American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 5

5.5: Room Service

--This episode could get American Horror Story canceled. Oh, I don’t believe for a second that it will. But it could. An army of indignant moms could start a letter-writing campaign, because how DARE this show depict something as tasteless as an elementary school massacre! Children can’t be exposed to this! If my child watches a show not intended for children, it is not MY fault, it is the SHOW’S fault. My child needs to be protected from EVERYTHING! No vaccines! No trick-or-treating! If I see my neighbor’s kids outside without an adult, I’m calling the police! This will definitely ensure my child becomes a proper adult as opposed to a paranoid, entitled shithead like me! My parents failed! I will not fail!

--I just summed up a lot of what’s wrong with America right now. So did this ep. The Countess’s brand of vampirism became a conduit for razor-edged social commentary. And the school massacre scene blew me away, because it was so unexpected, so offensive, and because it felt so important somehow. In addition to that take on modern fear culture, we also saw self-entitlement, contempt for the elderly (in the US, “elderly” now refers to anyone over thirty-five), sexual repression, the well-meaning idiocy of parents...hell, they even got in a brief dig at cultural appropriation. (“You’ve got that dot on your forehead.” “I’m Hindu.”) For these reasons, this is my favorite episode of Hotel thus far. Which may be a problem, as it all felt more interesting than ghosts, vampires, or dildo-demons.

--Both members of our Vampire Mommy Brigade experienced the unpleasant effects of changing. Alex was forced to guzzle bags of blood at the hospital, and also to endure having a fisheye camera clamped to her ear, because it’s artsy! Seeing the impending doom of Max the Measles Kid, she used her blood to save him...and convert him. He promptly killed and ate his parents, but that was only the beginning of young Max’s adventures! Meanwhile, Iris got a big wake-up call. All her life, people have shat on her. As she suffered through new-vampire tremors, did her own son care for her? Nope! Donovan dragged Iris to Ramona’s McMansion and offered her up like a Christmas goose. A pawn in their petty little scheme to topple The Countess. Back at the hotel, a miserable Iris found comfort, and a blood cocktail, in Liz Taylor, who...

--Well. This ep ensured Liz Taylor as one of my favorite characters this season. Denis O’Hare seems born to play the role. I always assumed Liz was a ghost with a lurid backstory. No and no. In his old life, he was a thoroughly wretched little man, stuck in a utilitarian marriage, happy only when he checked into hotel rooms and indulged in his private fantasies of wearing fur and silk, of being glamorous. Beautiful. Perfect. The Countess smelled his unhappiness, and did something that proves she’s not all rotten: she liberated him. She showed him how glorious he could be, and his reaction, his shyness and joy and relief, warmed the room. The Countess also murdered Liz Taylor’s homophobic coworkers. And he’s been reading Voltaire and delivering sassy barbs ever since. For such an act of twisted kindness, The Countess wins karma points.

--Nobody cares about John Lowe. Boo hoo, he’s having a meltdown and he got fired from the force. At this point, he’d better be the Ten Commandments killer, otherwise he’s useless. Not surprisingly, he fell into bed with Sally. It’s funny that they’ve given Sarah Paulson her best AHS character since Asylum, and are kinda wasting her. Every minute she’s onscreen, with her parched voice and eternally tear-filled eyes, I’m riveted. So how about giving her more than one freakin’ scene per ep?

--Alex, who could have been the pointless filler character her husband has become, hijacked the episode when she vampified young Max. And that led into the amazing, horrible chaos I couldn’t help but admire. At school, Max began slaughtering adults and infecting kids. Lockdown ensued. The media descended. Worried parents clumped behind the police lines. When the bloodied, shaken students were led to safety, they had their story straight: it was a guy in black with a mask on who did the killing. An archetypal Bad Man whose existence will be accepted without question. “How could this happen?” the public will wail. People will demand more gun laws, even though guns weren’t involved. They will waste their time on armchair outrage and superficial, useless “solutions” while ignoring the deeper problems, like an army of vampire kids lurking in LA. But take away the bloodsucking and this bullshit logic could just as easily be applied to Sandy Hook. Sorry if that upsets you. But it’s true. Our fear, our belief that we need to be afraid rather than prepared, is our greatest enemy.

--So vote for Bernie Sanders! Just kidding. Maybe.

--Iris had to deal with perhaps the scariest creatures ever to appear on American Horror Story: HIPSTERS. Two smug, whiny twentysomethings (Jessica Lu and Darren Criss) checked into the Cortez because Halloween sucks, #StrollerVermin. If the twelve-and-unders have been raised to fear life, the next-oldest generation is worse, because they believe they deserve a medal just for existing. Their theme song is “First World Problems” by Weird Al, only they’d hate that, because Weird Al is a pitiable relic who’s only funny to six-year-olds, #HighFive. They will never get within fifty feet of a celebrity, but demand a discount just for name-dropping. The fact that they despise anyone older or younger than them reveals their social toxicity. Non-shitty Millennials such as myself apologize for the hipsters. We really do. Anyway, this pair of vape-heads heaped all their disdain upon Iris...and, with Liz Taylor’s help, she fought back. Cat food passed off as paté? How about some old-fashioned stabbing? Yes, Iris murdered the hipsters, but it wasn’t played for laughs. It was a tearful, furious catharsis for a woman scorned by everyone around her. “I MATTER!” Iris howled, on behalf of all the mothers who gave their children love only to become a cruel Tumblr meme, #DinosaurMom. And her new boldness spells trouble for Donovan and Ramona’s plan. Good. Fuck those two.

