Weekly Recap: American Horror Story, S05E03
By Ross Dickerhoof, Contributor
This week’s Hotel is much more entertaining than last week’s, but also arguably more flawed and prone to recycling elements from past seasons.
On the Countess side, we finally know her endgame! She’s trying to marry real estate agent Will Drake so she can get her hands on his massive . . . wads of cash. And also his penis, even though he reveals via clunky dialogue that he’s gay. Thanks, Ryan Murphy, we really needed more of your weird internalized homophobia. Well, at least now we know she has a concrete goal other than “be evil and fabulous,” even though Gaga could hold my interest on that alone.
We also know the Countess has a living enemy: Ramona Royale, played flawlessly by Angela Bassett. Ramona is a former film star and one-time lover of the Countess’, until Ramona left her for an up-and-coming rapper, causing the Countess to murder him in retaliation, which Ramona’s trying to avenge. She even kidnaps Donovan for all of five minutes, which was pointless. Whatever. Her Blaxploitation-style intro was great, at least! The recycling of her character’s motive (and the racism) from Coven, not so much.
The John Lowe stuff is so divorced from everything else on this show that it feels even more like unintentional self-parody than the rest of it. The Ten Commandments killer killed some gossip columnists (that’s really it). Alex gets more of a spotlight, filing for divorce (to John’s dismay) and gives a really creepy voiceover monologue about how she really, really loved Holden. All that is taken as deadly serious as possible (and the acting is strong), but having a blood-drenched ghostly Naomi Campbell show up and make a joke about Alex’s fashion choice kinda ruins the drama. At least Alex actually seeing Holden pushes things forward.
The theme of motherhood continues in the worst of the main plots, the Donovan vs. Iris “I hate you, mommy” plot. It’d be nice if the show would establish a real reason for Donovan to hate Iris besides a high-fiber diet as a child (yeah, really), but for now we get hollow scenes like Donovan telling Iris to kill herself, which she does, by getting Sally to help. Donovan brings her back to life out of guilt, though, so Sally was pointless for yet another episode. Looks like the cycle of resurrections that sucked drama out of Coven is back too, for the worse.
