After reminding you what life they’re about in the Season 5 premiere for American Horror Story, Hotel doesn’t take its foot off the gas with “Chutes And Ladders”, with an emphasis on “chutes” and the introduction of some old favorites. Well, one old favorite and one that might actually be good this season. Maybe. Let’s go…….
-We open with Sally smoking and sewing the hotel’s latest victim, Gabriel, into a mattress. I knew I recognized him from somewhere, but Gabriel is played by Max Greenfield, who plays Schmidt on New Girl, which I’m a big fan of and that’s quite the change in scenery and mood for an actor. He wakes up and tries to guilt her about lying, while she responds that he shouldn’t have tried to cheat death. There has to be more to Sally’s story and I’m ready for it. But then she hears someone yelling for help…..
-It’s Agnetha, who is getting buffeted by two of the children feeding on her wrists and when Sally goes to complain, Iris is like, it’s fine, she’ll stop eventually. She does, but then the kids say she tastes gross and Iris is like, welp, she’s dead now. So Liz, the housekeeper (Miss Evers) and Iris start the elimination process, I’ll call it, which is Miss Evers tryna clean the sheets and then dumping the body into a laundry chute, where she joins her dead friend and the thing that popped out of their mattress. Miss Evers, her story is gon’ be something else, as well. So pressed to clean the damn sheets.
-The kids are chillin’, watching TV like normal vampire children, and they’re getting blood taken, which Iris uses to fill a decanter to give to Elizabeth, and she asks about Donovan, to which Elizabeth slams the door in her face. Of course she feeds on the blood of children. Shit looks like red Kool-Aid. Anyway, she wants to go out to an art show and hunt for new blood, while he wants to stay in and watch House Of Cards. Does he not know that the third season is terrible? I might actually prefer to drink blood than watch that shit again. And shoutout to that red dress Elizabeth is wearing. That has “I’ll suck your blood written all over it”.
-Side note: I just realized I never finished recapping House Of Cards and I never will because that shit was TURRIBLE, KENNY)
-Alex, John’s wife, is at work, taking blood from a child and she tells his mother that he has the measles because she didn’t have him vaccinated. Nice way to slip that in there, I guess. It’s important, but I’m not here for American Horror Story to teach me about some shit. Leave that shit for the interviews.
-John wakes up in Room 64 at Hotel Cortez, of course at 2:25 in what looks to be the morning, and Miss Evers walks in his room talkin’ about some turndown service. If you don’t get the entire fuck outta my room at this time of night, ma’am. If you’re comin’ in here that late, you better be ready to get it. Then a couple of weird things happen very quickly. He closes his eyes and sees what Wikia calls the Addiction Demon, which is what we call Rapey McDrillbit, so that wakes him up. Then he goes to the bathroom to wash his face, but he hears something in the shower and it looks to be two dead people having sex and they invite him in for a threesome before he wakes up again. How in the hell are you going back to sleep? WHY ARE YOU STILL IN THE HOTEL? Then of course, he sees Holden again and chases him, but to no avail, but Sally, Liz and a bar just kinda pops up out of nowhere. When this dude gets raped, I won’t be upset. You brought in on yourself, bruh.
-Over a ginger ale while Sally drinks Johnnie Walker straight from the bottle, we learn that John used to be an alcoholic. On the day of his last drink, he was investigating a case where a man was mistakenly accused of killing his wife and children, but he was actually trying to keep them warm and poisoned them with carbon monoxide by accident, so he killed himself. Then he went on vacation because of stress, and that’s when he lost Holden; now he stays sober because he doesn’t want to get lost again. This dude is so tortured….but I don’t buy it yet. Certainly not enough to believe he’s just gon’ chill in this hotel. But it’s American Horror Story and I’ll get over it by next week.
-John’s partner (Malik Yoba, I don’t know if he has a name) tells him that the Bel Air couple, those of the super-glued genitals, had texts go to their phone that made it seem like they were from each other, much like the text from Alex’s phone that sent John and Scarlett to that house. But John already knew this; the killer told him that, I think. Then he gets a package from what he thinks is a bomb, but it turns out to be an Oscar, which you should remember from last week, but you’ll be reminded of where it was from later on.