--For some reason, when The Countess and Tristan simultaneously craned their necks forward to scrutinize Iris, I lost my shit and giggled for a couple minutes. Why was that so funny? Maybe I needed it on account of this episode being very, very unfunny. Reminding us that real horror involves misguided values and ingrained dread. The kids who are taught to stay away from school windows. The fifteen-year-old who steals his dad’s car, kills three people with it, and thinks he’s the victim. The parents who attack a teacher for giving their child bad grades, while their child is online, bullying a chubby girl into committing suicide. This episode made me angry. I hope I’m not the only one.

Myst Series, pt. 10

Fez -- THERE... ARE... FOUR... OWLS!!!

There are four owls. They can be found somewhere in the game. You need to speak to all four in order to unlock the secret of the giant stone owl statue. What? You didn’t have a clue? You saw an owl once, but assumed it was just part of the scenery? Oops. What a silly fool you are. Better get searching. Yes, I know the map is gigantic. Didn’t you realize there was a clue to the owls’ locations in a random room way back near the beginning? Well, it’s not our fault if you’re unobservant! Oh, and the owls only appear at night. Good luck, ya sorry bastard.

Welcome to the unique mix of glory and utter frustration that is Fez. I have such a weird relationship with this game. I recognize it as one of the coolest games I’ve ever played, but at the same time, it pisses me off to no end. The first time I played it, I was so nonplussed that I left it off my games-of-the-year list, which was probably a mistake. I included it in the Myst review series in part so I could bitch about it. But doing so meant replaying it, and, dude, I liked the game so much more the second time around. The great things about it loom larger, while the shitty things about it have...well, not entirely diminished. So brace yourself for a schizophrenic post.

Once again, we have a game that barely seems to relate to the Myst series, until you pay closer attention. It’s heavily pixelated like The Dig, but this time, that’s a style choice, a little slice of retro 8-bit hipsterdom. Its initially flat, boxy aesthetic certainly can’t compare to the sumptuous vistas of the Myst games. But there’s plenty in common. You’re a blank-slate protagonist tossed into a dreamlike open world consisting of several distinctly color-coded environments, and there’s no way to die, no enemies, and lots of cryptic, world-spanning puzzles to solve. Our beloved formula returns! Fez stars a little marshmallow-dude named Gomez who lives in a comfortably flat, two-dimensional plane, or so he thinks. Then the village elder summons Gomez for an epic quest! He is brought into the presence of a giant yellow cube that’s supposed to give him quest instructions, but the cube explodes and Gomez must hunt down all its fragments to save the universe. Since the cube presumably did not intend to explode that day, one wonders what Gomez’s quest was supposed to entail. Doing the cube’s tax returns?

This is where the very cool, unique mechanic of Fez comes into play. Gomez receives the titular accessory, which gives him the ability to perceive and manipulate a third dimension. You see, Gomez’s world is fully 3D, but he (and the player) perceive it from a fixed 2D perspective. Thus, you can fuck with spatial physics by rotating your view ninety degrees. Is a platform too distant to reach? Rotate, and boom, it’s now inches away. Are two patches of climbable moss annoyingly far apart? Rotate, and blam, they connect. Gomez must study the world from all angles as he hunts down the little golden cube pieces, and his hunt takes him in a non-linear fashion through a variety of vibrant zones. I’m not exaggerating when I say Fez is one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever seen. The retro graphics fool you, until you begin to notice the sheer amount of detail crammed in. Beautiful textures. Ambient light and water. Color gradients that make the artist in me swoon. Each area is a vertical labyrinth and finding the correct path of ascension enables the player to study all these amazing little throwaway details. Fez feels like an actual world with actual history; its crumbling ruins suggest epochs we can only guess at, and each new zone (an island chain, a neon-lit city, a gothic graveyard, and much more) ties into the overall archaeology. This alone is reason to bump up the game’s letter grade.

But if we’re scrutinizing a potential successor to Myst, we can’t just go by looks. What about the puzzles? Here’s where things get weird. On the surface, you only need to collect the golden cube bits, which form 32 larger cubes and can be collected via basic exploration and platform-hopping. New areas introduce mechanics -- bombs, moveable sections, invisible platforms, time challenges -- that keep things from feeling repetitive. However, there are also 32 “anti-cubes,” and getting them is in no way straightforward. The anti-cube puzzles are all over the map, figuratively and geographically. Some are benign enough: move some blocks into the right pattern, use this treasure map to spot a hidden platform, etc. Others ooze past frustrating into the realm of unfair. There is an anti-cube that only appears once per week, in real time. Several require you to translate a made-up alphabet and a numeric system. There are puzzles that demand you visit a certain place when night falls; miss it and you’ll have to wait around for an in-game day. Other puzzles are impossible unless you’ve beaten the game and unlocked stuff. And what makes all this annoying isn’t difficulty so much as lack of obvious clues.

Kindly peruse this cute webcartoon about furries playing Until Dawn. It’s a good litmus test for what type of gamer you are. Me, I’m Rick the lizard. I’m a completionist; I like the feeling of knowing I’ve found everything, or as much as possible. Fez is incredibly daunting to me. Yes, I’m good at solving puzzles, but a lot of the puzzles in Fez aren’t what I’m used to. Translate a fucking alphabet? That is a job for a linguistic anthropologist, not a gamer. Fez accommodates the casual player: you can beat the game’s story without collecting a single anti-cube. But if you’re like me, you’ll feel inadequate. The first time I played Fez, I was left confounded and unsatisfied. When I went back, I was determined to penetrate deeper into the game’s secrets. Having done so, I feel better. Fez does reward your obsession: decrypt its codes and entire new vistas open up. I did what most people will do: I cheated. But is it really “cheating” at this point? Yes, someone online translated that damn alphabet for me, but that’s kind of the world we live in now. Fez is a game that requires a support structure.

