The world has gone from 2014 to 2015, but there’s nothing different about the returning American Horror Story: Freak Show. Well, except for the fact that somebody is now handless, a few people are now lifeless, and a batshit crazy war vet Neil Patrick Harris has arrived to add a little WTF to the show to counter the “why the fuck am I still watching?” feeling that crops up far too often now. Say, I guess things ARE a little different now. Maybe it’s magic. Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Marjorie!
Does That Count as a Foursome?
Harris plays the amateur magician and chameleon salesman Chester – and you’re damned straight it gets rhymed with “molester” at one point – who arrives at the Cabinet of Curiosities with a purpose. To get a job with the show, which he ends up doing based more on his math skills (to replace Ethel) than anything else. But then he just buys the freak show from Elsa, which certifies his place as a headliner anyway. Why wouldn’t he just buy it from the beginning and save himself performing the connected rings trick?
Anyway, the point is this: he has a ventriloquist dummy named Marjorie that he sees as a real person, played by American Horror Story vet Jamie Brewer in a funky wig and red dress, and she’s a murderer! While we don’t quite get into Marjorie’s origins, we do know that Chester was on the beaches of Normandy, where war wounds left him with a metal plate in the back of his head. Four years later, he’s still wearing his army uniform and smoking pensively while his wife and her friend are getting it on in the bed in front of him. While he’s holding the doll. Because ew.
And of course, Marjorie winds up killing both the wife and the girlfriend, after the latter talked a little too much shit about Chester’s mental sickness. That scene was pretty brutal as well, with the wet, rhythmic hammering leading into a bedroom immersed in spatter. Of course, Chester doesn’t grasp that he was the one doing it. Although to be fair, I don’t put it past Ryan Murphy & Co. to out-Calvin & Hobbes this story by actually showing the audience that Marjorie is a magical doll that comes alive when no one else is around.
Now Chester has found his next victim…or is it victims? Marjorie wants him to saw Bette and Dot in half, horizontally, using his spiffy new saw-a-woman-in-half contraption. She’s giving him the keys to the murder car, but he doesn’t want to do it. After all, the twins let him deflower them, in what may end up being the kookiest sex scene of 2015. Neil Patrick Harris’ bare ass pounding away as Sarah Paulson’s two faces are in ecstasy, all while he’s holding Marjorie. That takes some balancing skills after a while, holding a ventriloquist dummy in missionary position. Not that I’ve tried. A little bird dummy told me.
I don’t really think the twins are going to get murdered next week, but then I don’t know why I feel that way, since bodies drop all the time. Tonight especially. Bette and Dot did get a good chunk of this episode, as Bette wrote in her diary about not writing in her diary anymore, and the two really fell hard for Chester. Too hard for realism’s sake, but there are only two episodes left, so it had to go quick. Plus, Chester begged a cop to find Marjorie, so he’s clearly incapable of a day’s worth of rational thought. Maybe they are being set up to die.
Or maybe Dandy will stop him. Dandy, who hired a private investigator to check up on the twins, instead of just going and spying on people himself, which he’s already done before. Dandy, who will probably end up killing the twins himself, just because he loves them so damned much.
Hand No the Jimmy-O, The Bullet in the Dell
Sorry for that cutesy title. We saw Jimmy’s hands floating around in that museum last week, so we sure enough got to see how that came about. Turns out, Jimmy actually went along with it, only thinking that Stanley would take one hand, and that Jimmy would actually get some of the money to pay for a lawyer. That son of a bitch Stanley is starting to burn up too many ends of his rope at the freak show, but Dell won’t be around anymore to stomp his weird dick.
Because Dell finally got to feed his son food for the first time in his 50 years on Earth, the black sheep of the Amazing Ooh-Ahh-Ahh Toledo Lobster Claw Hand Extravaganza Mystery Tour (or whatever) finally had a change of heart about everything in his life. He vaguely tries to win Desiree back as she holds him at gunpoint and demands to know his sins. He admits he killed Ma Petite, and Elsa is there to blow the back of his head through the front. Presumably on at least a small part of Desiree’s body. Good riddance.
What happens next week? Let me look into my magic American Horror Story: Freak Show-licensed crystal ball. Wait, it keeps telling me to kill you, so we’re just going to put that back in the box for now. There's no such thing as magic anyway.
Other Thoughts Floating Beneath the Big Top
“I said kiss me, not lick me.”
“But I am French.”
I think Denis O’Hare made up for his minimal appearance by getting an entire episode's performance out in yelling at that guard. Not in a great way, but it was funny.
Are you fucking kidding me with there being a tent almost specifically just to keep a selection of finely crafted magic equipment that Dell supposedly lifted from his Houdini days? I’m guessing if a stray dog showed up, Elsa would take someone to some tent where they keep hundreds of pounds of dog food for no reason.
I actually thought Eve was stopping Dell because she wanted to start up an act. And when she cleared it up that it was about Jimmy, I was ashamed of myself.
I’m disappointed that Jimmy didn’t get to feel guilty about Meep’s death this week. Oh, wait. He did.
All that makeup on Chester’s face, though. Is he trying to be a ventriloquist dummy himself? We’ll see if he makes Bette stick her entire hand up his ass. Then we’ll know.
“I’m going to make these two fingers disappear.” Hottest magic-related double entendre ever.
I kind of thought Pepper would come back somehow.
Prediction for next spinoff: American Hothouse Story, in which we watch Neil Patrick Harris raise chameleons.
