In the American Horror Story: Hotel recap, we return to the Murder House, Liz finds love only to watch the Countess take it away…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
The return to American Horror Story season one’s Murder House was teased before the new season even began, but finally during the latest episode we took a trip down memory lane to the place where it all started.
In Los Angeles, circa 1926, The Countess sought out the illegal medical practice run by Dr. Charles Montgomery — the ether-sniffing surgeon to the stars, who used to perform abortions in his basement for a fee. It seems one of his patients four years after he first constructed the house for his wife Nora was a woman named Mrs. Johnson — better known to us as The Countess.
She sought out his help for a baby growing in her womb that was already quite large after only three weeks. Dr. Montgomery put her under anesthesia but when he tried to remove the baby, the creature sprung out of its mothers belly and proceeded to kill the nurse who was working alongside him.
When the Countess finally woke up from her medically induced slumber, she saw Dr. Montgomery standing there with a little bundle of joy.
“Congratulations, it’s a boy”
~ Charles Montgomery
The Countess hugged her child — a child we didn’t even know existed until now — and we are off and running in the latest episode titled ‘Room 33’.
With that said let’s recap the latest American Horror Story: Hotel…
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places
Out of nowhere this week we find Liz and Tristan in bed together in a tryst that’s apparently been ongoing for a couple of weeks. The two new lovers discovered each other and now they are falling in love. Liz brings Tristan books to read — something no one has ever done for him before and in turn he’s mystified by the way the front desk clerk looks at him every time he saunters down the stairs.
“I’m serious. When I come down to the lobby and see you it’s like you’re genuinely happy to see me. I believe you.”
~ Tristan
Liz and Tristan confess their love for one another but their relationship only creates a major problem — how will they ever tell the Countess about their budding romance? The Countess is nothing if not possessive and you never rub another woman’s rhubarb.
Tristan’s desire to be with Liz is complicated when the Countess summons him to her suite to ‘help’ her out with her new boy toy Will Drake. The two of them have been attempting sex for some time, but no matter how attracted Will is to the Countess, his dick just isn’t cooperating.
So the Countess more or less orders Tristan to act as her fluffer so she can finish off the man show hopes to marry before bilking him of every dollar he has in the bank. The next step is a trip to Paris that takes the Countess out of the hotel, which leaves the perfect opening for some of her biggest haters to go looking for revenge.
Suffer the Little Children
John wakes up from his latest nightmare to find Holden sleeping next to him and after saying ‘hi daddy’ and then running away, the former police detective can’t help but give chase.
He ends up in the pool where the sleeping chambers are kept and when John begins to explore, he eventually stumbles onto the glass coffin containing his wife Alex and his supposedly dead son Holden. John passes out cold, but Alex wakes up in time to see him and she has to act quickly before he starts asking too many questions.
Upstairs, Alex calls on Liz for help and they quickly move the sleeping chambers so if John comes back downstairs looking for them, there’s no more evidence and it just looks like another figment of his imagination. With each passing day he stays in the hotel, John is losing his grip on reality and it’s not helping much that his wife is pushing him off the ladder.
Meanwhile, Donovan and Ramona show up to the hotel to begin their plot against the Countess while she’s out of town. The first order of business is eliminating her vampire children, but thanks to the sleeping chambers being moved, when Ramona and her new cohort Iris show up ready to off the blonde mafia, there’s no one to be found.
Donovan heads upstairs to the penthouse to sniff the Countess’ panties because as much as feigns hatred, he really just misses her. While he’s there he runs into the two Swedish tourists, who got offed back in the second episode and like so many lost souls who died in the Hotel Cortez, they are locked there forever.
Donovan tells them the way they can escape — or at least expire from this hamster wheel existence where every day is the same for eternity. They need to find a purpose. The last person to do so who died in the hotel was a former schoolteacher, who ended up murdering a guest and she was able to move onto the afterlife. Maybe the Swedish girls obsessed with seeing Vin Diesel can do the same?
Back downstairs with the children missing, Ramona has one last card to play and that’s going after the Countess’ baby boy, who still lives in the hotel in room 33. She calls out to Bartholomew and tells him that his Auntie Ramona is there to see him. Instead of getting a hug, Ramona gets a cut on the face as the creature scampers out of the room and escapes.
That’s going to be bad news for everybody.