I don’t believe you can make a game with such deeply-buried treasures and expect everyone to spend the time and sanity digging them up. One big problem I have with Fez is that playing it gets exhausting. If I find a crucial clue to something on the far side of the map, it’s gonna take ages to transport Item A to Slot B. There’s a warp system, but it doesn’t make re-climbing all those platforms any less tedious. Yes, the map screen tells you which areas still contain items and secrets, but was that one treasure chest near the ruined observatory, or in the crypts, or back in Gomez’s home village, or....? You see the problem. Even the gorgeous details begin to mock you. Is that pattern on the wall important? If the owls can talk, what about the frogs and worms? Did I miss something crucial in this area, and will I be able to remember it for future reference? It’s a completionist’s nightmare: a disorienting game that doesn’t provide the clues needed to point you in the right direction.

Still, Fez does grow richer the more time you pour into it. I’ll keep chipping away. Got plenty of time to do so, because designer Phil Fish had some sort of ugly meltdown, decided the gaming industry was bullshit, and canceled a planned sequel. Thus we can lump Fez into the same category as Braid: a well-made but highly pretentious indie that pompously deconstructs the very DNA of classic gaming, created by an artsy dude who sneers at us poor, unenlightened plebes for merely wanting to push buttons and collect stars. Funny thing is, a game can be all of the above and still be awesome. I would say that Fez is awesome. But if you’re gonna play it, you need to take deep breaths, align your chakras, and summon up reserves of patience you didn’t know you had. Because maybe this time around, you’ll notice the paintings that pinpoint the locations of the four owls. And you’ll remember to visit those spots during the nighttime. And you’ll already have a guide to morse code open in your browser. And your phone will be ready to scan the QR code in the throne room. But you still haven’t translated the riddles in that one chamber, and you forgot to lower the water level on the islands, and the Black Monolith is still a fucking mystery, and what’s with that creepy skull artifact? And...

Deep breath. Let’s start with the owls.

Myst Review Series

Myst • Riven • Myst III: Exile • Myst IV: Revelation • Submachine • Kairo • The Talos Principle • The Dig • Daymare Town • Fez • Tri: Of Friendship and Madness • The Witness

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 4

5.4: Devil’s Night

--An argument could be made that every serial killer wins. You can halt their spree, lock them up, and execute them, but it’s too late: they’re legend. James March touched upon this as he raised a glass at televison’s freakiest exclusive dinner party not hosted by Hannibal Lecter. Our species still worships a pantheon; the difference is, we are conceited enough to make ourselves the gods. And while somebody like Ghandi or Jane Goodall or Pope Francis may achieve mere sainthood, it’s the bad guys who we deify. And if ghosts are real, if negative energy and unfinished business are what causes a spirit to linger, then the great serial killers of history are truly immortal. Pleasant dreams.

--Every now and then, AHS does something where I’m not sure if I should be really, really offended. Remember when they used the racist murder of a little black boy as a set-up for rampaging zombie rednecks? They’re always crossing some line or other, and the part of me that isn’t a total freak wags a finger. It’s Halloween at the Hotel Cortez, Devil’s Night, a very special holiday. Because according to this show’s rulebook, Halloween is the one night when ghosts can wander at will. And a few of them wander over to the Hotel Cortez, where March presides over a private dinner for the worst of the worst. Jeffrey Dahmer. Aileen Wournos. John Wayne Gacy. Zodiac. Richard Ramirez. You may notice that a couple of those names were in the headlines pretty damn recently. And that’s my quibble. It’s one thing to portray, say, Jack the Ripper. But giving us Aileen Wournos, whose death is fresher than 9/11? Damn. Someone’s gonna write an angry letter or two. Anyway, they’re March’s special snowflakes, and I did find it a bit contrived that all of these killers visited the Hotel Cortez in life. The place seems to write its own reality, which is the only explanation for why no one’s noticed the FOUR THOUSAND MILLION murders committed within its walls in four episodes alone.

--Still, I think AHS did the smart thing. They didn’t try to portray these killers in a “realistic” manner, but gave us the glorified celebrity versions that the media turned them into. Wournos was played by our dearly beloved Lily Rabe, who I hope returns to her proper home on AHS now that her silly alien invasion show has fizzled. Rabe was facing the impossibly high bar set by Charlize Theron in Monster, but she was game, turning Wournos into a jittery, sneering ball of sexual fury with shark eyes. Meanwhile, in a sick little joke, Gacy, the “Killer Clown,” was played by John Carroll Lynch, aka, Twisty the Clown from last season. And was that Fringe’s Seth Gabel as Dahmer? Scrumptious. I do wish they’d acknowledged the well-known killers of the AHS-verse. Where was Oliver “Bloody Face” Thredson? Missed opportunity.

--Sheesh, I can’t believe I’m defending John Wayne Gacy, but this has always bugged me. I do not condone his murders for one damn second. I find him extra-creepy because I’ve met actual people like him: cunning, likable sociopaths surrounded by friends who witlessly deny and/or excuse their dirty deeds. Gacy was evil scum. HOWEVER, I hate the whole “Killer Clown” thing. He dressed up as a clown for certain public events. It had absolutely nothing to do with his murders. Until the media decided that it did. If we turn serial killers into gods, I blame the media for a good chunk of their holy scripture. Shit, we just turned one dead lion into a crucified Christ because Twitter said we should. I’m cutting short this rant before it goes entirely off the rails. But I’m glad this ep mostly portrayed Gacy without the clown persona. He may have worn the most unsettling makeup ever, but he was scarier as the friendly, charming neighbor with the crawlspace full of rotting teenage boys.

