Weekly Recap: American Horror Story, S05E04
By Ross Dickerhoof, Contributor
I won’t mince words. This episode f—ing sucked.
The biggest running theme this season is that I’ve been bored, and I gave last week’s episode a pass because at least stuff happened. I was excited for this week, because I like AHS’s Halloween episodes! The best episode of Coven, the worst season, was a Halloween episode! And this one had a literal murderer’s row of potentially fun and scary real-life boogeymen lined up for cameos, including John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Aileen Wuornos (played by series regular Lily Rabe), so there was no way this could go wrong.
And yet. And yet. Every single second of this complete waste of an episode failed to produce any reaction other than “When is it oveeeeeerrrr?” I’d go as far as saying this is the worst episode of AHS ever. The best thing I can say about it is that it was short.
Why? Because everything about the “Devil’s Night” dinner, the main set piece, for which the episode is named, was completely pointless! Yep, March set up a banquet where Jeffrey Dahmer drilled a dude’s head (in the most blasé way possible, I might add) and molested him, and then the merry band of murderers stab some random guy Sally brought in, just to f—k with John. Ryan Murphy just wanted some excuse to do a Halloween episode, so he made up a pointless non-conflict, dragged it out for 75% of the episode with limp attempts at “atmosphere,” threw in a disgusting bit of EVIL QUEERZ with the Dahmer bits, had Lily Rabe flip her hair and yell a bunch, stole some of the score from It Follows and called it a day.
Ryan Murphy thinks you’re stupid. I genuinely believe this, because no good-hearted person would write an episode this deeply convinced of the fact that you’ll buy whatever it sells you based on name recognition alone.
Practically nothing else happened this week, because the stupid murderer dinner so thoroughly consumed the runtime. Yet somehow, they made time for Alex to get the Countess to turn her into a vampire so she can be with Holden forever, so now AHS is repeating its own plotlines and cranking up the mommy abuse even higher. It had zero buildup and less than zero impact. Who cares? Not me. Please, just let something happen next time.
