American Horror Story's Hotel Was Built By A Real Sicko

R.I.P. Aggie

There might be worse ways to go than having your life essence literally sucked out of you by a bunch of dead-eyed moppets until one of them comments that you taste gross and the adult supervising them informs him that it's because you're dead, but...the season is still young and we're bound to see even worserer ways to die before we check out of this joint. Anyway, bye!

Whatever, They're All Blonds, Right?

The moment the hotel's only employees have gathered to Aggie's body down a laundry chute, where she'll join her mattress pal from the season premiere (and get a scoop of lye dropped on her from what turns out to be six storeys up), is as good a time as any for a quick geography lesson.

When you're as beautiful as Liz Taylor, no one expects you to be smart.

Purity

I wasn't really sure why Countess Elizabeth was keeping all those little brats, but now we know: after they feed on Aggie, Iris draws their blood -- the normal, Red Cross way; nothing nefarious -- collects it in a handsome crystal decanter, and delivers it to the Countess. So the kids are like her Brita filter for questionable blood? Finally: someone's found a good reason to have kids around.

Vaccines!

Do you want to avoid getting a snotty lecture from your concierge doctor -- oh, and also, help protect your child from contracting a potentially fatal yet entirely preventable disease? Then get him vaccinated against measles, you brain-dead piece of westside garbage.

(Shout-out to Mädchen Amick and Chloë Sevigny for sharing a scene for what I believe is the first time ever. Umlaut party!)

Booze Cruise

Lowe's just woken up into one creepy dream of a couple of loose-skinned corpses banging in his shower (rude)...

...and into a reality in which his lost child Holden has not aged and is taunting him around every corner of this weird hotel when he ends up at the mezzanine bar. Hypodermic Sally recognizes a fellow addict -- she can tell, she says, that he's gripping his sobriety with all his might, and she knows the hour between 2 and 3 AM is the worst -- so she has Liz pour him a ginger ale and asks him to tell the story of his last drunk. And here it is! He was called in to investigate an apparent poisoning of a house full of kids by their father, who shot himself in the head...except what had actually happened was that the father's power had been turned off, so he'd brought in a portable generator, and when it ran out of gas while he wasn't there, the children all died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and he killed himself out of grief when he returned to this macabre scene. Lowe was so upset that he went on a two-day bender, and when he finally crawled home, he suggested that the family all go to the beach, in the hopes that a pleasant day would earn him Alex's forgiveness. Whoops, that was the day Holden disappeared.

Apparently this terrible story makes Sally...horny?

Lowe puts off Sally's advances, which given her scrapes and track marks probably isn't that difficult to do? "I can't afford to get lost," he tells her. "Or AIDS," he does not add.

Model Citizen

Name:	Tristan Duffy.
Age:	Late 20s.
Occupation:	Model.
Goal:	To do all the drugs.
Sample Dialogue:	"What?" "Whatever. Let's just do this."

Sashay, Champagne

What's the occasion? Will's celebrating his new ownership of the hotel by throwing a fashion show in the lobby.

What are the refreshments? Out on the floor? Champagne. Backstage and in every bathroom? Powders and pills. And powdered pills.

Whose big public scene will everyone be talking about tomorrow? Tristan's runway walk.

It's splashy, but also, this scene of Finn Wittrock walking in a fashion show while Matt Bomer watches in a Ryan Murphy production just makes me think of The Normal Heart. Oh, Ryan Murphy. Do more stuff like that and less stuff like this.

Use A Pen, Sideshow Tristan

I get that Tristan is a junkie, and that instead of letting Will scold him, he'd rather make a scene.

Or just leave? Why ruin your pretty face? You might change your mind when you sober up and wish you hadn't been so rough with the old moneymaker!

My Tastes Were Very...Singular Before That Grey Kid's Grandparents Were Born

After Donovan catches Tristan rifling through the Countess's suite in search of drugs, he's getting ready to kill him up real nice when the Countess stops him, and Tristan flees...to another room he's soon going to wish he hadn't entered.

Oh, Brother

Who's causing a family crisis? Scarlett.

