American Horror Story, Hotel, Episode 2, Chutes and Ladders

After an amazing premiere, Hotel continues with a second super sized episode.  The Hotel truly is a living demon propelling ghosts, vampires and mortals alike into its orbit.  A quick note about last week’s opener; I understand now the “creature” in the mattress is a metaphor for addiction. Upon repeat viewing of the vicious rape scene it can be noted after the man begs Sally for release, the camera pans out and he is not bloodied as we saw during the attack.  Real or imagined, the creature is formidable and terrifying!

The episode opens with Sally smoking by the window, than turning to sew up the mattress with hipster addict inside.  He opens his eyes and says, “You lied, I’m not free!”  Sally growls, “It’s your own fault, thinking you could cheat death!”  She kisses him tearfully, and sews him up into the mattress.

Down in the ballroom, Aggie, the remaining Swedish tourist is screaming.  She remains in the lighted cage with the emo children biting her wrists to drink her blood.  Sally comes down to the reception to complain to Iris about the noise. Iris arrives at the ballroom to investigate.  Holden says, “She tastes gross!” Iris looks at the woman, “That’s because she’s dead! Stop!”

Liz Taylor wheels Aggie’s corpse down the hall to the laundry chute.  The maid takes the sheets off her.  The body is dropped down the chute where other bodies in varying degrees of decay litter the floor.

Iris cares for the children who are hooked up to dialysis machines and watching cartoons in the white room.  The cleansed blood is emptied into a crystal decanter and presented to the Countess.  She fills her glass and says to Donavon, “You’re torturing that woman. (Iris)” Donavon is agitated and replies, “I became a junkie to escape her, now I never can!”  The Countess wants to go out to an art show to hunt, but Donavon suggests binge watching “House of Cards”.  The Countess cradles Donavon’s face menacingly, then leaves the room.  Dressed in a long pink gown, the Countess appears in a garden of columns and old-fashioned street lamps.  She’s looking for prey alone.

On a house call, Alex draws a boy’s blood. The mother is anxious and has been searching the Internet to try to diagnose her son.  Alex explains the boy has the measles and chastises the woman stating, “You can’t protect them from everything, but if you can, DO!”  Obviously, Alex is thinking about her own son she couldn’t save.

John is sleeping when he is awoken at 2:24am with the clock radio playing “Body and Soul.”  There is a knock at the door, the maid asking if he wants “turn down service.”   John declines, and captures a glimpse of the creature in the mirror.  He was dreaming, he wakes up and searches the suite.  In the bathroom, he pulls back the curtain to see a couple fornicating; they appear to be decaying bodies!  He wakes up again on the bed, to see Holden.  He runs after his son down the stairs to the lobby but Holden eludes him.

John arrives at the bar where Sally asks him, “Looking for something?”  She coaxes him over and states the hotel is a bat-shit crazy place, especially between two and three in the morning.  She brags to John that she wrote a song with Patti Smith.  She describes her heroine use as a “ladder you want to climb, higher and higher.” Pegging John as a recovering alcoholic, she asks him to describe his last alcoholic bender.

John describes a homicide case he was called to investigate.  It appeared the man poisoned his family, than shot himself.  The uniformed officer asks, “What happens to a man who murders his own kids?”  John notices the power was out in the house and an emergency generator was hooked up.  He deduces the man left the generator running and the family died of carbon monoxide poisoning.  When the man came home and saw his family dead, he killed himself.

After the case, John admits he was drunk for two days, than took his family to the boardwalk to make amends.  That was the day his son Holden went missing.  Sally listens to his story reverently.

The following day, John is at work.  The hotel case in which the couple was speared and mutilated is discussed.  The murderer hacked into their phones to send texts that would appear to be from the other person. (Just like John’s text from Alex last week.)  A package arrives, shipped to John from the Hotel Cortez.  Panicked, John shouts for the bomb squad to check the package. It isn’t a bomb, but a bloodied Oscar statute.

Hotel Cortez is under the new ownership, and Drake has arranged a fashion show and party.  Naomi Campbell makes a cameo as a fashion editor who seems smitten by John.  John meets Drake as he picks up his daughter Scarlett in the lobby.  Scarlett wants to stay and watch the show, John reluctantly agrees. Drake suggests Scarlett and his son Laclan can entertain each other.  Sally is not allowed to attend the show and protests angrily.

