A group of young witches attend a boarding school to learn how to control and conceal their special talents.
**CONTENT WARNING: Violence, slavery, torture, rape, death**
Synopsis
In 1834 New Orleans, Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates) is a wealthy slave owner with three daughters. When one of her daughters is caught sleeping with one of her slaves, Bastien, Madame LaLaurie has Bastien taken to the attic where she keeps several other slaves locked in cages to suffer various tortures. She puts a bull’s head on Bastien, recreating her favorite Greek legend of the Minotaur.
In the present, Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) has sex for the first time, but in the middle, her boyfriend starts bleeding out of all of his orifices and dies. The doctors say he had an aneurysm, but Zoe’s mother confides the truth—they come from a line of witches, and Zoe must have witch power in her. Her mother has never told her because she hoped it would skip her generation.
Zoe is sent to a boarding school for witches where she meets the three other students, Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe), movie star Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts), and Nan (Jamie Brewer). The school is run by Cordelia “Delia” (Sarah Paulson), the daughter of the supreme witch, Fiona (Jessica Lange). Most witches just have one power, but each generation has a supreme who has many or all powers. Cordelia explains that there are less witches than there used to be, due to how quick people are to harm witches when they use their powers as well as many people in the witch bloodlines deciding not to reproduce. She tells of Misty Day (Lily Rabe), a young witch who was recently burned alive for reviving a bird from the dead.
The girls discuss their respective powers and find that Nan is clairvoyant, Queenie is a human voodoo doll, and Madison has telekinesis, which she used to kill a director she didn’t like just because he critiqued her acting method. Madison doesn’t show a hint of remorse, which upsets Queenie. Delia’s power isn’t revealed, but in a conversation with her mother, she’s shown to deliberately avoid exploring the potential of her power, preferring to experiment with scientific concoctions.
Madison decides to make Zoe her new best friend and takes her to a college party where Zoe meets Kyle (Evan Peters), a frat leader. Zoe and Kyle feel drawn to each other, but thinking of what happened to her last boyfriend, Zoe nips their relationship in the bud. One of Kyle’s friends drugs Madison. When Zoe can’t find her, Kyle helps her look and finds his frat buddies gang raping her while video taping it. Kyle kicks them out and chases them to the bus they came in. They knock Kyle out and drive away with him passed out in the bus. Zoe and Madison run after them, and as the bus drives off, Madison uses her telekinesis to crash and explode the bus, killing all but two of the frat boys. Zoe goes to the hospital to see if either of the survivors, both in comas, are Kyle, but he is not among them. One of the survivors is the instigator, so Zoe rapes him in order to trigger her magic and kill him, figuring she might as well use the power she has to get justice for Madison.
Fiona is obsessed with restoring her youth. She funds an experimental drug that works well on monkeys, but doesn’t seem to do anything for her. When the scientist on the project tries to quit, she magically sucks his youth away, which momentarily reverts her to a younger age, but the effect doesn’t last long. Fiona takes the girls to a tour of Madame LaLaurie’s historical house, where more of her story is revealed. Madame LaLaurie was also obsessed with youth, smearing her face with blood and making poultices out of the pancreases of her slaves. Unbeknownst to her, Bastien was the lover of Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), a practitioner of voodoo. Laveau tricked Madame LaLaurie into drinking what she thought was a love potion, but instead killed her, though her body was never found. Nan claims to hear the lady of the house below the stones in the courtyard. That night, Fiona secretly digs up the courtyard and finds Madame LaLaurie, still alive and not aged a day. She has been stuck buried alive for nearly two centuries.
The Students
Taissa Farmiga and Jamie Brewer have returned, after skipping a season. Zoe appears to be the main character, which is only weird because her power is so bizarrely specific. The other girls have powers that can be used in a range of ways, and Zoe has a *checks notes* cursed vagina. I suppose that adds some complications into her personal life, because she doesn’t feel able to have a loving relationship as a result, but it’s just so niche.
Of course, the most dangerous power has gone to the girl who doesn’t give a crap if she hurts anyone. Granted, the frat boys deserved punishment for what they did, but the director didn’t. He literally just told Madison to stand where she’s supposed to in order to get the proper lighting for her shot, and she responded by cold-blood murdering him. Someone needs to keep an eye on her.
I’m not sure how I feel about the other two girls’ powers. The girl with Down syndrome is clairvoyant, which according to Fiona makes her smarter than all the other girls combined. Meanwhile, the one black student is a living voodoo doll. This just feels a bit ableist and racist to me. At least with Queenie, we’ve established that there is a line of voodoo witches, so I guess her powers could be explained as inherited that way. It just feels stereotypical to me that the only Black witch gets voodoo powers, while all the white witches get all sorts of different types of powers. Power complaints aside, I like Queenie and Nan. Queenie has no problems calling out Madison’s psychopathic behavior.
The Staff
Cordelia seems interesting—the daughter of the supreme who runs a school for young witches, but doesn’t seem to care much for magic. Or maybe she’s just afraid of the consequences when the public notices there are witches around.
Jessica Lange just loves playing the problematic characters. Fiona’s obsession with youth and immortality cannot possibly end well. Already she’s dug up a slave torturer, presumably to learn the secret of her immortality. It’s interesting that both women share this obsession, though I suppose it’s not that unusual of a goal.
Other members of the staff include Spalding (Denis O’Hare) who is the mute butler, and Myrtle Snow (Francis Conroy) who mysteriously disappeared after bringing Zoe to the school’s front doorstep. We don’t know much about either of these people yet, though I’m guessing we’re going to find out more about how Spalding lost his tongue at some point.
1834
Madame LaLaurie is so awful. On one hand, I can see why Laveau wanted to torture her for eternity, but on the other hand, surely death was the safer option than tricking her into eternal life. Now we have to worry about this atrocious woman in the present day, too.
Marie Laveau was a real-life queen of voodoo. It’s not unheard of for American Horror Story to model characters off of real people, as both previous seasons have done it (though in Season 2, that did turn out to be a deranged woman who only thought she was Anne Frank).
Filmmaking
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed this episode, but it largely lacked the flair that his episodes in the previous seasons had, with a few minor exceptions. I was so looking forward to seeing more of his work this season, but this was pretty bland.
The soundtrack for this episode is horrendous and frequently too loud, which took me out of many of the scenes. I might have liked some of the scenes better without the grating songs battling with the dialogue for my attention. Dear lord, please don’t let the rest of this season have this problem.
Conclusion
This episode was a huge step down from last season. The powers are odd, the music is terrible, and the plot isn’t super compelling yet. This is the last season I’ve seen before, and as with the other seasons I barely remember it, but I did recall not being very impressed with this season. I was hoping I just misremembered, especially with extra Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed episodes this time around, but unfortunately I’m already not really enjoying myself, and this is only one episode in. Oy.
Score: 5/10
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