I ran into Celia Weston today (I feel like her stalker. Always running into her in the city, I am) and told her that she sure has been causing a lot of trouble on Freakshow. She told me a vague but juicy anecdote about a scene she was prepping for the day before but immediately swore me to secrecy, damnit.
Sorry to dangle that carrot!
Plot threads are getting ever more tangled and destructive as we near the winter break. Lobster Boy springs Bette & Dot from the Mott mansion (our favorite place to be this season - hail Finn Wittrock & Frances Conroy) as all three of them begin to sense danger even if they can't yet put their finger on what exactly is wrong with Dandy. Then Lobster Boy reveals Elsa's lies to the freaks only to be betrayed by the twins he just rescued who are planning to blackmail Elsa instead. The Bearded Lady overhears Richard & Elsa's plans to off the twins and wants to off Dell the Strong Man off herself after he is blackmailed by Richard to kill a freak to keep his queer closet door shut. Etcetera etcetera etcetera while not one but two characters are seeking dangerous operations and so on and so on and so on.
Things are... messy. It's one hour of double and triple crossing as everyone turns against each other, lies to each other, and continues the march toward what we assume is their communal doom. Things are going terribly for just about everyone.
Body Count: 1. Ma Petit squeezed to death by the Strong Man, damn him, and sold by Richard to museum director Celia Weston. We'll never again hear Ma's high-pitched voice (this was a very disturbing death with her pitiful squeaks and tiny quivering limbs) or be amused by her little violin and those adorable butterfly imitations.
Musical Interlude: Nirvana's "Come As You Are" via Evan Peters for some reason. Elsa was not amused.
Best Line Reading
You read my diary."
In some ways Dot, who despises Dandy, is his perfect match. They're both childlike devils and their shared petulance rubs each other the wrong way. I love the amount of loathing accusation Paulson shoves into these four words, with a kind of moral superiority dangling from it... which is hilarious since she sort of wants to saw her sister off which Dandy would also surely love to do.
Most Unexpected Delight
It's been hilarious for entirely off-show reasons to watch Jessica Lange continually demolish Meryl Streep's Daughter's piece of mind. And now, this playfully gross series is the first entertainment to successfully stop one of the Gummer girls from looking like a defective Streep clone. We just didn't ever expect that this moment would arrive via an all face tattoo torture!
Best Moment
"Amazon Eve" beating the shit out of the Strong Man. Sorry, Chiklis bothers me and with Eve we have our third consecutive trans actor well cast on a hit TV series (following Orange is the New Black and Transparent). It's in some ways the surprise showbiz story of 2014.
Who's the Strong Man now ?!
Most Quotable
This is blackmail. My my my
-takes one schemer to know and respect one.
I want to keep my balls!
-best said with drunken slur
Oh, you wave the wand. That's all you do!
- The perfect fairy godmother insult! Not that that will come in so handy.
Plus, a new audition monologue for actors via the teary Bearded Lady (who has really grown on me with Kathy Bates's capacity for conjuring a life's worth of sorrow and disappointment.
You know what your problem is? You're stuck on the rosy notion that the world operates on goodness, decency. Truth is all goodness guarantees you is an early grave. But the biggest joke of all? The thing that will sink you every time is hope. Hope that the world will right itself, that the just will be rewarded and the wicked punished. Once you buy into that horseshit you're dead in the water.
The only way to survive in this disgusting godforsaken world is to take control. Aint nobody going to take care of our people but us.
Funniest Moment
Bette's makeover and Dot's "caterpillar" reaction. The entire scene is priceless from the hairdresser's delight to Bette's Mildred Pierce quoting, to Dot's humorlessness and Elsa's 'Fairy Godmother' offer.
Look at us, Dot. We're like the perfect before and after picture. It'll be our new act. We'll call it the metamorphosis.
Episode MVP
Given this season's most challenging role, Sarah Paulson is exceeding expectations as girlish naive Bette & bitter complicated Dot. She's like the tragicomedy actor masks as siamese twins. She's funny, hateful, delusional, abrasive, pragmatic, childish, and sympathetic and sometimes all of those things at once. It helps to have two faces to act with, I suppose. If Jessica Lange really wants to move on, or take a smaller role as she keeps indicating, Paulson has more than earned the headliner position after four seasons, I'd say.
And a major shout out to Evan Peters who finally justifies his major screen time this season with that drunken little boy despair in an alleyway. I actually felt it.
Grade: B+