We finally got the reveal we have been waiting for and know which clown is which! Ryan Murphy probably felt like a horror Oprah with the “and you get a clown mask! And you grt a ckown mask!” this season, with the anount of baddies we got, so it’s nice to pull the nasks off and see who is doing all these crazy things, and more inportsntly confirn the ckowns are indeed real and always a fignent if Ally’s imagination.
Speaking of Ally, we might as well get her involvement in the episode out of the way before doing all the two big bad scary scenes–Dr. Rudy is being a little harsh with ger and not very sympathetic. We see a flashback to the supervised visit with Oz where she gave him his sketchbook and was acting strange and spastic (her natural state) and alienating him. This continues into a tense phone call with Ivy in the car talking to Ally with Winter silently listening and subsequently flirting with Ivy, with Oz in the backseat witnessing it all.
So there’s that reveal, but then Ally has a more serious scene that actually moves the plot an inch. Having learned absolutely nothing, she spies on her neighbors and when she sees Harrison dragging something and she goes to investigate (she’d be better off actually being agoraphobic at this point) she sees Harrison making out with unbelievably cast cop Colton Haynes. She then finds the titular Hole in their yard, and veing the brave Jill-Stein-voter-that-could leans over the edge to sneak a peak of the formerly missing Meadow.
American Horror Story: Cult courtesy of FX
Ally runs back to her own house (bugged with cameras, remember?) and locks herself in. Meadow follows and beats on the windows, attenpting to tell Ally the truth about the cult and Ivy being in on it, but she is hooded and dragged away. So menacing. Much scare.
The real horror in the episode came when we saw the clown group in action. There first target was local news boss Bob. They’ve already killed Serena, and given Beverly a leg up to report biased news about Kai and the murders, but now its time to kill Bob out of satisfaction and eliminate a hurdle of their propoganda.
The clowns record the assault while chanting “Ave Satanus” (for dramatic effect), but are interrupted when Bob (Sean from Shameless with a bad dye job) tells them he has a gimp in the attic. This feels wildly unecessary as an inclusion since they kill Bob and the gimp and we will likely never see it referenced again. Is it a play on everyone having secrets? A call back to murderhouse? Or was it just a means to make us squirm when the hooks rip out of him while he is being gutted? Who knows, but we did appreciate the reveal of Beverly taking her mask off so Bob could see his killer after they all take some turns stabbing him.
American Horror Story: Cult courtesy of FX
As disturbing as the scene was, hearing their voices while in full clown costume felt almost campy when they sound slightly disorganized and honestly like a bunch of amateurs. We then get to see them all in partial costume setting up the coffin gimmick from episode 3, and a plain close meeting at Harrison and Meadow’s house.
The second, more disturbing scene, comes when the clowns turn on one of their own and kill cameraman R.J., which left almost everyone wondering “who is this guy?” It almost feels like previous scenes with R.J. had been cut, bevause we did not see the importance of his character outside of a plot device for this scene, where Kai forces every member of his group to put a nailgun to his head and pull. It seems like a unifying, team building exercise that also serves to assert Kai’s dominance. He makes Ivy start, who has the most trouble pulking the trigger and STUPIDLY goes for the temple instead of the brain stem. The rest of the group proves to be just as green, going for the forehead. The scene truly was hard to watch.
American Horror Story courtesy of FX
The last, and most interesting scene, we got was Kai’s flashback and PROBABLY fabricated origin story in a pinky lock confessional with Beverley. Supposedly, after moving into the basememnt after college, his shitty, abusive father got a little too muxh to handle and his mother shot him and herself. Dr. Rudy’s involvement becomes clear, as he wasn’t a revealed clown, but Kai and Winter’s older brother, who made Kai hide the supposed murder suicide to continue getting their checks and presumably earping his brothers mind, as Kai says he continued talking to their corpses he kept in their room. But when did his violent tendencies start? Would he give her his rrue origin story? Is Dr. Rudy still involved? (We say yes and manipulating Kai). And is his mother really dead? Or eas she woman in next week’s promo? You’ll have to join us in watching next weeks episode to find out, and we are in the point in the season where the secondary twist should rock the so-far linear season.
