It can be described as nothing less than disappointing when you spend an entire week thinking you’re going to, at long last, see an anal alien birth only to be presented with just a regular ol’ stomach-ripping alien birth. In seasons past, the American Horror Story franchise has really risen to the occasion when it comes to making a plot salad out of the weirdest possible ingredients it can find, but — and it pains me to say this — there’s been so much potential for truly innovative weirdness this season that it has just plain swerved on. You had butt babies right there as an option. It was right there! Anyway, at least we got to hear Sarah Paulson talk about her fudge some more. At least we got that.
There is one episode left of Double Feature. One solitary episode to wrap up the collection of creative blue balls this ended up being. If the finale doesn’t make me jump, cringe, puke, or at least whisper-gasp “WTF†at least a handful of times, I’ll, well, I’ll nothing. I’ll wait for the next season and hope that it ends up being that one perfect season we’ve all been waiting for — the one to top that initial creepy bliss of Murder House, Asylum, and Coven. Don’t get me wrong, I love this show unconditionally, just like one would their newborn alien baby. It’ll always be, at the very least, entertaining. It’ll always be “good.†But it’s so easy to remember a time when it was damn near perfect and yearn to go back there. But as the saying warns, maybe you really can’t ever go back.
Maybe we’ll have to resort to harvesting bits and pieces of television genius from each season, combining the elements in our mouths as an experiment to get that flavor we can still kind of taste on the back of our tongue if we try hard enough. Or we could spit it all out and go hungry until new writing and directing teams come along that are so good they force Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk to dig in harder and come back with the kind of butt-baby material we know they’re capable of. They got there once with Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange) chain-smoking and delivering monologues about “stupid sluts.†They gave us pleather gimp suits. They gave us bitchy witches who can flip a bus full of frat-boy rapists with a wave of their hand. They gave us Paulson bursting into tears at the sight of a penis. They can do it again. Maybe it’ll happen next week? But it kind of feels like we’ve been saying that for many weeks, doesn’t it? And yet, as always with this show, I can’t help but be optimistic. So back in it we go.
It’s 1954 and Dwight D. Eisenhower (Neal McDonough) is sick of hearing all the yelling and screaming going on underneath the White House. He creeps around in his pajamas and discovers tunnels that have been built to withstand nuclear fallout and that are now being used by aliens to experiment on humans to advance their human-alien-hybrid endeavors. In a hastily made “out of sight, out of mind†solution, he offers newly arrived Grand Poobah Valiant Thor (that’s first name Valiant, second name literally Thor) an expanse of land in Vegas so he can go out there and do all his alien business where no one is the wiser. That new compound is, of course, Area 51, which everyone the hell knows about, including Marilyn Monroe (Alisha Soper), who goes on about it while filming a movie and then ends up dead in her bed shortly after. “We knew it!†proclaims every conspiracy theorist with a Some Like It Hot poster hanging in their TV room.
Valiant Thor has come to town to see how all the hybrid babies are coming along and to present Eisenhower with a first-generation iPod that he refers to as “the future.†While he’s doing this, Mamie (Paulson) pushes her Halloween-decoration agenda and prepares herself, spirit and mind, to hop on that Valiant dick. Eisenhower catches her in the act, and she brushes it off by saying she gave her body for the national cause and that Valiant loved her fudge. I just bet. Which television food do you think has more sexual clout: Mamie’s fudge or Mamaw’s beer cheese?
We’re ramping up to a new world of alien-human hybrids, but they still haven’t made one that suits the aliens’ standards just yet. Troy gives birth (not anally … boooooo) to a beautiful alien with huge black eyes, but before he can hold it, Theta (Angelica Ross) hands it off to have its throat slashed and its tiny body disposed of in a tank of water. Reeling from the shock and sadness of that brutality, he regroups with the rest of his pregnant friends and pregnant boyfriend, and they look for comfort in a chat with Calico (Leslie Grossman) but come away with more horror. She tells them she’s had two babies a year since she was abducted, that Stanley Kubrick faked the first moon landing, and that they will eventually get used to having babies and then seeing them murdered. They don’t even get any bug Jell-O this time around.
“To be human is to not understand.†These were words of wisdom Theta spoke to Troy when he was in labor. Troy had none of his own for his boyfriend, Cal (Nico Greetham), when it was time for his alien baby to be born. Seeing this as the perfect time to start family planning, Troy pulls Cal away and tells him that he will cut the baby out of his belly so they can keep it. Seems nice. Of course, it comes out with tentacles and suckers where its legs should be and attaches itself to Cal’s face. In the preview for next week’s episode, we hear Valiant say they won’t have a perfect hybrid birth until 2021. Curious. I don’t know why, but I can’t stop thinking that Grimes has something to do with all of this. Fucking Grimes.
If You’re Horny, Let’s Do It. Ride It, My Mamie.
• Fun that all of the youths waiting to have their alien babies are given white Crocs slides to wear. Might as well be comfortable.
• Still laughing about how we all thought Red Tide was going to tie into this somehow. I don’t allow myself to ever live in a place of “wrong,†though, so if it DOES end up tying together, let me put it in print here that, yeah, I mean, yeah, I knew that.
• AHS needs to make more merch. I would definitely buy a hat that says “He loved my fudge†or “She drinks. She’s on pills.â€