How? She's taken the bus alone and returned to the empty pool at the Hotel Cortez in search of Holden. Finding all the coffins empty, though, she somehow finds her way to the nursery, and while she doesn't understand how it is that Holden hasn't aged since his disappearance, she figures it doesn't matter: their parents are going to be so excited to see that Holden really is alive! Time to go home!

Which relatives have a problem with it? All? Holden doesn't want to go; he says he likes it at the hotel, and that Scarlett can come visit him whenever she wants. Then, when she settles down next to him to take a selfie to show their parents, he freaks her shit out by hungrily leaning in on her neck.

How do things get even worse? Scarlett never told anyone she was returning to the hotel, so when she gets home, the house is surrounded by police cruisers and both her parents are freaking out on the phone trying to find her. After the expected recrimination about how badly she scared them, she gets mad back, telling them they lied when they told her Holden was dead: he's alive, he's at the hotel, and she has a photo!

Since John is pretty sure he's seen Holden around the hotel, this photo -- while still pretty inconclusive -- is unsettling! But he doesn't show it to Alex, and she's weirdly uninterested in looking at it.

Spoiler: Guys, I'm not sure this family's going to make it.

CounTristaBeth!

Tristan having fled that weirdo with the big neck hole and ended up in an elevator with Countess Elizabeth...yeah, he's a vampire now. He and the Countess proceed to have The Night, and after he preens over his newly even-more-beautiful face -- "Jesus Christ, I look amazing....No zits, no blackheads; all that crystal was wrecking my skin" -- his mind turns to practical matters: can a silver bullet or a stake kill him?

The Countess tells Tristan that he's only immortal if he's smart. Uh oh, that might be a problem.

Mid-bathtub fuck, Tristan learns that he's not going to get fangs. "We don't bite," says the Countess. "We cut." Both are equally messy, so I don't know why she's so imperious about it.

Later, the Countess has more advice: "Never drink from the dead. Avoid the diseased, the feeble, the polluted. Bad blood is like a-- Like a bad flu, or worse." Tristan asks whether he's going to start sleeping in a coffin, which the Countess does not do herself: "I prefer blackout curtains and a Duxiana bed. The sun won't kill you, but it should be avoided. It will sap your vitality." Gazing at him, she sighs, "Bellissimo."

The Countess says he just reminds her of someone. Tristan blows past this and on to personal beef: "You know what I can't wait for? To hunt Kendall Jenner. Bitch blew me off once at Coachella. Can I kill her?" See what I said about smart? "The only thing that can undo you now is your own recklessness," says the Countess, almost certainly to deaf ears. "Just don't get caught, and don't fall in love. That's the part you save for me. Forever."

Yet even later than the "later" earlier, Tristan finally decides to stop thinking about himself and learn more about his sire, like how old is she? "I was born in 1904," she says. Who turned her? "One who was even more beautiful than you," she says, "but he is long gone now. So you'll have to do." What was her favourite time? "Every decade has its decadent period. That's when I'm most alive." But really, she misses the late '70s the most; she was the disco queen, and everyone was basically a vampire.

When we return from watching her make her entrance at Studio 54 on a white horse, with several go-go boys holding up her giant Rapunzel braid, the Countess is wistful: "I want it still. I think about everything that could have been, had they all lived. My friends -- Andy. Keith. Robert. All that loss."

You're lucky you're extremely pretty, Tristan.

Maybe This One's Got A Jawline For Months, Though

I'm not sure what Donovan's been doing for the past several hours Tristan and Countess Elizabeth have spent screwing and chatting and screwing (maybe he decided not to wait for her and started watching House Of Cards by himself), but he returns to just in time for Tristan's stupid question and snorts, "You won't last the week." Tristan leaps up to try to start something, but the Countess saves him trying to act tough in his animal-print briefs...

...and dismisses him so she can dump Donovan, basically. Donovan is pissed that the Countess turned Tristan: "He's a stupid, trashy model." "And you were a pathetic addict dying on a filthy floor," the Countess shoots back, saving me the trouble. (Although, to be fair, he was actually on a bed. But I take her point.) The Countess says she didn't want to hurt Donovan and still doesn't -- "There's no reason this has to end badly" -- but this seems not to be where Donovan thought this conversation was going at all: "'End'? Are you throwing me out?" The Countess doesn't answer, probably because it would be pretty gauche for her to say "Duh," so Donovan reminds her that he loves her. The Countess loves him too: "But you will learn. It isn't our precious virus that makes you. It isn't who you kill or who you screw. It's the heartbreaks -- the bigger the better. I know better than any of us."

