With the second half of its Halloween two-parter, American Horror Story: Freak Show continues its exploration of its characters backstories, before arriving at a conclusion that seems to signal, at last, the “real” beginning of this season.
The major flashbacks this episode focus on Elsa and on Twisty the Clown. While these feel serve to add color and depth to the characters, much like Ethel’s conversation with Mordrake last week, the scenes bring the season’s overall narrative to a halt. It’s a shame that the season so far has been so stop and start in the story department, because the small vignettes that have thus far composed these episodes have been consistently entertaining, and occasionally fascinating. Elsa’s story is deeply unsettling, playing on the psychosexual body horror that is American Horror Story’s bread and butter. The big reveal: she worked as a dominatrix for hire back in the Thirties, until she lost her legs in the making of a snuff film. The images that accompany her narration are nothing short of insane—the scenes of her at work are a visual assault, and that toilet is still making me wince. This is great, twisted stuff, and it’s exactly the sort of story a show called Freak Show should be telling.
As for Twisty, the way the Mordrake business ultimately intersects with his arc is the first sign of the show telling an overarching story, and is a great way for these episodes to avoid superfluity. As we learn in his conversation with Mordrake, Twisty has some sort of mental disability. He either has molested children, or he’s been falsely accused of it, but either way Twisty isn’t handling this well. He tries to kill himself and fails, instead blowing the bottom half of his face off. For a character that had been sold thus far as the season’s major villain, it’s a surprisingly touching sequence, injecting the character and his story with a pathos that I wouldn’t have expected. It’s reminiscent of nothing so much as Asylum’s better moments, where even the heinous Dr. Arden had at least a shred of humanity.
What’s more, Twisty’s acceptance by Mordrake opens the door for the season’s real villain, the once annoying, and now suddenly scary, Dandy Mott. His interaction with Nora this week, after he dons Twisty’s mask (and surely along with it multiple infections), is an example of the show making good use of the two-part structure, creating a scene in parallel that underlines the transformation Dandy undergoes. Finn Wittrock has been a real standout this season, fitting right in among the rest of the cast and fully embracing a pretty challenging role. Dandy and his mother are super-stylized in their weirdness, and it would be easy for their scenes to seem forced or inauthentic, but not so with Wittrock (and of course Frances Conroy, but she sits this episode out). With Twisty out of the way, I’m actually intrigued to see where Dandy’s total commitment to the clown thing takes us.
Of course, the end of Twisty also means the freedom of those kids he kidnapped, and therefore the end of the town’s curfew and, somewhat unbelievably, their animosity toward Elsa’s freaks. They’re freed by Jimmy Darling, with an assist of Maggie Esmeralda, after they’re picked up by Twisty. Evan Peters and Emma Roberts have an easy, classic horror flick chemistry, and they make for exciting heroes in the mini-horror movie they star in this week. I’m much less convinced by the too-easy way that the town is so eager to adopt Jimmy as a kind of hero. We reach this conclusion out of plot necessity, rather than any logic on the part of the writing. It’s a resolution like you’d see on Glee, banal and cloying. While it’s a setup that could bear interesting fruit down the line, the means by which we’ve arrived at it are drawn out and overly sentimental.
Even though it shares the same flaws as “Part One”, “Edwark Mordrake, Part Two” is flawed to a much lesser degree, and it displays some of the series’ best strengths. Though the pace is still rather slow, there really is a lot that happens in this episode, and by the end the status quo is very different than how Freak Show began. Given the size of the cast, there might actually be some value in this extended prologue, which relieves later episodes of some character- and world-building burden. I’d like to see some more things happening in it, but the world of Freak Show is remarkably well illustrated, and there’s something to be said for that.
When watching the episode with my roommate, he commented that it started to feel like a season finale, and, well, he’s right. Twisty shuffles off this mortal coil and joins Edward Mordrake. Jimmy gets a hero’s welcome from what feels like the entire town of Jupiter. Elsa gets a big audience out of it, the curfew is lifted, all is well. The more I think about it, though, the more I think this is a beginning rather than an ending. Is it absurd that it’s taken four episodes to get here? Yes, absolutely. But now the introductions are made, the stage set. Certainly this episode amps up the weird horror quotient sufficiently. So I, for now, approach the remainder of Freak Show with cautious optimism.
Stray Observations:
– Patti LaBelle leaves without singing even one song. That’s some kind of crime.
– In fact there are no songs this week at all, for the first time, though technically this is the second half of one episode. I don’t want them to do songs for their own sake, but I’m also curious to see if the conceit has any life left in it.
– For an episode that’s named after him, Edward Mordrake himself doesn’t make much of an impression. The script treats him as a sounding board for the other characters and not much else, and Wes Bentley doesn’t really do a whole lot with what he’s given, either.
– I just want to remind everyone that probably the most glorious episode of this ridiculous series was Asylum’s two-part “I Am Anne Frank,” and you would do well to catch it on Netflix this Hallo-weekend. (Though you’re probably definitely reading this after Halloween.)
Michael Wampler is a graduate of The College of New Jersey, where he completed both B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature. He currently lives and works in Princeton, NJ while he shops around his debut novel and slowly picks away at his second. Favorite shows include Weeds, Lost, Hannibal and Mad Men (among many more). When not watching or writing about television, he enjoys reading, going for runs, and building his record collection.