers the writers of American Horror Story are taking, but I have never once in my entire non-car-owning life had an Uber driver who was as incredibly hot as Rhett Stone, a man with a jawline meant for the gods and a name meant for porn. Maybe all the Uber drivers in L.A. are unemployed actors and models so they think this absolute stud would just be driving an Uber in rural North Carolina. And how was the “real†Rhett Stone like ten degrees hotter than the guy who played him in the reenactment? I thought things were supposed to go the other way? The guy who plays Rhett Stone must have something on the writers of this show. Why else would they craft three lines for this actor who is clearly in some sort of relationship with one of them?
Now that we’re talking about inappropriate advances toward straight men and Leslie Jordan, whose character asks Rhett Snow if he’d ever heard of “gay for pay,†I have a great Leslie Jordan story to share. About ten years ago, I was interviewing him on the phone for a show he was doing and he was sitting on the sidewalk in L.A. because he doesn’t get cell reception in his house. In the middle of one of his answers, he stopped talking and shouted, “Hey! Hey, you!†to someone on the street. “Didn’t I see you last night in Gag the Fag 4?â€
Okay, back to the show. Holy exposition, Batman, this episode sure has a lot jammed into it. It’s like, all of a sudden, the staff of AHS realized they only have so many episodes left so it’s time to stop dithering on My Roanoke Nightmare and start answering some damn questions.
Most of the data dump comes from Professor Elias, the crazy man who made the videotapes of himself in the root cellar. He’s actually alive and he comes back to warn Matt and Shelby that the blood moon is about to start and they really need to get the hell out of there. Um, guys, I’ve been telling them for weeks that they need to leave that house and go back to the miserable existence from whence they came, but no one ever listens to me. According to Elias, who also tells us about the Chen family, who were killed by the Butcher and a bunch of hunters who shot each other in the face, the blood moon makes it possible for the spirits to not only appear, but also kill the living.
This seems to go against the regular American Horror Story rules, in which spirits are only allowed to be tangible and leave the place where they died on Halloween. However, the blood moon (or the “dead grass moon†as the Native Americans supposedly called it, which is as fake as Pocahontas’s blue-corn morn) follows the lunar cycle so it’s always in late October. I guess that maybe means it falls on Halloween sometimes? I don’t know how this works.
Anyway, they go off in the woods to find Flora, and Elias leads them to where Priscilla likes to play. They’re engaged in some sort of awful game with the two psychotic nurses, the dude with the pig’s head (and Rhett Stone’s body), the Chen family, and a bunch of other assorted weirdos. It’s like if Tim Burton and Edward Gorey directed a new version of The Addams Family. Unfortunately, the Butcher’s crew comes out of the woods and pumps Elias full of arrows before Matt and Shelby can rescue Flora. Thanks for nothing, Elias.
After his failure, only Cricket can save them. He shows up at the house and lets Matt and Shelby know that he’s been out in the woods communing with the spirits and found the “bitch with the real power.†It’s Lady Gaga, jacked teeth and stupid deer-horn headdress and everything. Apparently she was a British woman (that explains the teeth) who came as a stowaway with a bunch of white soldiers. They were going to burn her at the stake, but she was a Druish princess and she used her magic to escape. Then she went off into the woods where she became one with nature and apparently dressed herself in the leftover props from a Mumford and Sons music video.
After that, Cricket tells them the tale of the Butcher. When she and the rest of the Roanoke troop were starving in the woods, she made a deal with Lady Gaga and she led them to the “land of plenty†— except every year they had to make a human sacrifice (like Priscilla) so that blood would sanctify the land and their bodies would enrich the soil. The Butcher’s disciples thought she was praying to Satan — which is a really mean thing to say to the goddess who brought us the idiom “disco stick†— so they decided they wanted to abandon her and go back to England.
And so, the Butcher resolved to take revenge with some fruit. (Revenge With Some Fruit is the name of another porn movie that Leslie Jordan once enjoyed.) She fed everyone some really gross lime-looking thing that made them gag, hunty, as they would say on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and then she killed them all. Then the Butcher let Lady Gaga kill her so all of their souls would have to serve her for all of eternity, which is how we got here today.
Anyway, Cricket tells Matt and Shelby this whole tale and then he says he knows a spell to end it all. It will even bring Flora back. All he has to do is promise that Matt will satisfy Lady Gaga’s “needs as a woman.†What exactly are those needs? To make the same wage as a man? To be not told to smile? For men to not tell them what to do with their uteruses? Oh, no. Her womanly needs are just to be boned into next Tuesday.
Unfortunately, Cricket can’t perform his spell because he is lured away from his lurid Uber by Flora. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga comes to collect her flesh debt from Matt. I love how she lures Matt out into that old root cellar where she’s put a bunch of candles everywhere to make it romantic. I’m surprised she didn’t sprinkle rose petals on the hide of the deer in the middle of the floor.
Still, there is absolutely nothing sexy about Cuba Gooding Jr. I would rather have sex with a rutabaga stuck in a storm drain than get naked with Cuba Gooding Jr. Also, Lady Gaga already had him in the last episode. Wasn’t once enough for her “womanly needs� She already got his cow for free, why does she want to buy the milk?
While Matt is down in the cellar showing Lady Gaga his disco stick, the Butcher shows up with Flora, releases her to Shelby, and decides to kill Cricket by pulling his Coke Zero–infused intestines out of his body inch by inch. What a horrible way to go. It seems like everyone is finally going to come for Matt and Shelby. Also, Ryan Murphy promised us a giant shift after episode five, which is next week’s episode. I can’t wait for it to come. After everything we learned tonight, there seems to be little left to this Roanoke nightmare.