-Will Drake, your man tryna buy the hotel, is apparently setting up for a fashion show where we see Liz doing the “Vogue” and throwing all sorts of shade at Claudia Bankson, who is played by Naomi Campbell, who like Malik Yoba, was on Empire. This joint is starting to be like The Walking Dead and The Wire. She says she is spending the week at the hotel, so now the countdown is on to her death, and she sees John and gives him those eyes, while he is tryna find Scarlett, who is with a cop. He is tryna take her to his room, but Will and Claudia won’t let him go and pair her off with Lachlan, Will’s son who saw Rapey McDrillbit. While this is going on, Sally is being denied entrance to the show because, I mean, LOOK AT HER, and she makes a scene. But before she leaves, she gives Scarlett a creepy look and John better keep her away from his daughter. Scarlett will have a needle in her arm by age ten. Shoot, she might anyway, but I digress.
-The fashion show is starting and Elizabeth makes a grand entrance with Donovan, and the models start to come out while Donovan inquires about John and Elizabeth kinda fawns over him. Claudia says to John that “they need some excitement and they just might get”, and just then, we get introduced to Tristan, who is played by Finn Wittrock, crushing up some sort of pill of snort. Those were some big-ass pills, b. Anyway, we all know Finn Dogg, who stole the show as Dandy in Freak Show, and he is a fucking MESS. On his little walk, he drinks someone else’s champagne and throws that shit on the ground, sneers at a buncha mufuckas, kisses someone’s woman and then slaps her dude in the face and gets pushed to the ground. He goes to pick up some glass to stab dude with, but he looks at Elizabeth in the eyes and she can smell his rage, while Donovan is like, are you fuckin’ serious? In the back, Will tries to chastise Tristan for his actions, but Tristan cuts his own face to signify the end of his modelling career. So yeah, Finn Dogg back!
-Lachlan is taking Scarlett to where the children are sleeping in their caskets, and she recognizes Holden, who opens his eyes. This might be the most intriguing storyline of Hotel right now. After the commercial break, Scarlett is watching a home video on a laptop to confirm that was her brother.
-Meanwhile, Tristan is raging around the hotel, tryna find some coke, which he can smell in Elizabeth’s room and well, he has a point. Like I said in the Fear The Walking Dead recaps, junkies be knowin’, bruh. Donovan interrupts him and when Tristan starts being an asshole, he almost gets his shit eaten, but Elizabeth stops him. Tristan peaces out, but doesn’t seem to be bothered and gets in the elevator, which takes him to a dark floor where he keeps hearing random shit. He eats someone’s sandwich and realizes there are maggots in the shit and backs into someone’s room, where of course, he starts looking for stuff, coke, pills, anything.
-Here, he meets James March, who is played by Evan Peters, who is the only person besides Sarah Paulson and Lily Rabe (yep, she’ll be in Hotel at some point) to be in all five AHS series. However, I’d wager to say that he was only good in Murder House and he might good in this joint as well. He is a proper old-school wealthy dude who has a hankering for killing people as Miss Evers brings in a tied-up prostitute, and March tries to goad Tristan into shooting her, which he can’t. But March can and does, and when he takes off his scarf, you notice that he has been cut across the throat. Miss Evers complains about the stain. She ain’t never gon’ keep this hotel clean. Anyway, Tristan runs out, but gets caught by Elizabeth in the elevator and you can only imagine what happens next.
-Scarlett is on a city bus, apparently, looking at a picture of she and Holden, and she has gone back to the hotel to find him, but his casket is empty; the other three as well. She finds him eventually and he asks what took her so long, and he says he remembers her after she asks him. She shows pictures of the family and wonders why he hasn’t aged like she has, and she wants to take him home, but he is already home, he says, and yeah, this little mufucka is dead, yo. She tries to take a selfie with him, and Holden gets hungry, so she jumps away and he’s lookin’ at her like, what’d I do? This is how we get down. She leaves to find Sally in the hallway, whose mouth is bloody and her teeth fall out. This entire sequence, but especially the scene with Holden and Scarlett, was by far my favorite of the episode.