Bryan Ferry’s song “Don’t Stop the Dance” sets the mood for the fashion show. The Countess arrives impeccably dressed in a white ball gown and feathered hat.  Backstage, model Tristan Duffy (Finn Wittrock) snorts crushed pills and is summoned to the catwalk.  He makes quite an entrance, kissing an unwilling spectator and fighting with her boyfriend.  In the mayhem, the children leave the show.  The Countess watches him hungrily, causing Donavon to question her.  She coos, “He’s full of rage, I can smell it, like copper.”

Drake is furious with Duffy for causing a scene in his fashion show. Duffy announces, he’s done with modeling and uses a knife to slash his left cheek. Upstairs, Laclan shows Scarlett a white tiled room, which holds the children in small glass coffins.  He tells her, nothing wakes them up.  She sees Holden and knocks on the glass.  Holden opens his pale blue eyes.  Yikes!

Back in her bedroom at home, Scarlett watches a video of her missing brother at the beach.  Can she remember his face now?

Duffy rummages through the Countess’s suite, looking for drugs.  Donavan catches him and attempts to strangle his rival.  The Countess stops Donavan, Duffy gasps and runs down the hallway to the elevator.

Once on the elevator, Duffy gets stuck on the seventh floor.  With effort, he is able to open the door to another hallway.  On a radio, FDR delivers his famous speech, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself!”  Duffy notices a room service tray outside a room.  He takes a bit of an untouched half a sandwich only to realize it’s teeming with maggots!  It seems he has entered a time loop of some kind.

A record plays, “You Make Me Feel So Young.”  Duffy enters another room, searching for drugs.  A man (Peter Evans) with a thin mustache and an old-fashioned in a suit interrupts his quest.  He says, “Bolivian marching powder?  Too tame for my tastes.”  Duffy asserts his love for cocaine.  The man sizes him up, “You’re just like me, I had it all once. I’ll show you what you’ve been dreaming of!”

The man calls for the maid who brings in a bond and gagged woman. (A prostitute she caught at the bar.)  Duffy is unimpressed, “Bondage bores me!” 

“Me too!” the man replies as he removes a small revolver and hands it to Duffy instructing him to shoot her.  Duffy refuses and the man removes his ascot to reveal a bloody neck wound.  The man shoots the woman in the head and Duffy runs off.  The Countess intercepts him in the elevator…

Scarlett rides the city bus alone, looking at an old family photograph that includes her brother.  She enters the now empty lobby then back to the white tiled room to find the coffins empty.  Scarlett walks down a dark hallway until she finds the “game room.” Holden looks up at her and asks, “What took you so long, Scarlett?”  She shows him the photo; he says she looks different now.  Scarlett replies, “I grew up, why haven’t you?”

She talks excitedly about taking him home to reunite with their parents. Holden looks blank, “I am home but you can visit anytime you want.”  She attempts to take Holden’s picture, but he moves suddenly.  Scarlett runs out of the room.  In the hall, Sally grabs her arm.  Sally grinds her teeth bloody until she spits them out on the floor.  Scarlett screams and Sally smiles, “Kids are the best!”

Scarlett walks down an empty street and sees multiple police cars in her driveway.  Her parents have been frantically searching for her for the last five hours. She tells them about finding Holden in the Hotel.  John firmly states her brother is dead.  She claims she has a picture of him.  Alex is furious at John for “putting through all this again!” (It’s clear she blames him for losing Holden.)  Alex quickly claims she’s just really tired.  John looks at the picture his daughter took which shows a blurred image next to her.

Duffy admires himself in the Countess’s mirror.  His scar is gone; she has turned him into a vampire like herself.   She gives him the lowdown on his new status, he’ll be immortal but can be killed, he doesn’t have fangs but rather he’ll cut his victims to feed and avoid the sunlight. She instructs him never to feed on the dead or diseased.  Duffy asks if he can kill Kylie Jenner since she dissed him at Coachella! (Ha, I’d welcome a Jenner cameo as comic relief!)  The Countess cautions him not to get caught killing people and don’t fall in love.  They proceed to have some sexy time!

