‘American Horror Story’ 3.02 Recap: “I’m Sorry I Killed Your Boy Candy”

No one ever accused ‘American Horror Story’ of being a show for the squeamish. Last week’s episode was called ‘Boy Parts’, and let’s just say that the title has a couple of different meanings.

Still grieving over the death of her almost-boyfriend Kyle, Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) finds herself dragged to the morgue in the middle of the night by Madison (Emma Roberts). Lest it not be forgotten, Madison was responsible for killing Kyle and a whole bus-load of frat boys. She doesn’t feel particularly guilty about this, even if Kyle was innocent, but she is getting kind of annoyed by Zoe’s moping and decides to do something about it, hoping that a little dark magic and a resurrection spell will make Kyle right as rain. When they break into the morgue, however, the girls encounter one possible hitch in their plans: Kyle and the other boys were all badly dismembered in the crash, and their corpses have been sorted into piles of body parts.

No worries, Madison finds this an opportunity to build “the perfect boyfriend” by mixing-and-matching the best parts of all the bodies and stitching Kyle’s head on top, Frankenstein’s Monster-style. At first, when the resurrection spell doesn’t seem to have any effect, Madison shrugs this off as a failed experiment and heads home for the night, leaving Zoe alone with her mutilated love. When a morgue attendant arrives and confronts Zoe, Kyle’s new body finally lurches to life and kills the man. Although he’s alive again, Kyle is clearly not right in any way. He’s non-verbal, twitchy, and prone to sudden outbursts of rage.

Zoe shoves Kyle in her car and tries to drive him… somewhere. Before she gets very far, she discovers that someone else is hiding in the backseat. That turns out to be Misty Day (Lily Rabe), the witch Zoe had been told in the previous episode was burned at the stake. It appears that she got better. Misty conveniently has the power of resurrection, and used it to bring herself back from the dead. She seems fine physically and is very friendly, but something is a little off about her personality. She’s a very hippie-dippy, Mother Earth-loving free spirit who listens to far too much Fleetwood Mac for anyone’s mental health. (Also, as we’d seen in an earlier scene, she has a predilection for murdering alligator poachers.) Misty invites them back to her cabin in the swamp, and promises that she can heal Kyle up good as new if Zoe leaves him there for a few days. While this may not seem like the best idea, Zoe has nowhere else to take him and no better options.

In a related storyline, a pair of homicide detectives come to the school, asking a lot of questions about the frat party and the bus crash. Weak-willed Zoe easily breaks under even the tiniest bit of pressure and blurts out the whole story about how they’re all witches and Madison murdered the boys. She looks like a crazy person, and Fiona (Jessica Lange) is forced to use her powers to brainwash the cops, which she’s not too happy about. She warns Zoe, “In this whole wide wicked world, the only thing you have to fear is me.”

Meanwhile, Fiona keeps Madame LaLaurie (Kathy Bates) bound and gagged upstairs, hidden away from everyone. When Fiona demands to know how she’s still alive, LaLaurie tells the tale of how she was cursed by voodoo priestess Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), who murdered her family, damned her to immortality and locked her in a casket to go crazy for the past 180 years. LaLaurie just wants to die, and had hoped that the witch would know how to kill her. Fiona warns her to behave, or she lock her up in the casket to rot for another 180 years.

In the episode’s best scene, Fiona pays a visit to Laveau, who’s also still alive and currently owns a hair salon in the black quarter of town. Tension between the two women bristles, as we learn of the longstanding blood feud between the voodoo cult and witches. After Fiona leaves, we discover that Laveau’s lover, who’d been tortured by LaLaurie, is now a real minotaur.

In other side stories, we get some backstory for Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe), and learn that Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) has been unsuccessful at having a baby, despite fertility treatments. Although she initially resists using magic to conceive, by episode’s end, she casts a spell and has dirty magic sex with her husband.

While we’re still pretty early in the season, I’m really loving this year’s setting, characters and storylines so far. ‘American Horror Story’ is firing on all cylinders and I’m eager to see where this goes.

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