‘American Horror Story: Hotel’ Episode 3 Recap: Heartbreak All Around At The Hotel Cortez

The Hotel Cortez is making Detective Lowe weird. Really weird. Everybody seems to be breaking up and betraying one another, and the heartbreak is truly felt all around. At least Lowe is performing well at work, but his wife can see that the hotel is getting to him. Last week, Scarlet found her brother in the hotel, but nobody believes her story. They will soon. Plus, we get more back story about Alex’s special bond with Holden.

‘American Horror Story: Hotel Episode 3 Recap

Alex (Cloe Sevigny) and John Lowe (Wes Bentley) are in therapy with their daughter. They find it disturbing that their daughter would make up a story about their son being alive (sort of) somewhere in the Hotel Cortez. Alex interprets the story to mean that the daughter has a motive to hurt her mother, who, admittedly, always favored Holden. The therapist has another view of scarlet’s motive for the story, and that is that she wants to heal the family from the loss of her brother.

Back at work, Detective Lowe is investigating a murder at the offices for a gossip website. All victims have been shot in the head, and some of them have a nail driven through their tongues, pinning them to their desks. One of the detectives suggests that it may be some kind of Charlie Hebdo attack. Lowe has other ideas, quoting from the Bible, “Thou shall not bear false witness.” The attack is similar in style to that of the double homicide in the season premiere: Both victims speared through the chest with the woman’s hands nailed to the headboard during intercourse.

At the hotel, a junky inside the mattress of one room murders the guest. Lowe shows up to the hospital where they take the junky to question him. The trail leads him back to the hotel, and to Sally who has some Bible references of her own. She tries to seduce him in the elevator and freaks him out enough that he lets her go.

Donovan and Iris (Cathy Bates) have it out in the lobby. In the wake of being cast aside by the Countess, Donovan tells his mother how much he hates her for letting the Countess turn him into a vampire, that a real mother would have let him die. Before he leaves the hotel for good, he tells her something to break his mother’s heart for good.

Lowe and his wife are in the bar at the hotel. He has a sudden breakdown when she hands him divorce papers. She leads him back to his room where they share a moment of affection before Alex comes to her senses. As she is on her way back to the elevator, she runs into Holden.

Donovan finds himself captured by actress from the seventies. An actress who had a sexual encounter with the Countess in 1977, and hence, why she is a vampire today. But she turned her back on the Countess when she meets a rapper who really steals her heart. The Countess kills the rapper in a fit of jealous rage, and now Ramona (Angela Basset) is on a mission to take from the Countess what the Countess took away from her.

Donovan is having a pity party back at the bar and Sally is killing his mother upstairs. He’s changed his mind about wanting her dead, and when he finds her with a plastic bag over her head, his only option is to turn her into a vampire before it’s too late.

American Horror Story: Hotel airs Wednesdays on FX.

Pictured: Sarah Paulson as Sally.