Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Swamp People! Kidding! It’s still AHS, although you’d be forgiven for confusing the two given that we spend the first five minutes tonight following around two guys with thick accents who are wearing flannel and Stars and Bars t-shirts as they hunt gators in the swamp and bring them back to their camp. When they arrive, Misty Day, somehow miraculously having survived her Joan of Arc routine, is wandering through the camp while “Edge of Seventeen” plays from somewhere. Misty looks at the gator carcasses and declares it “wrong, all wrong” before reviving two of the gators who come after the hicks, dragging them head-first into the swamp water as Misty wanders off into the distance, the strains of Stevie Nicks still playing in her head.
You can go your own way...
Morning at Hogwarts. Zoe is still focusing on dead Kyle, but Madison thinks she should get over it. “Those guys were his brothers,” Madison says. “He’d have gone after me too.” Meanwhile, Delia is trying to get everyone downstairs for the pledge of allegiance or something and notices a horrible smell coming from Fiona’s room. Fiona blames it on “Chinese herbs” she bought down at the local Witches-R-Us, but of course it’s Delphine, Madame LaLaurie herself. She may not have decayed, but she still was in the dirt for 180 years, so she’s not exactly fresh. Also, she’s kind of freaked out by the modern world and things like cell phones and electricity. Basically, Fiona brought home a puppy. A puppy that used to strip the flesh off living people.
At Morning Vespers, we learn how Queenie came to the school. Seems after a customer at the friend chicken joint she worked at in Detroit last year called her a “stupid fat ass” she plunged her arm into a vat of hot oil to fry the man’s skin. “I grew up on white girl shit like Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Cracker,” she tells the girls to explain why she didn’t want to come originally. Turns out she’s since learned she’s a descendent of Tituba, so she’s kind of royalty.
Damn. Queenie don't play.
Just then, the cops arrive! They want a word with Madison and Zoe. Seems witnesses totally noticed the movie star actress going into a back room at a frat party with the dead boys. Madison insists that nothing happened, but Zoe is starting to crack. When the cops want to know why Zoe went to the hospital to visit a survivor who died after she left in the same way her ex-boyfriend did, Zoe looses her shit and tells the cops everything. As in, “they gang-raped her and we’re all witches and we all have powers and please don’t send us to jail GAH!” Fiona intervenes, pouring two glasses of water for the cops and spitting in them. She offers the glasses to the cops, one of whom drinks immediately but the other is, understandably, a little wierded out. Fiona stares him down and he starts to shake. “In about 10 seconds I’m going to turn those brains of yours to scrambled eggs,” she tells him if he doesn’t drink from the cup. As the cop begins to bleed from his nose, he grabs the glass and downs it. They’re under Fiona’s spell as she tells them to forget everything before heading upstairs to Madison and Zoe and throwing them literally across the room. She tells them the cops were nothing and Zoe is soft if she is afraid of them. Witches have been persecuted throughout time, she reminds them, so when The Man comes, you don’t get scared, you close ranks. The real point, according to Fiona, is “in this whole wide wicked world, the only thing you really have to be afraid of is me.”
The next day, Madison and Zoe head for a little breaking and entering at the local morgue, thanks to Madison learning how to pick a lock for a catburgler movie she was once cast in. “I’m going to pay you back,” Madison tells Zoe, showing her a resurrection spell that she found in the house. Inside the morgue, the girls find the remains of the boys killed in the bus crash. And by remains, we mean piles of body parts, including Kyle’s head, on tables. Madison sees an opportunity, or as she calls it “a challenge” to assemble the perfect boy. I’m getting the sense Madison wasn’t great with her Barbie dolls as a child.
Delia, meanwhile, is with her husband and getting bad news from her doctor. Short version, they’ve been trying to get pregnant and… it’s not going well. Their options are becoming limited and Hank, Delia’s husband, wants her to start considering, you know, fucking MAGIC to fix the problem. Delia is reluctant. “This kind of magic is dark, it’s about life and death,” she tells him.
At home, Fiona has brought Delphine a plate of friend chicken to loosen her tongue about how it was that she’s survived almost 200 years in a hole in the ground. Delphine recounts what happened – it wasn’t poison that Marie Laveau gave her – it was something to make her immortal. The night it happened, Marie freed the slaves in the attic and had Delphine’s daughters hung by their necks from the house’s balcony. “Don’t think that they didn’t suffer,” she told Delphine after showing her their mutilated bodies, “because they did greatly.” Marie’s curse was be to keep Delphine alive forever but trapped in a box in the ground. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Fiona deadpans after hearing the story and casually offering her a bite of chicken.