--Funnily enough, with a chunk of the main cast absent, it was Miss Evers who got the tragic backstory while bonding with Lowe. They share trauma: Evers lost her own son to the Wineville Chicken Coop Murderers, who I guess were too lowbrow to sit at March’s table. This apparently caused her mind to snap and her to become March’s accomplice? Maybe we’ll get the rest next week. But she’s definitely in her own purgatory.

--Lowe may be as well. Because the poor bastard was the guest of honor at the killers’ dinner, absinthed all to hell as they cavorted. And everyone else on the internet is calling the upcoming twist, so I won’t brag about guessing it. But I got the gist when Liz Taylor dramatically revealed Lowe’s personal invite. And when March was very cryptic about said invite and the reason behind it. Guys, I didn’t consider this at all. John Lowe is the Ten Commandments killer. His weird, dazed demeanor may well be covering up the fact that he himself is out murdering and doesn’t remember it! Devil’s Night may help trigger his horrified emergence. As the night wound down, Sally provided dessert -- a juicy man for the ghosts to prey upon -- and also provided solace to Lowe, writing off his experience as a boozy hallucination. I think Lowe’s about to become one cheatin’ husband.

--Alex has other problems. In the second major plot of the evening, she brought Holden home but changed her mind when he exsanguinated the dog. With Holden snug in his coffin, The Countess cast her spell over poor, confuzzled Alex. She was awfully confident that Alex would choose option A) willing vampification over option B) running to the fucking cops, one of whom is her fucking husband, who would presumably drop everything to help rescue their fucking long-lost son. Alex, you’re a tool. And now you’re a vampire. You and Iris can form a book club. First up: Fifty Shades of Grey. Also, I’m hearing theories that there’s some sort of power struggle going on between the ghosts and the vamps, with Sally as an independent go-between. I might be down with that.

--Countess costume commentary: During the no doubt massive police investigation following Holden’s disappearance, nobody at the amusement park reported seeing a woman dressed as Mary Poppins with a geisha parasol and her hat pulled down to her chin? Inconspicuous The Countess ain’t.

--AHS normally does Halloween as a two-parter, but this felt like a standalone episode, so who knows what next week will bring. I do think a little of those serial killers goes a long way. Except Lily Rabe. We can never have enough.

--This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but I’m fairly sure that in one shot, they digitally erased a dog’s butthole. I’m also fairly sure that the FX artist knocked back an extra glass that night.

--Hey, I sure hope Alex cleaned that broken glass off the living room floor. Someone could really get hurt! And she’d better have disposed of her dog’s corpse, because Scarlett is already gonna need copious therapy when she learns her entire family are vampires and/or serial killers. Girl can’t catch a break.

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 3

5.3: Mommy

--“Hi, Mommy.”

--Not “mother.” Mommy. This episode cracked open the case files on two women who lost their sons early and never got over it. Iris and Alex have plenty in common, including their helpless selfishness: He’s my son, no one else can have him! The difference is, Alex was a good mother, and she knows it, and Iris is a shitty mother, and she knows it. But both their children are now monsters, and both mommies may be heading down that path. Alex got an effective opening voiceover; we saw her dealing more with the dynamic duo of Anti-Vaxxer Mom and Measles Kid, and you could tell she was screaming on the inside: You did this to your son! HE’S YOUR SON! After losing Holden, Alex tried to kill herself once...that we know of. Now she wants a divorce, because she won’t admit that pushing her family away just agitates the wound. Never forget that AHS can be really powerful when it tackles simple human drama.

--Still, supernatural drama’s okay too. Claudia sure didn’t last long. Did they cast Naomi Campbell just so they could show her in a sexy nightie? (Hey, she looked DAMN good.) Without much preamble, the blonde junkie dude (I think his name is Gabriel?) exploded from the mattress, perforated Claudia to death, then collapsed in the arms of a startled Detective Lowe and later flatlined in the ER. Dafuq? I thought he’d already died and become a ghost! What is going on here? I demand an explanation, and I’m also okay with Claudia sticking around as a haunt. Just saying.

--The Hotel Cortez is giving Drake a serious case of blue balls. After March and Evers whined about their favorite murder-floor being renovated, Tristan sashayed to the penthouse suite, seduced Drake (bisexuality is the norm this season, and I’m not complaining), and was just about to kill Drake when The Countess silently stopped him. Later, it was The Countess’s turn to nearly get Drake’s rocks off and Tristan’s turn to cockblock. Poor Drake; guess his evening ended with a box of Kleenex and WellDressedDudesWithTheirDicksOut.com. The Countess revealed to Tristan that she lost all her dough to Bernie Madoff (this show uses famous people like punctuation marks) and she’s now planning to pull off a classic: marry Drake for his money, then axe him. Witness the return of the patented Finn Wittrock Demon Grin. He’s so onboard.

--Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness. The Ten Commandments killer’s motto seems to be, “Go big or go home,” because his/her latest deed was to murder the entire staff of a gossip site and nail their tongues to their desks. Slurp. Lowe’s at his wit’s end, not helped by the fact that he keeps getting quasi-seduced by Sally and her pointy-dicked buddy, definitely not helped by Alex and her folder o’ divorce papers. To the list of possible Ten Commandments killers, I must add Tristan (unlikely, though, as he only recently learned about March) and Liz Taylor (no one suspects........the BARTENDER!). But I still want it to be Alex. Because I’m sick.

