AHS Asylum: Nevermind. Not THAT Anne Frank.

Sorry kids – seems I got all excited about the Anne Frank storyline on American Horror Story for nothing. Well, almost nothing. More on that later. Sister Jude, all worked up over Dr. Arden possibly being a war criminal, reverts to Judy (but not Slut Judy…not just yet) to pay a visit to Sam Goodman, a Nazi hunter. She brings him what little information she has on Briarcliff’s resident physician. The huntsman explains that if Dr. Creepy is, in fact, a former SS doctor, he will have a tattoo which would be visible if he removes his shirt. Sister Jude blushes when Mr. Goodman asks if she’s seen Dr. Creepy without a shirt on, but she’s not fooling me. We all know she has seen many a bare male chest in her day. She is told not to act on any of her theories until the hunter can do some research.

 

Sister Mary Eunice is busy snooping through Sister Jude’s office when Anne Frank brings Dr. Creepy in at gunpoint, calling him a monster. Sister Mary Eunice leaves to summon Sister Jude, and Anne’s plan is foiled when Frank the Security Guard (could we have given him a different name? Anne Frank is caught by Frank?) enters and points his own gun at Anne.

 

Anne had to be sedated and comes to with Sister Jude hovering over her. She tells Anne that she searched Arden’s office and found no sign of a creature with no legs. The conversation is cut short when Sister Mary Satan arrives to tell Sister Jude that Anne Frank’s husband is waiting in her office. Apparently Anne Frank is actually Charlotte Brown…and that, my friends, is a huge buzz kill. Huge. I’m still going to call her Anne though, because it’s too difficult to accept at the moment. Anne’s husband shows Sister Jude a picture of their son, David, and tells her the story of how his wife became obsessed with Anne Frank after reading The Diary of a Young Girl and seeing the play. She even gave herself the Auschwitz tattoo with her sewing machine and kept a den filled with newspaper articles, photos and notes from the Holocaust.  

 

Dr. Thredson interrupts, telling Anne’s husband that she must suffer from post-partum psychosis. He’s having none of it, saying she’s just very emotional and needs to come home. Down the stairway to heaven she goes, dressed in a TV housewife dress from that era and very confused. Anne negates her husband’s notions of their life together and fights hard to maintain her false identity until she sees a family photo with her baby boy. She recognizes him, and they leave quietly.

 

Fearful that she has really done some damage with Dr. Creepy and Monsignor Timothy, Sister Jude calls the Nazi hunter and leaves a message for him to forget everything. Dr. Creepy enters and lets her know that she is screwed. He plans on pressing charges, because under Sister Jude’s watch, Anne got a hold of a gun, shot him, and then she sent Anne home with her husband as if nothing happened. And then there was the drunken movie night where three inmates escaped…yeah, that all sounds pretty bad. Sister Jude pleads with him, hoping they could start over, but he says “You’re through here Sister, and you know it.”

 

Dr. Creepy returns to his lair to dress his wounds, and Sister Mary Satan appears and assists him. She apologizes for the whore behavior she exhibited the night of the storm. He lets bygones be bygones (don’t you want to call her a whore one more time? Please?) and thanks her for assisting him. Ah! Seems the devil nun disposed of Shelley. Dr. Creepy assumes she was dumped in the woods to be devoured by the other creatures, but just then, we cut to a school yard. My initial thought is – this has something to do with Stupid Lana and Wendy’s teaching careers, but I’m wrong. A child discovers legless, deformed Shelley crawling up the stairs, and this scene is just awesome. It kind of reminds me of the girl from The Ring crawling out of the well. But the question is – why was Shelley dropped off in public rather than killed?

 

 

Meanwhile, Kit and Grace sit in side by side cells waiting for sterilization. Kit mentions that he and Alma always wanted kids, but they wouldn’t have that chance now anyway. Grace tells him she’s not sorry for what they did, and though there is a wall between them (literally), they comfort one another. Sister Mary Satan arrives to bring Kit to supper. She tells him Sister Jude changed her mind, and off he goes. Grace is also looking forward to supper, but alas, her procedure is still on schedule. She is left alone to scream in terror and shouts until she is entirely exhausted. No worries, Grace – you are about to be abducted by aliens anyway.

 

Whether or not this abduction is real remains to be seen, but Grace opens her eyes to some hazy existence where Alma tells her “not to fight it.” Does Alma look pregnant? Is it Kit’s or an alien baby? The alien cuts Grace’s stomach, and I am flabbergasted. Is she receiving a microchip? Is she pregnant now too? Am I imagining things?

 

Kit meets with Dr. Thredson and makes a deal with him – Thredson asks Kit to talk into a tape recorder and say exactly what he think happened to Alma and the other women. In return, Thredson will tell the courts that Kit needs to stay institutionalized, thereby avoiding the electric chair. Does this deal make sense to anyone else? “Let me record you saying you killed those women in cold blood, and there are no little green men. I won’t do anything with the tape – I’ll just tell the judge you’re crazy for thinking aliens are real….even though again, you are admitting to murder and no aliens.” Kit buys it and spills his guts. Should I start calling him Stupid Kit?

 

Dr. Creepy might able to confront his assailant sooner than he thinks, as Mr. Brown has already returned the woman who believes she is Anne Frank to Briarcliff. Seems she didn’t take too kindly to the housewife/mother role and tried to suffocate her baby. Lessons learned, my friend. Suddenly she is no longer “an emotional person.” She now “needs professional help.” Okay, okay. Let’s call in Dr. Thredson. Where is he? No Thredson? No worries - Anne Frank is in good hands. In fact, Dr. Creepy has “cured” her by giving her a lobotomy. Now she is fortunate enough to be like the Stepford wives and be the perfect woman.