That’s cold, Fiona. Both your attitude and the chicken.
In the morgue, Zoe and Madison have sewn Kyle back together (more or less) using the…ahem…choicest cuts and are starting their spell. There’s chanting, smoke, screaming, freaky sounds, flames leaping up, pentagrams drawn in blood. The usual for a teenage girl séance, really. Madison gives it her best, clearly shooting for that Teen Choice Award nomination, but when all the smoke and creepy music clears, Kyle is still just a pile of sewn together corpse pieces. “Well, that was a bust,” Madison declares before gathering up her purse and heading out, not even bothering to clean up. Zoe lingers, using the old “I left my phone in here somewhere and I’m totally not going to use this chance to do something weird that will bring back the Frankenstein-like monstrosity that we’ve just created.” Zoe apologizes to Kyle’s corpse, leaning in to kiss him (kinky) just as the Medical Examiner shows up for work. ‘Bout time, really. Security in New Orleans just must be really lax or something. The Medical Examiner is, understandably, a little unnerved by what he sees and finds Zoe cowering just as a reanimated Kyle rises from the table, grabs the Examiner and beats him to death. Undead Kyle has anger management issues, but if I woke up sewn into the body parts of my dead frat brothers, I like to think I’d so the same.
"Gosh, I hope we don't all learn a tragic lesson about the thin line between life and death over this."
In the Ninth Ward, Fiona is getting her hair did by a bunch of black ladies. It’s not just because she wants to be down with what the kidz are doing these days, though. The place is owned by a modern-day Marie Laveau, who spots Fiona and sends all her stylists home. “I’ll take care of this one myself,” she vamps.
At the house, Nan is having a hard time concentrating on her reading because she can sense Delphine upstairs. More annoyed than freaked out, she simply walks upstairs and frees Delphine from her ropes. “You think too loud,” she tells her and orders her out of the house. Delphine runs into Queenie on the way out and boy does that ever go well.
In the beauty parlor, Marie and Fiona snark each other for a few minutes before admitting they both know who the other is. “Your kind and my kind have been going after each other for centuries, though it’s like a hammer going after a nail,” Fiona says. Marie’s having none of this white privilege and points out that if not for Tituba, there wouldn’t be witches in America. Fiona scoffs that Tituba was an illiterate slave girl and that Fiona’s power comes from far more than some overly deified historical caricature bringing magic to the New World. And now it’s time to get real – Fiona is here because she wants whatever it is that has kept Marie young all these years and she’s willing to trade Delphine to get it. “The hammer wants the nail’s magic,” Marie laughs. “That is rich.” Fiona isn’t take no for an answer, setting Marie’s wigs on fire to show her strength and promising to be in touch. Later, Marie heads into the back room, pulling chains off the wall and talking to a man with a bull’s head. “You’re never going to believe who’s back,” she tells him.
We actually both thought this was the audition for the gender-swapped remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
It’s been almost a full episode since we’ve had a sex scene, so the quota is up. Delia and Hank have set up an elaborate circle of candles and salt and powders and herbs and who knows what, including a bunch of large football-sized eggs. They speak in Latin, smear blood on each other, and begin with the sexy time. As they make love, the eggs crack and snakes begin to slither out, growing rapidly in size until the snakes begin to join Delia and Hank’s bodies among the circle of flames surrounding them. It’s honestly a little like something out of a Guns and Roses video, but what can you do?
Zoe is trying to make off with Kyle’s…um…corpse? Entire pledge class? Whatever he is? He’s totally not verbal, but way into punching his head through things. Zoe is panicking while driving away from the morgue. And that’s when Misty Day herself suddenly is sitting in the backseat and wanting to know why Zoe “drew me out here.”
Fiona finds Delphine moping out in front of her old house and bemoaning how she’s been remembered as a monster. “I was a woman of my time,” she justifies herself as Fiona snorts. “If ten of each hundred things I read about you were true, you deserved to be under all that dirt,” Fiona says. Delphine insists that she loved her girls, in her own way. “Even the ugly one,” she says, slightly undercutting her own argument. Either way, it was the thought of her girls that kept her mind occupied these past 180 years. She asks Fiona if she’s a witch to kill her and let her find peace. “Oh I may kill you, but not today,” Fiona says before telling her to buck up and come back home.
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