Hey, American Horror Story fans, remember how crazy cool and weird it was to hear Asylum's Pepper would be in Freak Show? It's just two years later, and co-creator Ryan Murphy can't seem to go a full week without revealing new and different ways the horror anthology's past and future will feed into the crossover conceit. For a Halloween treat, Murphy dropped the bomb on fans that American Horror Story: Roanoke will bring in one of the few past characters who managed to live through an entire season.
Aw, snap. American Horror Story: Roanoke will be getting a journalistic dose of Lana Winters, who found herself an inmate at Briarcliff after trying to get to the bottom of the asylum's dark secrets, of which there were many. In that season's finale, there was a time-jump to years after Lana's release from Briarcliff, and it showed she was now a famous TV reporter who no longer had to hide her homosexuality. I believe we can all guess just how Lana Winters will come into Roanoke's reality-skewing narrative.
The characters on American Horror Story: Roanoke are currently in the middle of the doomed reality show follow-up Return to Roanoke: Three Days in Hell - at least the ones that are still alive - and I'm guessing that all the "found footage" that viewers are watching will be at the center of some huge news stories within this fictional universe. And who better to report on all of it than one Lana Winters?
Obviously Lana Winters arriving on the scene means that we're getting another season where actress Sarah Paulson gets to play multiple roles. She's currently playing an actress, the trapped-with-cannibals Audrey, but it's hard to know if she will be the sole survivor that was touted when the big twist was revealed. If so, that would give audiences the chance to watch her act opposite herself. Kind of like she did as Dot and Bette, just without sharing a bladder.
Last season, for American Horror Story: Hotel, Sarah Paulson played the wild-haired addict ghoul Hypodermic Sally, but she also reprised her Murder House character Billie Dean Howard in the season finale. And Roanoke already has ties to Billie Dean, the "psychic" that told the story of how the word "Roanoke" was supposedly used as a native curse against the spirits of the colonial settlers who died. What if this year's finale features an interview with Lana, Billie Dean AND Audrey? The world might explode.
While we don't know when Lana will return to our TVs, it'll probably happen in the finale after the rest of the cast has been slaughtered, and that's just over two weeks away. American Horror Story: Roanoke airs Wednesday nights on FX. To see what else is still coming to the small screen in the coming weeks, head to our fall TV schedule.