 

Stupid Lana waits at the front stair case for Dr. Thredson. He has promised to sneak her out of the asylum tonight. The two of them walk right past the car and Stupid Lana makes it into the car unnoticed. I seriously think that if Sister Jude ends up being fired for negligence, the entire security staff should be caned for incompetency.  Frank the Security Guard rushes outside to ask Thredson to come back inside to examine Anne Frank. He replies “I don’t work here anymore, Frank. As a matter of fact, I never did.” And therrrrre we go. His new name is Dr. Bloody Face.



Mint?

They make safely it to his home and he tells Stupid Lana to start calling him Oliver. Clearly they should be on a first name basis now that he has kidnapped rescued her and all. She wants to go to her own house, and he tells her no way - that is the first place the Briarcliff bad guys will go to look for her. Are you sure? Those guards don’t seem too bright, and Sister Jude is in the midst of losing her mind. She wants to make a phone call but he can’t allow that – he is harboring her and has put himself at risk too. She buys that as well, but she isn't happy. It's okay though - he asserts that they will absolutely go to the police in the morning and expose Briarcliff once and for all. Tomorrow will be a triumph. For now though, let’s have some wine, shall we? Stupid Lana sits down contentedly with her wine glass and listens to this man she trusts tell her that she is going to win the Pulitzer Prize for writing about this whole crazy thing. He tells her “You are the person to tell my story.” Uh huh. NOW, do you get it? NOW do you see where this is going, Stupid Lana? Not quite, but the wheels are turning. She looks around and gazes upon a lamp nearby that includes an interesting shade. Wait. Is that….is that a nipple impression on the lamp shade? IS THAT SKIN?!?!?! He offers her a mint…from a bowl that absolutely is a portion of a skull. Your move, Stupid Lana. She pulls one of those “I need to use the restroom” excuses that fool no one and disappears down the hall. His glasses come off. Showtime.

 

Instead of a restroom she finds a craft room of sorts. He pops up behind her, telling her he makes lamp shades as a hobby. She nervously asks what kind of material he uses. “Skin,” and then Stupid Lana disappears through a trap door. Stupid, Stupid Lana.

 

After what was probably an insufficient search, Frank notifies Sister Jude that Stupid Lana is nowhere to be found. Knowing this is probably the final straw (again, cane the security guards), Sister Jude launches into an emotional narrative that is too good not to quote in its entirety. Well done, Jessica Lange.

 

“You know, when I was a child, I would come home after school to an empty house. My father had flown the coop. My mother worked as a maid at a hotel. It was lonely. So I brought in a baby squirrel that I had found and kept him in a shoebox came home. He looked sickly. He was dead already, but I didn't know that. I had forgotten to feed him for a couple days. So I took him out of the box and laid him on the table, and I and prayed my heart out for several hours, and when my mother came home and found him she screamed bloody murder and threw him in the garbage.  She worked hard, my mother, she was exhausted. She couldn't have known how cruel that was. I cried and cried and saying God didn't answer my prayers. I remember my mother was pouring herself a whisky -- the Martin family cure for everything. She looked at me and laughed. ‘God always answers our prayers, Judy. It's just rarely the answer we're looking for.’  It's over for me, Frank. My goose is cooked.”

 

And with that, Sister Jude tosses her robes aside, grabs some of her best “ravish me red” lipstick and hits a bar. Welcome back, Slut Judy.

 

 

Stupid Lana awakens in a room that came straight out of the Saw movie. Who’s that over to her right? That’s just Wendy, all dead and frozen. Dr. Bloody Face slithers in and wants to continue the therapy they had started at Briarcliff. He tells her she can start by kissing Wendy’s lips. “Don’t worry. She won’t bite. I took her teeth.” Those teeth now reside on the Bloody Face mask, which he slowly puts on.

 

 

 

As we near the end of the episode, everything falls apart for our other protagonists as well. Kit enters the common room to see Grace bleeding from her womb. Was is a botched sterilization or an alien procedure? Kit doesn’t have time to find out – he is arrested for the murders of the Bloody Face victims and removed from the asylum. As he is escorted out, he realizes that Thredson screwed him. Grace wants to help, but she can barely speak....she tries to tell the authorities that everything Kit said is true – that Alma is alive, but no one beyond Kit takes any notice of her. Probably just as well. I doubt anyone would take her seriously, but at least Kit knows now that his story was true. He can think about that on the way to the electric chair.



We end the episode with Anne Frank, fresh from her lobotomy, being the ever doting wife and mother. Now that she has found her purpose in life, she is cleaning out her Auschwitz room and throwing away all of the items from her false identity. One picture lingers for our eyes though. Funny, even though she is not Anne Frank, she still has a photo of Hans Gruber, aka Dr. Arthur Arden hanging out with Hitler. Come back, Slut Judy!

 

Again, a lot of issues remain unsolved. Are there really aliens? It seems strange that Grace was left bleeding in the common room. One would imagine that if Dr. Arden really did perform a "sterilization" he would have just kept her as an experiment if the operation wasn't going according to plan. She had to have been abducted, right? What happens to Kit now? He has been touted as a Christ figure all season. Will he be executed/sacrificed for the sins of others? AND what is to become of Briarcliff? If Dr. Creepy does gain control, how long can that last given Shelley has now been found? My guess is Sister Mary Satan wants the place all to herself - she's just taking baby steps to get there. Oh, and there's that little matter of her being POSSESSED. I guess no one is too concerned about her change in behavior.

 

Next week we are promised Bloody Face's back story. If he wants Stupid Lana to write his tale, he can't kill her...at least not yet. To be honest, I'm still not rooting for her. I'm far more concerned with Kit clearing his name and Sister Jude taking down Dr. Creepy. Who knows if either of those things will happen, but I am eager to find out!