American Horror Story: Coven examined the tormenting effects of being resurrected from the perspectives of the pieced together Frankenstein's monster Kyle (Evan Peters) and the unfeeling Hollywood starlet Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts).
Chained up in a room in Miss Robichaux’s, Kyle has a flashback to sometime before the fateful frat party where the date rape and subsequent fatal bus accident took place. He’s in a tattoo parlor with a few of his fellow frat boys. One gets a shamrock on his arm, while another gets Chinese characters on his leg. Kyle, who wants to be an engineer, passes on getting inked up. In the present, he discovers he’s wearing the limbs of his dead tatted pals.
Madison, meanwhile, realizes that her millennial ennui has only been made worse by her death and resurrection. She feels absolutely nothing, which is causing her to seek feeling in any way possible. Holding a flame to her hand, she feels nothing as her palm slowly burns, nor does she feel any kind of fullness upon eating a refrigerator full of food.
Walking about the house in search of sensation of any kind in the dead of night, Madison spots Delia (Sarah Paulson) about to tumble down the stairs. She reaches out for her witchery teacher, causing the newly blind/newly sighted Delia to witness how Madison died. Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange), Delia’s mother, slit her throat.
Fiona was out at the Axeman's (Danny Huston) squalid apartment – that he had commandeered from the previous owner upon killing him and dumping him in the bathtub. The Axeman seduces Fiona with healthy glasses of bourbon and a jazz record on repeat. Fiona is eating up Axeman’s attentions, but after pulling a clump of hair out when she goes to freshen up in the bathroom, she expresses her reservations in consummating their flirtation. After insinuating that his saxophone playing foretells his prowess between the sheets, Fiona throws caution to the wind and hops into bed with him.
Fiona, rising from her fornication with a ghost, tells him she knows about the dead guy in the tub and that the police are on their way. He tells her he knows she didn’t do any such thing, and that he knows a whole lot more about her. In fact, he was her father figure and self-described “guardian angel” ghost at Robichaux's until she either became legal or went through puberty when he realized he loved (read: wanted) her. She kisses him, slaps him, chastises him for seeing her grow old and storms out. But, later, Fiona returns to the jazz club to watch the saxophone playing murdering ghost, prompting the possibility that their affair is not yet over.
At Robichaux’s an unlikely friendship appears to be blooming between Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe) and the immortal racist Madame LaLaurie (Kathy Bates). They bond over a mutual hunger and the lack of food available after Madison’s binge. Queenie takes her slave LaLaurie to a fast food joint that the 19th century woman believes serves the best food she’s had in her protracted existence. Over the greasy meal of burgers and fries, LaLaurie tells Queenie that she’ll never fit in at Miss Robichaux’s – not because of her size, but because she’s “black as coal.”
Out of growing unease and curiosity, Queenie pays a visit to Marie Laveau’s (Angela Basset). Like LaLaurie, Laveau plays on Queenie’s insecurities, telling her she’ll never be a sister to the white witches, and also that the voodoo doll belongs in the house of voodoo. Laveau promises her that if she hands over LaLaurie, she’ll welcome Queenie among her people. To encourage her to turn on LaLaurie, Laveau implores Queenie to ask LaLaurie the worst thing she had ever done.
Once again Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) tried to put Kyle out of his misery only to find herself incapable of ending the life she helped to revive. So, instead, she’s focusing on trying to get him to learn a few simple words to express his needs – food, bed, etc. When Madison interrupts the tutorial, she tells Zoe that Delia wants to speak with her and opens up to Kyle abut the difficulties of living after death. They hug, which leads to sex between the undead.
Zoe, meanwhile, is learning from Delia that Fiona killed Madison – and that she could be next if the current supreme begins to see that Zoe is to be her successor. How are they going to handle the problem of Fiona’s ruthless and murderous narcissism? “We’re going to kill my mother,” says Delia. “Kill her once, kill her good, kill her dead.”
Zoe, upon hearing Delia’s vision, wants to have some proof that she can come to through her own brand(s) of magic. She locates Spalding’s (Denis O’Hare) severed and enchanted tongue and performs a spell that will allow her to reattach it to the chained up manservant. With his tongue back in working order, Zoe manages to coerce Spalding into confirming that Fiona killed Madison. He also reveals to her that his family has served the Salem coven for 10 generations. Ending the serving nepotism and eliminating the risk of Spalding revealing her broadening powers, she stabs him through the heart.
Zoe then jumps into the shower to wash off Spalding’s blood. Madison finds her in there and explains to her sister witch why she had sex with Kyle – it finally made her feel something. Zoe admits that she probably can never have sex with him without killing him anyway, so it’s pretty much water under the bridge. But then Madison explains that his deadness makes it impossible for her to kill him that way and leads her into the bedroom where a robed Kyle calmly sits on the bed, ready for a threesome.
Downstairs, Queenie prods LaLaurie to tell her the worst act she’s ever committed. It turns out LaLaurie’s husband got one of the house slaves knocked up. Instead of confronting her spouse on the subject, she had the baby killed and its blood turned into an anti-aging concoction. Queenie is duly revolted and more or less makes up her mind to hand LaLaurie over to Laveau, which she does by episode’s end. At Laveau's beauty salon, LaLaurie finds herself caged and in chains.
American Horror Story: Coven airs Wednesdays on FX at 10/9c.
– Chelsea Regan
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