-Scarlett goes back home as John has the police looking for her, but she evaded them once again and she isn’t having good luck at being protected by them at all. She tells John and Alex about Holden being at the hotel and John freaks out, and she tries to show them the picture, but Holden is a blur because he’s a damn vampire. But you can surely make out that it is something.
-Speaking of vampires, Tristan is getting the vampire rules from Elizabeth, while poppin’ that thang from the back as the old Roman poets used to say, and here they are: they can’t age, don’t drink diseased blood, don’t get caught and don’t fall in love. We learn that she was born in 1904 and that she loved the 70s, where I assume she picked up the coke habit, but can we just revel in the fact that she rode into the club on a mufuckin’ horse? That might be the illest entrance you could make. Mufuckas holdin’ her Rapunzel-ass hair, too. I ain’t even mad at the fact that she was eatin’ a mufucka like, two seconds later. Hatin’-ass Donovan comes in to express his disappointment, but barely gets it out before Elizabeth tells him to pack his shit and go because there is a new sheriff in town. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooh! He was tryna make her feel guilty, too. That shit ain’t work at all.
-John rolls up on Iris angrily and slaps handcuffs on her as an accessory to murder, and he’s mad because she “let” Scarlett roam around the hotel, but yo, why don’t you watch your child and not let her on city buses? Don’t blame Iris for you being a fuckass parent, dogg. Anyway, Iris is fed up with the whole thing and is like, I’ll tell you everything. She tells him the story of James March, who was one of the new rich, but needed somewhere to do his dirt, so he built this hotel. She says he was killing people at a rate of three a week at times, and that there is no escape from the place, which should make sense to John as he basically ran in circles tryna find Holden. Miss Evers was his faithful servant, right up until the time they met their death as the cops found bodies with his monogrammed handkerchief beside it. Miss Evers was about to kill herself, but she would be honored if she were March’s last kill, so he shot her and slit his own throat, which explains the wound on his neck. Of course, John doesn’t believe her, but then Iris tells him that his office was Room 64, which explains so much about the fuckery that goes on in this place. But he has to be skeptical at first to push the plot along and really, I believe that he doesn’t believe her, after everything that has happened to him, because he’s fucking stupid.
-Malik Yoba tells John that the blood on the Oscar belongs to the man in the pictures in the premiere, who got, ummmmm, well, as we discussed as we watched it, homeboy got “butt-effed by an Oscar”. We laughed for a good few minutes over that. Like, probably longer than we should have. I’m laughing about it right now. Anyway, John puts together that this new killer is murdering people based on the Ten Commandments, and March wasn’t a fan of religion, so this person is continuing March’s work. Malik Yoba clues in that John is staying in March’s old hotel. The cops on this show are buffoons, bruh.
-Tristan is on Grindr, which I didn’t know was a thing until this episode, and he lures a victim to the hotel, where they start making out and Elizabeth enters. The dude is like, I’m not really down for this, but it doesn’t matter because Tristan stabs him in the neck before he and Elizabeth have sex on the corpse. Good for them. Fuck him, his man bun, his beard and his suspenders. I bet he was wearing shoes with no socks, too. He deserved it.
I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of this episode, mainly because the Blue Jays game was on that day and I might have had a few drinks. But after watching it again, it was typically good stuff from AHS. The introductions of Tristan and March were extremely well done, if not bloodier than a mufucka, and that scene with Scarlett and Holden was chilling. I was like, nah, they won’t kill a child in this show, then I remembered that they killed a baby and framed Pepper for it on Freak Show, which sent her to Asylum, so that is now on the table. Donovan is mad, so he’s about to try something stupid, and Naomi Campbell gotta die as well (I also felt that way about her Empire character). Still waiting on Ms. Bassett, too. And of course, the next time we see Rapey McDrillbit, the shit won’t be a dream sequence. Just another episode in the life of American Horror Story.