--Donovan is not a character I like very much, and it didn’t help that he hates Iris so much he wants her to die. Model son, huh. But Iris isn’t much better, as she can’t admit that children grow up and become adults. Neither one of them is in the right. And it hardly matters, because I’m more interested in Angela Bassett. Aww, yiss. She snatched Donovan off the streets for a bondage and exposition party. She’s Ramona Royale, a Blaxploitation queen in the 70s. When that dried up, Ramona met The Countess and became her vampire lover. When that dried up, Ramona fell for a studly rapper and tried to vampify him, but the rapper and all his homies got murdered by a jealous Countess, leaving Ramona thirsty for revenge. She banished Donovan upon learning he’d been dumped, and I sure hope we don’t have to wait three more eps for her return. Bassett is, of course, just playing the same role as ever (a sassy, dangerous diva who gnaws on her dialogue like rare roast beef), but in this case, I reeeaaaally don’t mind.

--You could argue that The Countess is also an overly controlling mother figure, which is why it gave a nice jolt when Ramona revealed her notion to kill The Countess’s four little children of the damned. And our other hapless mommies suffered unusual plot twists as well. Alex stormed out of Lowe’s room after spreading the blue-balls virus, was snarked at by Claudia’s ghost, and then ran smack dab into Holden. Rather chilling was the utterly blank look on Alex’s face: she loved Holden so much that she instantly knows he’s...changed. Meanwhile, Iris enlisted Sally’s help in committing suicide, swearing she wasn’t gonna stick around in ghost form. But Iris proved death-resistant enough to linger until Donovan, who’d gotten some wisdom from Liz Taylor, burst in. Unable to revive Iris in the traditional way, Donovan opened a vein and fed her his blood. Iris is now a vampire. The Countess will be mad. Probably because she thought all vampires had to be thin and sexy. Now Iris is gonna want to raid her wardrobe.

--Speaking of which...in one scene, The Countess wore what looked like a church organ on her boobs. And during the Madoff flashback, she was dressed like Cruella de Vil on African safari. Is costume commentary my new running gag?

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 2

5.2: Chutes and Ladders

--OH MY GOD EVAN PETERS. I have been waiting SO LONG for this damned show to give him a good role again. Stop trying to make him the “everyman hero.” He does psychopaths! That’s his thing! And now he’s back in top form, having an unholy blast, elevating Hotel to new levels of excess. Keep the momentum going!

--Have the episodes gotten longer, or is it just me? Can’t complain, I guess. This ep was rather expository but featured some decent plot momentum here and there. We should, I suppose, be discussing the difference between ghosts and vampires. Ghosts are...well, yeah, I delivered a tongue-lashing last week about reusing the gimmick from Murder House. But now that I’ve thought about it, every season of AHS has the same rules in regards to spirits. You die in a particular cursed location and your ghost remains there for good. Except on Halloween, when you may roam. Coven implied this with both Spalding the butler (killed; ghost trapped in house) and the Axeman (ghost trapped in house until returned to life by magic), and Freak Show had Edward Mordrake (ghost free to wander on Halloween Night only). Now there’s Sally, who can’t leave the hotel and who is responsible for sewing undead dudes into mattresses. Except, the two Swedes seem to have died for real. Huh.

--Maybe it’s a vampire thing? The vamps of the Hotel Cortez are a mix of tropes both traditional (they don’t age; sunlight is bad for them) and newfangled (no fangs. And no pun intended). They’ve hit the nail on the head in regards to immortality: it gets boring. The Countess admitted that the only time she really comes to life is during the bright, brief periods of decadence America goes through now and then. During the late 1970s, she was queen of the disco, feeding off the night, off sex and drugs and reckless pleasure. And now...could Pandora’s Box be opening again? Will Drake used the hotel to stage a trashy, trendy fashion show. Among the models was Tristan Duffy (Finn Wittrock, yum yum), a glamorously horrible meth-gobbler, a glittery trainwreck waiting to happen. The Countess smelled Tristan’s rage, his jaded first-world frustration, and knew he was her next partner in grime. Thus did Donovan get the heave-ho, as well as a rude lesson: vampires don’t love. They only lust. Eh, I’d rather have the hypnotic Wittrock over the whinging Bomer. No offense.

--Drake’s show also set the stage for a couple more plot-related thingummies. First, we met Claudia (Naomi Campbell?!), a pouty Vogue-head who’s all set for ghastly and gruesome ordeals, I’m sure. Secondly, Lachlan Drake, who’s made the hotel into his own personal Super Mario 64 castle, took Scarlett Lowe to visit a basement swimming pool where The Countess’s four little children of the damned sleep in stylin’ coffins. Scarlett recognized her baby brother, Holden, and visited him later, snapping a haunting iPhone photo and freaking her parents all to shit. As if her dad didn’t have enough to brood about!

--Best line: “C’mon, let’s stay in! We can binge-watch House of Cards!”

--Normally it bugs me when a show (or a movie, or a book) rams a social agenda down our throats. But I fucking hate the anti-vaccination movement. I hate it in ways I can’t articulate. I literally equate it with child murder. So I was very happy when Alex delivered an outraged rant to a lady whose kid was down with the easily-preventable measles. We need more of this.