Speech thus speeched, the Countess backs up and tells Donovan to pack his things. She thinks that's it, but then he chucks his glass across the room and grabs her, reminding her that she'd told him bringing him back from the brink of death was "the closest thing [she] ever had to a spiritual experience" -- can she say that about the moment she turned Tristan? Smiling at the memory, the Countess agrees that turning Donovan was one of the most erotic experiences of her life (please tell me this doesn't mean the writing staff doesn't know the difference between "erotic" and "spiritual")...but then she kicks him away and walks out of the room without adding a "but," and that's a wrap on Matt Bomer for this episode. We don't even get to see his but! Lame.

He Was A Rich Pervert, WE GET IT

Between the incident where Lowe got mailed the murder weapon that killed that Oscar blogger in a package with the hotel as its return address and Scarlett's having spent the afternoon roaming the halls of the hotel (the latter of which is definitely more his fault, as her parent, than anyone else's, but whatever), he's stormed behind Iris's desk to try to harangue her into telling him what the fuck is up with this weird hotel. Iris is unimpressed by his aggression, but she does volunteer to tell him about the guy who built the hotel -- something he did "with every atom of evil in his being." His name was James Patrick March, and he was a self-made man: "Oil, coal. But he was new money, shunned by the elites of east coast society. So he came west, to a land where pedigree meant little if you had a lot of dough." So he's Howard H.H. Holmes Hughes? Got it.

In 1925, March started building the Cortez -- a "perfectly designed torture chamber," with secret chutes for disposing of bodies, hallways with no exits, and walls lined with asbestos to muffle the screams of his victims. People walked in and vanished.

March had a wife they say he forced to watch his tortures, but maybe it didn't actually require that much effort to get her to participate? (Mrs. March, judging by her voice, is obviously Countess Elizabeth, btw.) No one knows how many people March killed -- something like three a week, but more if he went on a bender. He was assisted in all his murderings by Miss Evers, the laundress, who loved cleaning all his stains with her secret ingredient...

"Love."

As this flashback drags on into eternity, we see March kill a religious man and immediately resolve to remove all the Bibles from the hotel nightstands, and when next we see them, they're piled up next to a bunch of mutilated bodies in a field, one of which has a piece of evidence on it.

"He was sloppy with his wetwork out in the world," Iris opines. Plus the rumour is that March's wife turned him in so she'd get all his millions. We watch as Miss Evers comes to tell March the police are there, and he gives her the chance to decide the order in which they will die. She asks to be his "last meal," by gunshot, and he politely shoots her in the head. He then takes the blade in his other hand and slashes his throat, falling so that he's bleeding out into the tub when the police break down the door. The end...?

Lowe is sarcastically dubious about Iris's story, but she sticks to it: "This place is the real deal. If you want to know what's really going on here, you're going to have to expand your thinking a bit." Lowe sniffs that he's investigated all kinds of crimes and that none has been committed by a ghost or a ghoul: "People do enough damage without help from the afterlife." But does it change anything for Lowe to know...that he's sleeping in March's old office??!??!?!?

Maybe? Then again, his face kind of always looks like that.

The next day at work, Lowe has started trying to confirm elements of Iris's story, and guess what: apparently it's largely true! He asks Hahn whether he's ever heard of March, which he hasn't. Lowe says that during his life the police tried to connect several murders to him, and while they were not successful, he thinks their current serial killer has been: Lowe's discerned a pattern in which people who've broken one of the Ten Commandments have been punished ironically for doing so! Hahn takes this in and then is like, and he totally built the hotel you live in now! GREAT DETECTIVE WORK, HAHN!

Tristan finds a guy on Grindr and summons him to the hotel and then up to the Countess's suite! When she wanders in to congratulate Tristan on having chosen well, the guy whines that he's not into "vag action"...

...but his interests are not really the point this time!

"Just because I'm sucking on a dude doesn't mean I'm gay," says Tristan gravely, adding, "Do you want some?" The Countess would rather watch, and play with herself.

Online dating: it's not for everyone!