A new patient claims to be Anne Frank and accuses Dr. Arden of being a Nazi. Grace’s backstory is revealed. Kit questions his sanity.
**CONTENT WARNING: Descriptions of violence and conversion therapy, mentions of rape**
Synopsis
This is the first episode that doesn’t open with a scene from the present.
Dr. Arden experiments on Shelley, claiming that this may cause her to never die. He also x-rays Kit to see if the microchip returned to him, because it has gone missing.
Sister Jude visits a new patient (Franka Potente) admitted during the night. She claims to be Anne Frank, and that she was mistakenly believed dead but had barely survived and wound up eventually coming to America. She recognizes Dr. Arden as one of the Nazis from Auschwitz who frequently experimented on the women there. Sister Jude doesn’t believe her at first, but Anne reveals her concentration camp tattoo.
Grace tells Kit why she was admitted to Briarcliff. She witnessed the murder of her father and stepmother, but the murderer conspired with her stepsister to frame her for it. Kit visits Dr. Thredson who does a convincing job of explaining how Kit may have created an alter ego, killing the women but not allowing himself to remember it. Kit starts to worry maybe he is right, and asks Grace if she thinks he’s sane. She says she doesn’t care either way and just wants to be with him. They hook up, but are caught in the act by a security guard. Sister Jude threatens to sterilize them and places them in solitary, but Sister Mary Eunice secretly shares Grace’s file with Kit to turn him against her. Their solitary cells are next to each other, so the pair talk through the walls and Grace admits the real truth: yes, she did murder her parents, but only because her father constantly raped her and her stepmom didn’t stop it. Kit doesn’t blame her, but admires her. Still, he questions his own sanity and gains a private audience with Sister Jude where he admits he may have killed the women and just doesn’t remember, and would like God’s forgiveness if he did. She seems touched by this.
Dr. Arden is questioned by some detectives following the report of the prostitute from episode two. They are not pressing charges currently, because they are homicide detectives, but they find some of the information she gave to be suspiciously similar to the Bloody Face murders. Sister Jude is shocked to hear this, and also notes their mention of Nazi memorabilia in the prostitute’s report. Sister Jude confronts Monsignor Timothy about Dr. Arden but he scoffs at her willingness to believe a mental ward patient and questions her judgment since he knows she drank on the night of the storm. But when Sister Jude leaves, he calls Dr. Arden and alerts him that the police are onto him and to hide anything he needs to.
Dr. Thredson tells Lana he noticed her escape attempt the other night, and that he agrees she doesn’t belong here. He offers to treat her personally so that she can be rid of her diagnoses and free to leave. At first Lana insists there’s no cure, nor anything wrong with her, but she decides she must do whatever it takes to be free of this place. Dr. Thredson subjects her to aversion/conversion therapy but it doesn’t go well. Afterwards he apologizes for using a method he doesn’t even support, but he had been trying to rush the process because he’ll only be around a few more days until Kit’s fate is determined. He promises he will do whatever he can do get her out of here by the time he leaves.
Dr. Arden brings Anne into his lab, but she’s pocketed a gun from the detectives and shoots him in the leg. She hears banging in the adjoining room and opens the door to find Shelley, covered in lesions and begging for death.
The Staff
So… Monsignor Timothy knows Dr. Arden isn’t above board, and even supports his work, apparently. I wonder why he’s on Dr. Arden’s side, even above his most loyal coworker. We still don’t know much about Monsignor Timothy so I’m not sure what his game is.
Dr. Arden may or may not have been a Nazi. He claims he’s from Scottsdale and never went to Germany, and to be fair the person making these claims also believes she’s Anne Frank and might not be super stable. But Dr. Arden is proven to be an atrocious man, so I wouldn’t put it past him. Plus the prostitute claims she saw Nazi coins in his house, and she doesn’t even know about Anne. Interestingly, the young Arden in Anne’s flashbacks is played by James Cromwell’s son, John. Apparently it’s not the only time they played the older and younger selves of the same character, either. One of the detectives on Dr. Arden’s case is Joel McKinnon Miller, but let’s hope this guy is a better detective than Scully from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Although he did already lose his gun to a mental patient, so maybe not.
Dr. Thredson is played by Zachary Quinto, a gay actor. I wonder if it was difficult for him to act in a scene where he is literally giving someone aversion/conversion therapy for being gay. In any case, Dr. Thredson’s seams are starting to show. He told Lana in the last episode that he isn’t sure if Kit is Bloody Face, but in this episode he spoke to Kit so convincingly that he even made Kit himself wonder if he’s actually Bloody Face after all. In the last episode he walks right into Wendy’s house when she doesn’t answer the door, and here it’s revealed he even took a photo of her from the house to present to Lana during the aversion portion of the therapy. He keeps renouncing outdated therapy treatments when Sister Jude does them, but gives Lana therapy he supposedly doesn’t agree with. At first I thought he was just dumb about the order in which he did the therapy, moving to the conversion portion, where he tries to get Lana to associate excitement with the male body, while she’s still nauseated from the medicine he uses to cause her aversion reactions, but considering the other cracks in his veneer, maybe this was done intentionally for some reason.
Sister Jude seems to be starting to think Dr. Arden might actually be Bloody Face. When she meets with Kit, she focuses on the fact that he can’t remember doing the killings, and with the detectives’ information, she might actually be coming around to the idea that Kit’s innocent. We’ll see if that plays out or if I’m pulling at straws.
The Patients
I was right, originally, about not trusting that Grace was innocent like she claimed. However it seems as though she still isn’t necessarily crazy, but rather snapped because of what she had to endure at the hands of her own parents. I still don’t think Kit is Bloody Face and it sucks that he’s so torn up about it and worries he might have hidden this side from himself. I appreciate Lana’s determination to get out of here, but at what cost? She should not have had to endure that. I wonder if the experiments on Shelley are turning her into another creature. Anne’s tattoo is real, though it still doesn’t necessarily prove that she’s literally Anne Frank. Maybe she does recognize Dr. Arden, but she still might not be completely sane either.
Conclusion
We still don’t know much about the aliens or the creatures, but now we know Dr. Arden might be a Nazi. Lana’s time here just keeps getting worse and worse. I’m glad we learned the truth about Grace, and they pulled it off in a way where she’s not a bad guy even if she is a killer. They didn’t do a present day scene at the start of this episode, but I wonder if that’s just because it’s a two-parter or if they’ll drop that theme for the rest of the season. I think it’s interesting that the two-parter is episodes four and five, just like in season one.
Score: 7/10