In the latest American Horror Story: Hotel recap, The Countess seduces someone new, Donovan goes on the hunt and a resident asks to die….
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
As it turns out, The Countess Elizabeth’s thirst for blood is only matched by her need for money.
It was mentioned previously during an innocuous exchange between the sultry 100-year old sexpot and her former boy toy Donovan that the Countess is no longer flush with cash the way that she had been for the past century.
This week, the Countess revealed that her fortune ended up as cannon fodder during Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme that robbed a whole lot of people of a whole lot of money. His scummy reach even went as far as the Hotel Cortez and its former owner, the Countess, who signed over everything she owned to get an even bigger piece of the pie.
Instead she was left with nothing and now she’s forced to seduce ambiguously pansexual art dealer turned hotel owner Will Drake until he’s so ravenous for her touch that he marries the vampire queen.
Until that time, Drake might be the only person staying at the Hotel Cortez where the threat of death isn’t dangling just overhead like a guillotine blade. Of course if he marries the Countess his days are truly numbered and if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the seductively sexy character played by Lady Gaga — she always gets her man.
And sometimes she even gets her woman.
With that said, let’s recap the latest American Horror Story: Hotel titled ‘Mommy’…..
The Art of Death
When Tristan Duffy first met the ghost on the seventh floor better known as James Patrick March — the man behind building the Hotel Cortez — he wasn’t interested in his murder fetish. But after being turned by the Countess and killing his prey to survive, Tristan got a taste of what it feels like to take a life and he liked it.
After an internet search to find out about the Hotel Cortez founder, Tristan returns to the scene of the crime and asks Mr. March to take him under his murderous wing.
Mr. March: “How do you know all this?”
Tristan: “I Google’d you”
Mr. March: “That sounds obscene!”
Tristan: “You were right, man. Killing is awesome.”
Mr. March is thrilled that someone wants to follow in his footsteps, but he has a problem — Will Drake has arrived with his fashion friend Claudia along with plans to tear through the seventh floor as he begins remodeling his hotel. This is obviously unthinkable to Mr. March, but his new pal Tristan decides to take it upon himself to rid the hotel of Will Drake once and for all.
Tristan goes to see his former employer in his penthouse suite and tells him how he’s cleaned up his act while giving up drugs. He is curious, however, what Will plans to do with the hotel now that he owns it. As Will begins to scour over the blueprints, Tristan gets awfully close and a few seconds later the two of them are making out on the couch and Will is latched onto the model’s skin like a leech.
At that moment, Tristan pulls out a blade and prepares to take his second victim when he sees the Countess standing just outside the door and she makes a motion to drop the knife and allow Will to keep breathing air.
Without an explanation at the time, the Countess then goes to see Will later that day and despite his declaration of homosexuality, she wants to see if his blood will boil by her touch the same as it did Tristan. As the two begin to kiss, Tristan busts in and erupts with anger while seeing his new lady already on top of another man.
“Where did you get the balls to eat out of my dish, man?”
~ Tristan
The Countess quickly pulls her hand away from Will’s pants and whispers in his ear with a sly smile creeping across her face.
“I’ll call you later. By the way, you’re hard”
~ The Countess
Will is in much deeper than he can possibly know because while she’s telling him about the rigid object in his pants, the Countess is only truly thinking about his cold hard cash.
And she plans to take all of it.
“Will Drake can’t die until after I marry him and take every goddamn penny”
~ The Countess
Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness
Detective John Lowe discovers another murder scene this week as the Ten Commandments killer strikes a local gossip rag. The writers all had their tongues nailed to the desk, which immediately told Lowe that he was investigating the latest ‘sermon’ from the murder — thou shall not bear false witness.
John’s day only gets more bizarre when he’s tackled upon his return to the hotel by a half naked junkie covered in blood. That junkie is Gabriel — the guy who showed up and got attacked by the drill-do in the debut — and he finally escaped the confines of the bed where Sally sewed him up. Unfortunately upon ripping through the mattress, Gabriel found Claudia before stabbing her to death believing that she was the one who did this to him.
At the hospital, Gabriel confesses that Sally was the person who put him inside the bed in the first place, but he expires before Lowe can get any more information out of him. Back at the hotel, John attempts to interrogate Sally about her role in the murder, but he ends up almost getting it on with the resident heroin addict while the sperminator with a drill-do keeps popping up as the car flashes in and out of the light.
“I am starving. You’re starving, too. I can taste it on you.”
~ Sally tells John with her hand down his pants.
John doesn’t resist so much as Sally disappears when he reaches the bottom floor but a junkie hand job and a murder scene will end up being the high point of Lowe’s day after his wife Alex shows up at the hotel and serves him with divorce papers.
As we learn early in the episode, Alex never actually wanted children of her own but instead only wanted to care for kids as a pediatrician. When she got pregnant and gave birth to Holden, her entire perspective changed as she fell in love with that little boy more than anything else in this whole universe. As it turns out loving Holden trumped her feelings for her husband and even her daughter born a few years later.
So when Holden was kidnapped and presumed dead, Alex felt like she had nothing left to live for and tried to take her own life. John saved her, but their marriage hasn’t been the same ever since.
With John out of the house these past couple of weeks while he’s living at the hotel, Alex realizes that she’s happier without him around because he’s no longer a constant reminder of the son they lost. She also believes this underlying tension between the two of them is what led to Scarlet running away from home and telling fantastical stories about her visit to the Hotel Cortez and an encounter with her dead little brother.
Alex delivers the papers to John but nearly ends up back in bed with him until he suggests having another child. Talk about a mood killer.
