Kirsty Capes reviews the third episode of American Horror Story season 6…
Season 6 continues, and we are now falling in to the familiarity of the My Roanoke Nightmare premise of this latest offering from American Horror Story. It’s clear that the show-within-a-show format is here to stay, to my dismay as you’ll know if you’ve read my other episode reviews for this season. Chapter 3 in the latest AHS saga focuses on the search for Lee (Angela Bassett’s) missing daughter Flora, who has wandered out in to the forest with her imaginary friend/ghost, Priscilla.
Enter Lady Gaga as a weird evil forest spirit woman, and Leslie Jordan, who fantastically played Quentin Fleming on the Witch Council in AHS Coven, with his fabulous southern drawl and bitingly sarcastic persona. I’m so glad to see him back. He stole the limelight in Chapter 3 by a country mile, and I hope we get to see a lot more of him as the season progresses.
Chapter 3, for the most part, is an exposition episode. The majority of it is taken up with the search for Flora, and it is interspersed with some historical revelations about the Roanoke settlers and their disappearance, provided by Leslie Jordan’s medium character, Cricket. We discover that Kathy Bates’ character is nicknamed the Butcher, and was the wife of the head of the Roanoke colony, but when her husband went back to England for supplies, she was overthrown by other townspeople. She took a bloody revenge after meeting Lady Gaga in the forest and eating the heart of a pig.
Pigs are everywhere again, but there are no real jumpy moments in the episode, especially compared to the last which was full of them. There are still a lot of things I don’t like about season 6, like its over-usage of dry ice mist, the fallible logic of the story – like Shelby, Matt and Lee heading to the hospital to get updates on two hillbilly boys found during the search, rather than continuing to search for Flora themselves, or Kathy Bates’ weird accent which I suppose is meant to be Olde English but is a horrible jarring mix of inaccurate Shakespearean dialect, and a regional patois which shifts inexplicably between Irish, Geordie and Brummie. It’s good enough for American viewers who don’t know the difference, but not for Brits who can spot an indiscrepancy from a mile off.
Chapter 3 is more eerie and disconcerting than anything else, but once again it leaves more questions than answers, and sometimes the questions aren’t good. Small pin-prick sized holes are emerging in the fabric of the plot, but these can easily tear in to great gaping abysses if they are not stitched up soon.
Kirsty Capes
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https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
Originally published September 29, 2016. Updated April 14, 2018.