Duffy reveals in his new form and as the Countess how old she is. (Rude dude!) The Countess reveals she was born in 1904.  Duffy is impressed she has lived through world wars and the Clinton administration!  He asks what was her favorite time in the last century.  The Countess recounts the glory days of the Disco Era, riding a white horse into Studio 54 surrounded by sex and decadence. “We were all vampires then.”  She adds wistfully.  Suddenly, Donavon enters the room and is horrified to see she has turned Duffy. “He won’t last a week!” Donovan declares.

The Countess asks to speak to Donovan alone.  She reminds him when she turned him he was just another addict dying on a dirty hotel floor.  She adds, “This doesn’t have to end badly.” (Cue song, Bad Romance!)  Donavon tells the Countess he loves her.  She replies she loves him too, but it’s the heartbreaks, which make you.  She asks him to pack and leave.  Donavon is hurt, he recounts how she told him “making him was a spiritual moment” for her.  The Countess says, “Making Tristan was one of the most erotic moments of my life.” Ouch!  Please tell me Donavon is not off the show yet!

John confronts Iris at the reception desk, charging her with kidnapping Scarlett and worse.  Iris is amused as she is handcuffed.  She offers to tell John the history of the Hotel Cortez if he’ll have a drink with her at the bar.  They settle at the bar, attended by Liz Taylor for a drink and a story.

Iris says the hotel was built in 1925 by Patrick March (Peter Evans) who put all his evil into it.  He was a self-made millionaire from the East Coast who went west where he could fit more easily into privileged society.  The plan for the hotel was to have an “engineered alibi.”  The hallways would lead to nowhere; there are chutes and secret passages to conceal the bodies.  This story is eerily reminiscent of the true story of Dr. H.H. Holmes, who constructed a hotel during the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair as a place to conceal his vocation as a serial killer. (Check out Erik Larsen’s haunting telling of the story in The City of Black and White.)

Mr. March is seen killing a construction foreman, for “a good full feeling!” He lived by the adage, “no body, no crime.” It was said he may have murdered three or more people a week and forced his wife to watch.  Mr. March has a trusty ally in Miss Evers (my maiden name, eck!), the laundress always ready to clean up his messes.  Things that upset Mr. March the most were “religion and regulations.”  After he kills a religious man and dumps his body down the chute, he orders the removal of all bibles form the hotel.

A crime scene is shown consisting of murdered migrant workers in a vineyard surrounded by the hotel’s bibles.  Mr. March’s monogramed handkerchief was found at the crime scene.  The police were on their way to arrest March, who was busy in a secret room murdering another victim.  Miss Evers warns him the police are on their way.  She offers to be his last victim; Mr. March shoots her before cutting his own throat with a sharp dagger than  falling into a zinc bathtub with his earlier male victim.

John claps sarcastically as Iris finishes the story of March.  He feels there is enough evil in men without the existence of the supernatural or an afterlife. Iris tells him the room John is staying in, was Mr. March’s office, adding, “If this Hotel had a heart, it is black as the ace of spades and you’re sleeping in it!”

John is at work the next day and they have connected the Oscar statue to the Gamboa murder. (He was the Oscar blogger.) John reveals to his partner the theory Mr. March’s murders are being continued another killer using the Ten Commandments as a guide.  John connects the migrant worker killings by March to “Thou Shall Keep the Sabbath Holy” since they were working on a Sunday.  The couple in the hotel concerns adultery, the Oscar killing concerns the worship of “false idols” and the disemboweled men were brothers who killed their parents. (Disobeying “Thou shall Honor Thy Mother and Father.) It’s a theory crazy enough to be true!

Tristan turns to social media to find a victim.  A bearded man enters the lobby, impressed with his date.  They enter the elevator up to the suite.  The Countess interrupts them and she repulses the bearded man.  The next moment, his jugular is stashed and Tristan feeds on the man, telling the Countess, “Just ‘cause I’m sucking on a dude, doesn’t mean I’m gay!” (This Tristan Duffy isn’t the most enlightened dude!)  The Countess pleasures herself at the site of her new protégé feeding.  They proceed to make love next to the man’s bloody body as the screen fades to black.

There was a lot of explaining in this episode, it took some of the mysteries away but still was satisfyingly creepy and tense.  It’s clear the Countess and children are vampires and Sally, Miss Evers and Mr. March are ghosts.  John continues to question the surreal happenings at Hotel Cortez, while he works tracking a real and living murderer.  Next week is Halloween and Angela Basset’s debut this season. So far this season is dark and suspenseful, just how I like my horror.