--Detective Lowe, meanwhile, is sinking into the strange malaise of the Hotel Cortez. Sally got him to open up about his alcoholism (he’s seen things, man...he’s seen things), and then he got a package containing an Oscar trophy that had previously occupied the anal cavity of a dead blogger. After hearing the hotel’s backstory (more on that in a sec), he connected the dots. The Ten Commandments! They are the basis for this string of murders. We’ve seen Thou Shalt Not Steal (dead thief), Honor the Sabbath (dead migrant workers), No False Idols (Oscar up the butt), Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery (lovers dead in bed), and Honor Thy Father and Mother (discount Menendez brothers). Five more to go, and I wonder if any of our cast of weirdos is gonna end up a victim. And who is the killer?

--Well, I called it last week. Now I may have to backpedal. While galumphing about the hotel, Tristan met an unsettling man with an icky little mustache and an accent suggesting Howard Hughes by way of Tom Hardy’s Bane. The man dragged a bound woman onto a bed and shot her. Later, Iris gave Lowe the whole sordid tale. James March (Evan Motherfucking Peters!), a self-made oilman, built the Hotel Cortez specifically to be a staging ground for his endless, savage need to murder the shit out of people. Secret rooms. Chutes for disposing of corpses. March made H.H. Holmes look like Big Bird. He hunted for new ways to kill, often while wearing that steampunk headgear we glimpsed last week. He was assisted by the maid, Miss Evers, the Harley Quinn to his Joker. His office? Room 64. When the police came a-knocking, March and Evers killed themselves, forever stamping their mad phantoms into the hotel’s woodwork. And it was March who began the Ten Commandment killings. Ahh, but how can he have continued them in the present day, being a ghost who can’t leave the hotel? And was The Countess really his wife, or are we misled?

--So the mystery deepens, and my current pet theory is that the modern-day killer is none other than Alex. Wouldn’t that be a great twist? As a private doctor, she can be in many places, and Lowe did get a text from the killer via Alex’s phone. Occam’s Razor! But we’ll see. Drake is also a decent suspect (did he buy the hotel because he hero-worships March? Hmm). And it’s kinda nice how, so far, we don’t have any utterly pointless subplots. Eh, but I’m sure they’ll be along soon.

--Two episodes without Angela Bassett is a crime. A crime, I say. It’s hard enough to deal with the loss of Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy. I get it, Ryan Murphy: you have a thing for hot white guys with dark hair. You’ve packed this season full of them. But I need a diva fix! Lady Gaga can wander through as many random clumps of marble pillars as she wants, but I’m getting fidgety for Bassett. Don’t make us wait.

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 1

5.1: Checking In

--What. The FUCK. Did I just watch.

--Yeah...sorry, anyone who was hoping to hold onto their sanity. Did you think I wasn’t gonna recap American Horror Story this year? I may not have unpacked its luggage in advance, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t check in. And hopefully the previous sentence is the only hotel-themed analogy I will use during Season Five. As October began, I experienced the same old tingly excitement of knowing AHS was about to punish my senses. I’m a bit more jaded about this show than I once was. But it remains a juicy guilty pleasure if nothing else. Will Hotel be the season that pumps a fresh dose of mojo into the proceedings?

--Probably not! Still...shall we?

--I can already tell people are gonna haaaaaate this season. In part because people hate every season. Look at any year of American Horror Story and you’ll find an angry subgroup calling it the worst. Murder House was a repetitive soap opera with zero likable characters. Asylum was a bleak, pretentious sobfest. Coven was an embarrassing clusterfuck that used gallows humor to try and hide its lack of coherence. And Freak Show was basically Glee with mass murder. So sayeth the hater brigade. The premiere episode of Hotel was a total fever dream. A love letter to Kubrick that included a severed nipple in the envelope. Nothing made much sense. Everything was fisheyed and queasy. Our latest malevolent locale, the madly Art Deco, trapped-in-the-past Hotel Cortez, defies all logic, or so it seems. Is there method to the madness?

--I sure as fuck hope so, because while I dug the sumptuous production values (great music, too!), I found the Hotel Cortez to be almost too horrific. It doesn’t even seem like a real place that became bad; it seems like a giant man-eating plant disguised as a building. It sits in the midst of Los Angeles, awaiting its victims, first represented by a pair of Swedish blondes who met the sort of fate you’d expect on this show. The Hotel Cortez has no wifi. Its elevator doors are clearly waiting to lop off a dick. Behind the front desk is Iris (Kathy Bates), an ill-mannered toad of a woman in giant eyeglasses who seems to hate...well, a list of what she doesn’t hate would be shorter. The hallways curve upon themselves and are patrolled by freaky little ghost children. The chambermaid is Mare Winningham (never good news on this show), and is probably a ghost as well. Peeps are sewn up in mattresses. Room 64 seems to be a locus of dark energy, especially in connection with 2:25 AM? Maybe? The Hotel Cortez is evil.

--And that’s my problem. It’s almost too much. Not only is the building evil, so is everyone who inhabits it on the regular. Iris may take no joy in forcefeeding raw organs to gibbeted victims, but does anyway. Her coworker is a bald gender-bender known as Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare), who straight-up don’t give a fuck, and is already more entertaining than all three of O’Hare’s previous AHS roles put together. And then there’s Sally (Sarah Paulson), a trashy, predatory drug addict. A fellow junkie, blonde and ditzy and played by Max Greenfield, checked into Room 64 and wound up sodomized to death by this season’s freaky-monster-who-probably-won’t-last-past-the-first-four-episodes. Said monster has Elmer’s glue for a face and wears a drill-shaped strap-on, and Sally watched with a mix of relish and tears as the blonde ditz met his icky fate (or did he?). Sally remains a mystery, but I’m still super elated by how well Sarah Paulson can vanish into a role when need be. Emmy win? Maybe? Finally? Sally and the demon vanished very quickly when Detective Lowe barged in, which should have been a big hint that...

