Lo, my friends: John Landgraf giveth, and John Landgraf taketh away. In the very same week where Sons of Anarchy reinvigorates a flagging season with a stunning, emotional episode, American Horror Story comes completely off the rails, on the heels of a pretty good outing. After all my ballyhooing about how “Bullseye” brought focus to a show that desperately lacked it, “Test of Strength” is a scattered mess.
Much of the problem is that the show is all sprawl, without any real protagonist or core story for us to latch on to. When an episode (or even just a scene) features a more engaging character, whether it's Elsa or one of the Motts, then Freak Show is consistently entertaining and occasionally even good. But outside of those characters there really isn't anything to grab on to here. Too many of the other characters, even Bette and Dot, are too thinly drawn for the audience to actually care about them. Maggie is an utter non-presence. Jimmy Darling, despite Even Peters's best efforts, is a bland hero-type, a sketch more than anything else. And these are the characters who have gotten significant screen time! As for Desiree or Ethel (whose name I just had to Google), they are summed up by their “freak” traits and not much else.
It's one thing for these characters to be support, to be less well developed than the “important” characters. But then you get an episode like “Test of Strength” that abandons those characters entirely. Worse, it introduces yet another entirely new aspect, as Grace Gummer's dad forks her tongue and tattoos her skin and, you know what, whatever. I can't even get that worked up about it. Freak Show is a show where stuff happens and sometimes it is interesting but most of the time it is not.
Really, that is the worst sin of the season to date: it is so very boring. It does not even have the courtesy to be hilariously, mind-bogglingly bad. A big chunk of this episode is devoted to Dell and Jimmy having a “man to man” talk, and while I appreciate the time spent attempting to develop this relationship, and I appreciate the actors' best efforts in this regard, I'm just not invested in it, and I'm not convinced that the show is, either. Their conflict is introduced and resolved in the span of one scene, to be tossed aside for the next outrageous thing. At least Dell's murder of Ma Petite has the trappings of a horror story, and is a genuine shock in a real sleeper of an episode. But even that falls flat, because Ma Petite is here only to be a victim, and Dell is only here to be a villain; there has been zero attempt to complicate the former, and only failed attempts to complicate the latter.
The biggest disappointment is that the show thinks it has interesting things to say, but as always with Ryan Murphy joints, it falls well short of actually saying them. Between Stanley's crusade to present all the freaks in jars, Dandy's creepy obsession with Bette and Dot, and now Grace Gummer's crazy fucking dad, there's a really great thematic element here of commoditization and objectification, of how we view the Other in American culture, and simultaneously are repulsed by it and yet want to have control over it. But, as with Coven's similar trappings of body horror and gender trouble, we never get quite so far as actually exploring these ideas. Ryan Murphy is content to skim the surface.
At the end of the day, “Test of Strength” is a formless mess, giving too much attention to dull, underdeveloped characters at the expense of the too few good ones it has. It gives way to the series' worst tendencies, while failing to maintain the previous episode's focus, nor to deliver on the potential of the various underlying themes at play. Things happen haphazardly: Suddenly Maggie is totally into Jimmy and wants to run away together. Suddenly Stanley is blackmailing Dell. Suddenly Grace Gummer is a fork-tongued tattoo monster. Or else the same damn things happen over and over again: did you know that Elsa feels threatened by Bette and Dot?
I hate to begrudge Freak Show its good qualities. I still admire the show's willingness to work outside of the box formally, even if it's in little ways, like the split-screen shot of Elsa reading her note to Dot. Even though she's far too underused, Kathy Bates still gives a great performance, and her speech about Dell is moving even within the relative void of characterization that has been given Ethel. But there is just no core to this season, no spine to speak of. There's no sense of the story moving anywhere, even though just last week, there seemed to be a way forward emerging. “Test of Strength” feels like a rug being pulled from beneath our feet, and now, with half the season already behind us, I wonder if there's any way we get our bearings again.
Stray Observations:
- What exactly is the justification for a freak show where everyone singing all the time? Evan Peters' rendition of Nirvana's “Come As You Are” is autotuned beyond recognition, as Freak Show becomes even more like Glee. It's an unnecessary, illogical performance—and it's almost certainly meant to fill out a Songs from American Horror Story: Freak Show album.
- The horrible squeaking sound that Ma Petite makes as Dell crushes her really is horrifying.
- “I wanna keep my balls.” In case you hadn't surmised this already, Jimmy's one of those dumb drunks.
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.