I would like my toddler to eat leafy greens by the handful like I see Instagram children do, but instead, I hide them in smoothies. I would like to be a person with clean hair, but this morning I waited to leave bed until my toddler was screaming, “Mama, it’s morning, c’mon already!†And I would like to be a peaceful mother who indulges the slow pace of childhood, but today I bribed my toddler with rice cakes so I could start work on time. That motherhood is a series of compromises is a truism. American Horror Story: Delicate is taking the notion to a terrifying extreme: Motherhood itself can be bartered away.
Last week, Bloody Mary sold her only child for a long and fruitful reign (which, of course, did not materialize). This episode — the part one finale — we learn Mrs. Preecher’s grisly origin story. In 1980s New York, Preech was a promising FIT student whose talent had been scouted by Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent before she could even graduate. But when a Fleet Week fling became an unwanted pregnancy, she made a deal with the devil’s advocates. She’d hand over the baby and, in exchange, Preech would receive “the world.†The world, it turns out, was a lucrative handbag partnership with Marc Jacobs. It left Preech hideously wealthy but completely unknown (which makes me think these women really need to get more specific about their demands when making satanic money moves). Regardless, once in labor, Preech tried to renege, but the devil’s obstetrician — flanked by the feather-horned Satanettes we’ve seen so often — wouldn’t allow it. And that man was … DOCTOR HILL! We saw it coming, yes.
Now, it seems, it’s Anna’s turn to play Let’s Make a Deal. To protect her medically complicated pregnancy, Hill forbids Anna from attending the Golden Globes ceremony in L.A., which is just as well because she loses to that faux ditzy ageist Babette anyway. Babette is repped by Siobahn now — a fact we learn when Anna turns up to her bestie’s office with a box of Lafayette Grand Café suprêmes. (Babette samples just the icing like Ariana Grande at a donut shop.) “It’s not personal,†Siobahn tells Anna, who is understandably hurt to run into her rival. “It’s business.â€
But after the Globes loss, as the episode ends, Siobahn calls Anna to ask a pointed question: “Do you want an Oscar as much as you want a baby?†When Anna promises to do everything Siobahn says from now on, the screen cuts to black. By the next morning, Babette has suffered a freak vehicular decapitation. We saw Kim K’s sinister turn coming, yes, and we all wanted to see it.
We’ve now hit the halfway point on Delicate, and the seemingly odd occurrences are finally stacking up to suggest some meaning (except Anna’s inexplicable zit, which shifts colors like a mood ring). The unlikely bridge between Preech and Anna turns out to be Virginia Harding, Dex’s mother who has just filed a lawsuit against Dex’s father contrary to her son’s wishes. She’s being represented by Luther Feldman, a lawyer who helped take down Weinstein and who, I guess, is hoping survivors of satanic abuse will be his next cash cow. Even all these years later, Virginia still experiences the eerie kinds of shit that Anna has been experiencing; she’s haunted — or visited — by horned witches and their tamed goats. Ivy, who seems like she’s definitely #TeamLucifer, lingers around her, too.
The reason Preech finally confronts Virginia is to warn Anna and Dex about what’s coming for them: vengeance. Virginia’s Mr. Harding may have worshiped at the altar of the Great Deceiver, but Dex, perhaps unwittingly, is responsible for the defection of one of the devil’s favorite disciples. Before Adelaide became another in the line of Misses Hardings, she was one of them and, according to Preech, “they†are poised for retribution.
Which brings us to Sonia, a person so unsettling that she even unsettles Thalia’s deeply unsettling Hamptons housekeeper, Nicolette. This episode, Anna decides to be the bigger person and befriend the woman she suspects to be her husband’s mistress. She even invites Sonia to the house; at dinner, they lightly bond over the bland idea of harnessing pain to fuel art. But there are some peculiar moments between them, too. When Anna confides she once worried Sonia was her stalker because she was followed by someone wearing Sonia’s spiky emerald heels, Sonia claims she would never go anywhere near the color green. And when Anna shows Sonia a photo of her blonde doppelganger Adelaide — “my less evil twin,†she quips — Sonia does not bug out enough, in my opinion. Still, Sonia is nothing but supportive when it comes to Anna’s stalker and Anna’s jealousies. Maybe I’m being naive, but I think Sonia Shawcross is #TeamAnna. She looks too cartoonishly high-end Hot Topic to really worship the devil.
Dr. Hill, of course, is a footman for the Prince of Darkness. And just in case we had any lingering suspicions about Siobahn, this episode employs Hamish to put them to bed. Siobahn is the one who gave him the crappy script for The Auteur and told him to put his name on it and not ask questions. Siobahn is the one who insisted he give the starring role to a burnt-out child star when the studio execs told him it would be cinematic suicide. Now, here he is with a hit movie on his hands, not to mention the fact that he’s consistently taking down Satan’s spin doctor.
As for what’s going on with Anna in “Preech,†it really is the same old shit. Like a good little starlet, she takes whatever potions Siobahn’s passing off as B12 and fails to make a connection when her hair starts falling out. She has late pregnancy symptoms like rib flares and round ligament pain even though she’s only in the second trimester. Rather than get a second opinion, she continues to see Dr. Hill, who, at this point, can’t be bothered to feign a bedside manner. He tells her to do more prenatal yoga and see Cora, who on top of being a nurse also just so happens to be a pelvic-floor therapist who works out of the same Brooklyn Heights condo building Anna and Dex live in.
In a terrible echo of what happened at the Hamptons hospital with Ivy, Cora (Tavi Gevinson) forcibly penetrates Anna with her fingers and keeps going even once it’s clear Anna’s in tremendous pain. But this time Anna isn’t paralyzed with fear; she screams for the molestation to stop. As always, there’s the eerie stuff, too: Ivy appearing and disappearing from that old photo of Adelaide and Dex that Anna’s obsesses over; another Summer Day voodoo doll, this one with blood coming from its head, for Anna to add to her collection in Thalia’s basement; the fact that Nicolette has stocked the refrigerator — AND NOT THE FREEZER! — with pints and pints of the same ice cream Anna scarfed down last week.
And then there’s the possibility that Preech’s warnings, whenever they reach Anna via Virginia, will have come too late. If the point is to ruin Anna and Dex’s lives, then the revenge is already underway. Their marriage is crumbling. Dex doesn’t believe Anna about any of it: the stalker, the dolls. He even thinks she scrawled the lipstick message on the mirror herself. Maybe for attention? For publicity?
And Anna, for her part, doesn’t seem that upset by the distance between them. Whatever this force is that’s tormenting her, it has coincided with this pregnancy. She doesn’t need Dex to sit around a cafe and distract her from the pain of infertility with what-ifs anymore. What will we call our baby? Where will we live and how will we balance our real-estate portfolio against the expense of private education? She doesn’t need the daydreams because, regardless of what Dex thinks of her, Anna’s got the real thing growing inside her. At least for now.