--What? Detective Lowe? Sorry; it’s hard to recap this damn show in a coherent manner. While the hotel is Kubrick on acid, the outside world is bearing witness to a low-rent version of Se7en. Detective John Lowe (Wes Bentley) investigates a pair of canoodlers glued together and nailed to a bed, and something clicks. He’s seen this before. There’s a serial killer a-serial killing. Every fictional detective has to have either a tragic past or an unhappy home life, and Lowe has both. He’s on great terms with his daughter, Scarlett (Shree Crooks...kids these days have weird names), but his wife, Alex (Chloë Sevigny), is distant. Their son, Holden, vanished at a carnival in 2010. Good to see Sevigny again; her ill-fated sex addict in Asylum was lame, and I hope Alex will prove to be more interesting. Anyway, the killer’s taunting Lowe on the phone, pointing him to the Hotel Cortez and then to a third murder, and we don’t know what the murders have in common yet (well, we do, but the show hasn’t officially called it), but Lowe has left his family and checked into Room 64 himself. Possibly with more than one motive.

--Okay, okay, okay, but WHAT ABOUT LADY GAGA? She’s the whole reason I put this season on my Cautious Enthusiasm list. Considering her overexposure in the show’s promos, is she a cool thing to have, or an awkward gimmick? Well, she plays The Countess, who may or may not be the hotel’s owner, but is definitely a vampire. Yep, a vampire. AHS hasn’t done vampires yet, and I’m sure they wanted to avoid cliché, so they ripped off Byzantium instead: this breed of vampire bleeds its victims with a spike-nailed glove. The Countess and her prissy boytoy, Donovan (Matt Bomer), were seen seducing another couple at an outdoor showing of Nosferatu (ho ho ho), engaging in a pansexual threesome, and turning it into a blood orgy. I can’t tell if Gaga can act or not, since all she has to do is be sexy and aloof. So far, so decent, I suppose. Also, backstory: Iris is Donovan's mother. Iris remains at the hotel to be close to her son, because back in 1994, Donovan died of an overdose, thanks to Sally. Wait, what? Iris then shoved Sally out a very high window. Wait, WHAT?

--I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means. The blonde junkie and one of the Swedish babes also appeared to die and then return to life. Are they just doing Murder House again? Really? You die in the Hotel Cortez, your spirit is trapped there? If so, that is such a blatant act of recycling that I cannot forgive the showrunners. Hotel certainly seems to be hyperlinking itself closely to Murder House. Because who should waltz in but Marcy the bitchy realtor (Christine Estabrook), and I’m okay with this particular return because Marcy is the BEST THING EVER. I love her. I do. She was selling the hotel to a well-groomed fashion dude named Will Drake (Cheyenne Jackson), who has an annoying son named Lachlan (Lyric Lennon...kids these days have WEIRD names) and who is quite taken with The Countess. So was Lachlan, after The Countess showed him a secret room full of ghostly kids, gumball dispensers, and decades-old video games. It would’ve been hilarious if Lachlan had whined, “No Call of Duty?” But it mainly served to confirm that one of the ghost kids is Detective Lowe’s son. Are we surprised? And if some invisible owner is selling the hotel to Drake, does that mean The Countess is not herself the owner?

--Dunno. It was a lot to process. I’m really annoyed that they seem to be using the exact same ghost gimmick from Season One, but maybe there’s more going on than we’ve been shown. We certainly haven’t learned everything. Like, there was that big dude with weird headgear, and a reference to something bad in Room 33. And the poor person inside the mattress, and the eerie maid. And we have yet to see Angela Bassett, Evan Peters, and Finn Wittrock. (I’m already pretty sure Peters, who plays the Hotel Cortez’s original builder, is also the serial killer in the present day.) Yeah, this ep left me plenty baffled. And oddly tickled. It was so lurid and attention-starved. There was enough sex to almost be softcore porn. There were so many murders than I can’t believe the LA police haven’t descended on the hotel by now. But I got the sense that the hotel runs on dream logic. Don’t think too hard. Just hold on for the ride.

--People will hate this season. I bet they’re already tearing it apart on forums. But maybe the Hotel Cortez will messily give birth to something, not profound or all that original, but certainly memorable. I’m ready to witness the birth. So far.

To Squee Or Not to Squee: Hannibal, pt. 2

PART TWO: RED DRAGON

There was once a hungry fox who noticed a succulent bunch of grapes hanging high over his head. Craving the grapes, the fox did everything in his power to knock them down, but failed. Finally, disappointed, the fox went on his way, muttering to himself that he’d never wanted those damn grapes in the first place. What I’m saying is, some people will write lots of flowery paragraphs about how three seasons of Hannibal were enough, about how the show needed to end while it was still strong and undiluted, how we’re fine without any more, really. They are lying. And though I’m trying to be mature about this, FUCK, I AM NOT READY TO LET GO. I’ll maintain my vigil over the grave of this wonderful show, hoping for a hand with perfectly manicured nails to pop from the earth, clutching a fondue fork.

