I thought this season of Scream Queens was finally hitting its stride and then, as Chanel No. 5 was a doggie ring bearer and Denise Hemphill sneered at Zayday as she walked down the aisle at Chanel’s wedding, it was all ruined.
That’s when Chad Radwell, mega hunk and locker-room-talk expert, comes crashing down out of the ceiling wearing Johnny Castle’s tuxedo from Dirty Dancing. He is covered in blood, apparently the latest victim of the Green Meanie. Oh, don’t say it’s so. Tell me this is one of those fake-outs where he’s actually alive or he’s pretending to be dead so he can catch the real killer or get out of his prenup with Chanel or something like that, because Chad was pretty much the entire reason this episode was good.
I was beginning to hope that every episode would feature a homoerotic naked encounter between Chad and Brock in the hospital locker room where they compare wiener size (apparently the same!) and talk about how they are both in love with Chanel as a cover for how much they’re in love with each other. Their rivalry of back-and-forth zingers, especially the scene in Dr. Munsch’s office where they fight over who is the better lover, was the dialogue engine that drove the show forward. Yes, Chad thinking that he could perform the surgery to replace Brock’s killer hand with a non-killer hand was completely ridiculous, but we’re not even bothering trying to spackle over the enormous plot holes in this show anymore, are we?
Their rivalry culminated in that excellent scene where Chad confesses to Brock that all of his friends were killed and he has no one to serve as a best man. It seems like there was some honest affection between the two, and Brock relents to putting on a matching tux and providing Chad with the rings when the time comes, even though Chad knows his union won’t last because he’s banging chicks at stoplights and IHOPs far too frequently to stay married for long. Brock tells him that when Chad leaves, “I’m going to be there to comfort Chanel by having lots of sex with her.†Chad replies, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.†It was almost as if they were both imagining the other naked and forgetting all about Chanel, like those frat bros who have three-ways with girls because then they can touch each other and not be gay.
Maybe it’s just my overactive erotic imagination speaking, but when Brock was lurking in the background at Chad’s proposal for Chanel, didn’t it seem like he wasn’t mad that Chad was taking Chanel, but instead, he was mad because Chanel was taking Chad? Wasn’t that what that sidelong glance he gave Brock before kissing Chanel was all about?
Here is my ridiculous theory of the week: After their locker-room confrontation but before the wedding, Chad and Brock discovered that they were in love and decided that the only way out of this was to fake Chad’s death. Believable? No. But then again, neither is Cheri Oteri having 27 orgasms a day because she did a complicated yoga position incorrectly. As evidence of this theory, we don’t see the Green Meanie actually kill Chad. The only way we know the killer did it is because Hester tells us that the Green Meanie has killed again and next thing you know Chad comes crashing through the ceiling.
Chad is the only person we didn’t see the Green Meanie actually kill. In this episode, we not only saw Chad’s bestie with Jumping Frenchmen of Maine disease get hacked to bits, but we also saw Cheri Oteri get a scythe to the neck just as she was about to leave the hospital. She alerted the press about her recovery so they won’t be able to hide this murder like the other two by dumping her body in a swamp. (Note to the cast of Scream Queens: Just because there is a swamp next to your hospital doesn’t mean you need to dump bodies into it. If there were a big mound of pudding sitting on the ground, would you dip your balls in it?)
That brings us to the identity of the Green Meanie. The one unrealistic thing about this season that is really bothering me is how, exactly, does Hester know who the killer is when she’s locked up in some dank prison being forced to watch Sweating to the Oldies 2 on constant repeat? Did she have some knowledge beforehand? Is there someone feeding her secret messages? And why does everyone believe that she knows who the killer is? Shouldn’t they just dismiss her as an absolute loon?
She does give Chanel a lead to nurse Lynn Johnstone, the billionaire founder of Esrun Cream. They travel down to Florida to meet him (yes, him) and he just tells them the story of the Halloween Massacre at the hospital and how it was revenge for when they killed the patient and dumped him in the swamp. That might be news for the Chanels & Co., but not for us.
This leads Dean Munsch to posit that the killer has to be the child who the dead man’s wife was carrying when he was killed. The guy would be about 30 now, so it narrows the subjects down to Cassidy, Chad Radwell (he was held back in the second grade eight times), and Chamberlain. It’s not Chad since he’s “dead.†It’s not Chamberlain because he was at the scene of the killing when Cheri Oteri got a scythe to the neck and lost her head. (Unless there are two killers for the second year in a row, but that would be lame.) That leaves us with Cassidy, I guess?
But that doesn’t mean that it has to be the woman’s child. My money is on evil nurse Ingrid Hoffel. Maybe she was the pregnant woman and she’s back for her revenge? Or maybe this whole revenge thing is just a red herring and the killer is someone out to get the Chanels and Dr. Munsch for ruining her life back in the sorority house. Could it be Grace, the forgotten sorority girl from season one who found out the history of the hospital and decided to use it against Munsch? That would explain how Hester knows about it, if Grace was talking to Hester before she got locked up for the Red Devil killings. Or maybe it’s Grace’s dad, who is still mad at Dr. Munsch for dumping him after she left the university.
Cassidy just doesn’t seem like a good candidate. First of all, he’s already dead from passing out drunk on his back and choking on his own puke. He believes that the reason he is back among the living is to give Chanel No. 3 her first orgasm. I think that is a very valiant mission indeed but, sorry, unless it’s Brock and Chad giving each other orgasms in a locker room, I really don’t care that much.