Alex rushes to get out of the hotel but turns the wrong corner and runs into Claudia’s spirit after she was butchered earlier that day. Alex goes down another hallway and sees a little blonde boy standing at the end near the door. She gets closer and closer until Alex finally comes face to face with him.
Holden looks up and locks eyes with Alex and tells her ‘hi mommy’. There’s no way that will end well for her.
The Ex-Girlfriend
Donovan has turned self-destructive since the Countess jilted him a week ago and his first wrong move is killing a street corner junkie and drinking her blood. As we learned from the rules about these new age vampires — never drink from the dead, from the sick or from someone on drugs.
Donovan starts seeing double but he’s clear headed enough to spot another potential victim nearby having car trouble. What he doesn’t know until a taser is getting shoved into his neck is this is no stranger who just happened by.
The next morning, Donovan wakes up with tubes running from his arms while hooked up to a dialysis machine. The woman who kidnapped him explains that she’s switching out his doped blood for some good stuff so he doesn’t get sick. She then explains why she took him and her connection to the Countess.
Flashback to Los Angeles in 1977 and we meet Ramona Royale — queen of the Blaxploitation movies of her era. She starred in such classics as Sister Slaughter, Silky Fine and The Bride of Blackenstein. But for all her success, all Ramona wanted was to crossover into major motion pictures and she landed a meeting with a studio head at the Hotel Cortez while trying to land a part in one of his upcoming films.
Just when it looked like he was going to offer her a part based on Ramona’s willingness to spend some time on his casting couch, the Countess showed up and quickly dispatched the sleazy studio mogul and immediately fixated on the ‘B’ actress instead.
From there, the Countess and Ramona would engage in a whirlwind romance that lasted more than 14 years until there was another. But it wasn’t the Countess who moved on this time — it was Ramona.
She fell in love with a rapper named Prophet Moses and she engaged in a secret relationship with him behind the Countess’ back while also helping him prepare his assault on the hip-hop world that was ruled at the time by names like Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Ramona even decided to share her gift of immortality with him, but that was a big mistake because the Countess found out about her adulterous affair and ended up killing Moses as punishment.
“What she couldn’t have was one of her creations creating something else. There can only be one queen.”
~ Ramona Royale
So after another 14 years have passed, Ramona is finally ready to seek her revenge but she needs someone close to the Countess to help her achieve it and that’s where Donovan comes in. Unfortunately he has to inform Ramona that as of a week ago, he’s no longer the Countess’ muse and her devilish smile turns to an unmistakable frown and she kicks him out of her house immediately.
In all likelihood, Ramona and Donovan will cross paths again while they both try to knock the queen off her throne.
A Mother’s Love
Before Donovan ended up in Ramona’s trunk, he had one final falling out with his mother Iris after she suggested they move to Santa Monica and move into the same apartment building once inhabited by James ‘Whitey’ Bulger.
Donovan explains to his mother that she is the scourge of his entire universe and the source of all his pain. She’s the reason he went from a casual drug user to full blown addict.
“I went to an AA meeting once and after I stood up and shared about you, people came up to me — hardcore addicts — and they were like ‘wow, man, no wonder you use'”
~ Donovan
Of course there was the episode where his mother got involved with a vegetable cult and Donovan had to eat so much fiber that he shit his pants at school so he did have a few legitimate gripes, but Iris isn’t sure what she is in this world without being his mother.
It’s the only job she’s ever wanted and the only thing she truly loves about life.
“Honestly, if that is really true you should kill yourself. You should do it even if it isn’t”
~ Donovan tells Iris.
She takes her son’s words to heart and decides to visit her old pal Sally to have the ghost junkie inject her with enough heroin to take out an entire marching band after promising that all of her business at the hotel has been finished and thus her soul won’t stick around after she’s dead. Unfinished business is apparently the prerequisite for someone to die there and then never be able to leave.
“I am stuck in this place thanks to you so I want to be 100-percent sure when I do this that I am done with your miserable old ass. In other words, don’t haunt my hallways bitch.”
~ Sally
Meanwhile downstairs, Donovan returns home and ends up at the bar having a chat with Liz Taylor about his failed experiment of a life. All his misery and complaining are wearing thin on the barkeep, but his insistence that the source of his pain starts and stops with his mother finally sends her over the edge.
Liz tells the spoiled brat that no matter what he’s done or will do, Iris will always love him and no one will ever love him that much again.
“In the next 100 years of living, you may find someone who treats you better, who screws you better, who makes you laugh more than cry, you’ll never find someone who loves you as much as she does.”
~ Liz Taylor
In that moment, Donovan finally realizes that for all his problems and all his fuck ups, the only person that never judged him or asked him to change was his mother. When he finds out that she followed his instructions and intended to kill herself, Donovan rushes to Sally’s room to stop the assisted suicide.
When the heroin didn’t work, Sally had to turn to a plastic back over Iris’ head and when Donovan arrives it appears his mother has finally shuffled off this mortal coil. In a panic with his mother no longer drawing a breath, Donovan cuts open his wrist and pours blood into Iris’ mouth.
Sally obviously objects, but it’s already too late — Iris is alive again.
“There’s some twisted poetic justice”
~ Sally
Donovan brought his mother back to life but don’t forget the wise words from Ramona earlier in the episode — the Countess doesn’t like it when her creations start creating. Donovan just saved Iris from certain death but he may have also marked her as a target for the one and only queen of the Hotel Cortez.
And the Countess doesn’t share her throne with anybody.
SOUNDTRACK TO ‘MOMMY’:
“Siamese Twins” by The Cure
“Just Like Honey” by The Jesus and Mary Chain
Tune into the new episode of American Horror Story: Hotel next week as the annual Halloween celebration gets underway!