The final six episodes took Thomas Harris’s first Hannibal Lecter novel and made it into a vivid epitaph -- for now, anyway. There was no last-minute rescue by some other network. It hurts. It hurts bad. But I’m happy to report that the Red Dragon story arc married all the show’s best elements. It wasn’t sluggish like the first half of the season; enough material was packed into the six eps to make it almost feel like a season in its own right. It did justice to the novel (mostly) while bidding farewell to its cast of partially devoured souls drowning in the crimson allure of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It still wasn’t quite as good as this show has been in the past, but it sated my hunger until the next course, which I must believe will come in time.

Hannibal, the man, is a construct. A series of elegant puzzle-box layers surrounding an unspeakable core. He is all artifice, all facade. Red Dragon gives us a killer who is the opposite: all emotion, all pain and id and physicality. That’d be Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), dubbed “The Tooth Fairy,” who murders happy families. A man so bizarre and inhuman that only two men and one blind woman can make anything out of him. The men are Will Graham and Hannibal himself. Three years have passed and Will has fooled himself into thinking he’s normal again. He has a wife, Molly (Nina Arianda), who nurtures him while knowing in her heart she’ll never quite have him. Hannibal, meanwhile, previously gave himself up to the FBI for shits and giggles, and now resides in prison under the cold, watchful eye of his onetime lover, Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas). Hannibal’s cell is more like a vast, luxurious study; even in captivity, he requires comfort. Jack Crawford wants Will to assist on the Tooth Fairy case, and Will is yanked back by the hooks still buried in his psyche.

The Red Dragon arc has a lot of ground to cover. It hits all the beats from the novel -- the tiger, the flaming wheelchair, the dentures -- and at times it felt like a checklist. The show continues its knack for surprising Lecter fans, often by swapping out one character for another. Alas, that Red Dragon couldn’t have taken up an entire season, a recurring tale mixed in with other material for thirteen episodes. Instead, Hannibal returned to its crime procedural roots somewhat, while also running with its dream-images of grisly beauty; it gave us the best of both worlds. You see, Francis Dolarhyde is transforming in his mind, giving way to an entity inspired by William Blake’s watercolors of a savage and sexualized dragon-man. Armitage, best known for playing Thorin in the Hobbit trilogy, portrays Dolarhyde as a man attempting to move and speak through constant, excruciating pain -- the pain of being a monster in human skin. He has a raw beauty (he looks a little like Robert Patrick’s T-1000) and a haggard, harelipped scowl, and in his debut episode, he conveys all we need to know without uttering a word. He thinks he’s impregnable, until he meets Reba (Rutina Wesley), the blind woman, who refuses to judge him. The possibility of love and tenderness cracks Dolarhyde’s human suit before he’s ready, allowing Will and Hannibal to slither in.

All things come back to Will and Hannibal; Dolarhyde is simply a catalyst to bring the two star-crossed antiheroes back into each other’s orbit. Hannibal has less to do in these episodes; cozy in his cell, he pulls a string here, nudges a chess piece there. Will, Crawford, and Alana find themselves scheming amoral schemes in dim rooms, and Will comes to accept he’ll never be free. He was doomed from the moment Hannibal saw him as more than a curiosity. But how does it all end? Oh, it ends. The season/series finale is an ending, to be sure. It could also be a beginning. The Red Dragon arc abandons the source material to focus on its three main players, and what follows can only be called a consummation of sorts. I won’t spoil it. But it puts Will and Hannibal in a place from which they may never need to return. And it finally, finally, allows Will a position of dominance, of control. Meanwhile, we get more-or-less satisfying cap-offs for other characters, including a truly shocking and pitch-perfect revelation concerning Dr. Bedelia du Maurier. The show even continues the dark running gag of inflicting copious bodily harm on sleazy Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza) without actually killing him. Dry chuckles. (In the book, tabloid journalist Freddie Lounds meets a ghastly fate; on the show, Lounds, gender-swapped and played with amoral relish by Lara Jean Chorostecki, was too good a character to sacrifice.)

Yes, the ending is an ending, and still, Will’s final decision is sure to be debated. (And the post-credits scene with Bedelia may be dismissed as a tease for a phantom Season Four, but still wraps up her character pretty well, when you think about it.) I will wait for more forays into this universe, but in the meantime...thank you, Bryan Fuller, for never, ever compromising. Thank you for using your final season to craft two very different, sumptuous tales -- even if you did rush the story along in the process. And thanks to the cast! Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy have woven the narrative around their relationship and will always be linked in my mind. I love how Laurence Fishburne took Jack Crawford from angry doggedness to bitter acceptance of man’s evil. I appreciate Dhavernas’ Alana Bloom, who was really annoying in Season Two (“I am sleeping with him, therefore I refuse to hear a word against him! BAWW!”) before undergoing a killer metamorphosis. And I have plenty of affection for those two wiseass forensics guys played by Scott Thompson and Aaron Abrams. (They have names, but from the beginning, I have lovingly thought of them as Thing One and Thing Two.) Finally, I tip my hat to the late, lovable Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park); I hope your thinly-sliced corpse turns up in a modern art museum.

Thanks to all. And I will wait patiently until the players find a time and a place to reassemble. In the meantime, my consolation prize: Fuller is working on the American Gods TV show, a project which has my full attention. He’s going to make it beautiful and epic, and, God, do I hope it won’t sink in the tide of bullshit on TV. Yes, I am grateful that Hannibal got three seasons when it could have only gotten one. Yes, its story can be over. But it doesn’t have to be. A show this unique, this ambitious, defies TV Land. Wait with me. Sit at the table and chat with me while the next course is prepared. It takes a long time to make a meal, but the result is all the more mouth-watering.

A toast to Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Long may he simmer.