We All Go a Little Mad, Sometimes
So the Swedish dimwits end up killing an Asian traveler who came to the Hotel Cortez because he figured there would be random models roaming around the floors now that Will Drake owned the place. He was correct except he ended up in bed with the psycho dead variety.
The problem is killing the guy didn’t give the girls ‘a purpose’ and they still haven’t crossed over to the other side. Alex finds them sad and miserable, surrounded by blood and a dead body but mostly just bummed out that they are still stuck there. Instead of killing people, Alex suggests they try another plan — drive someone mad — and she knows the perfect person to target because he’s always dreamed about having two women at once.
Before John gets a visit from Sweden, he ends up at another crime scene where Ten Commandments killer struck again. He’s convinced this is just the latest in a series of murders committed by the same man, but he’s thrown back when his former partner tells him that they already have somebody in custody for the crime. My money is still on John being the real killer after his personality splintered back when his son was kidnapped, but we shall see.
Back at the hotel, John relaxes with a bottle of vodka in the hallway but soon gets a pair of blonde visitors who fuck his brains out, but only long enough to slice each other open and cover him in blood, which sends him screaming out of the room. He runs to get Liz from downstairs, but when they return, the bed is covered in blood but the girls are nowhere to be found.
John is really losing his shit now and like clockwork James Patrick March shows up to welcome him to madness.
“Good to see you’re truly finally checking in to the Hotel Cortez.”
~ James Patrick March
John quickly grabs a shower to wash off the blood; he packs his bags and heads home. He picks up his daughter Scarlet, who was left at a friend’s house two days ago and then just abandoned when Alex became the newest employee of the Hotel Cortez. John apologizes and tries to comfort his little girl, but he’s got a bigger issue — Bartholomew hopped in his suitcase when he wasn’t looking and he joined him on the ride back to the house.
When John finds the disfigured creature, he takes two shots at it with his gun, which of course freaks out Scarlet. Minutes later, John’s partner has arrived to take Scarlet to her grandmothers while Alex shows up to essentially tell him that he needs to seek help because his mind is turning into pudding.
The good news is Alex finds an injured Bartholomew hiding in the bushes and she’s able to scoop him up and return him to the hotel without further incident.
If I Can’t Have Him
The Countess returns from her trip to Paris with Will and his son Lachlan before shipping them off to bed while she tends to business at the hotel. She runs into Liz, who has something important to tell her before it gets even later into the night.
Liz is convinced that if she just tells the Countess her real feelings about Tristan that she’ll give him up and allow them be happy together. Ramona warned her that the Countess never surrenders what she wants until she’s done with it and Liz would be better off grabbing up her model and making a run for it.
Liz doesn’t listen because she knows the Countess will listen to her plea because they are such close friends after all.
So Liz explains to the Countess how she’s fallen in love with Tristan and she wants nothing more than to be with him. The Countess calls on Tristan to join them so the two of them can explain this together. Tristan arrives and he tells her how she only makes people fall in love with her so she can eventually dump them and then they pine after her forever.
She gets off on the misery.
“I know you. It’s not that you get bored and move on. Moving on is the point of the whole thing. That is your orgasm. You collect us and create us and get us addicted to the light of your love just so you can take it away. You feed off the heartbreak.”
~ Tristan
The Countess sees a patter and decides to let Tristan go so he can be with Liz — well at least until she slits his throat and he falls to the ground gurgling on his own blood. Liz screams out in terror as she tries to stop the bleeding, but it’s already done — Tristan is dead.
“Fine, you may have him. He’s yours. Bury him.”
~ The Countess
It seems Liz should have listened to Ramona after all.
Following Tristan’s death, the Countess returns to room 33 to check on her son but when she arrives, the door is already cracked open. She finds Alex sitting with the boy in a chair, rocking him and she explains that he escaped but she found him and nursed him back to health after he lost some blood.
“You saved my son.”
~ The Countess
Alex says she did nothing more than the Countess did for her when she saved Holden. Finally, the Countess puts her baby boy back in her arms and we finally get a look at the deranged little creature and it looks like an extra leftover from Fraulein Elsa’s Cabinet of Curiosities. That is truly a face only a mother could love.
SOUNDTRACK:
“One Caress” by Depeche Mode
“Jack the Ripper” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
