Welcome back! The masterminds behind American Horror Story have kept us guessing on the Season 6 theme right up until the premiere, and I'm excited to say they are tackling Roanoke with this new chapter. The Lost Colony, as it is known, is introduced to us in present day AND in documentary style. That's right - we have actors doing "reenactments" of other actors who are giving interviews for what seems to be a documentary. This is going to make blogging complicated, but I'm digging the new format. What does this premiere hour have in store for us? Here we go...
As Time Began To Blur
We begin with Lily Rabe and Andre Holland as Shelby and Matt Miller, a married couple in the midst of an interview regarding their time living in Roanoke. This looks like it could be an episode of Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel. As they tell their story, we cut away to Sarah Paulson and Juice Cuba Gooding Jr. as the actors "playing" Shelby and Matt in this documentary. Neat huh?
In the interview Shelby tells us all about how perfect she and Matt were for each other from the get-go. She was a yoga instructor when they met, he took a class, and it was love at first sight. They settled in Los Angeles where they decided to start a family. When Shelby found out she was pregnant, she and her husband went out for a night on the town to celebrate. While walking down a very public street that evening, Matt was attacked and beat pretty badly by a group of gang initiates who ran and were never caught. Shelby stayed by his side in the hospital and willed him to wake from his coma with her loving touch. Unfortunately for Shelby...the stress of all of this caused her to miscarry.
Going into the reenactment sequence now we see Shelby and Matt leaving Los Angeles behind to head to the east coast. Matt believes they will be safer moving close to where he grew up and where members of his family still live. They arrive in Roanoke and go for a picnic in the woods...how they chose that particular spot to picnic, I don't know. Maybe they pulled over on a whim? Maybe Matt's family lives in walking distance? Maybe this is the local picnic area that's not really a picnic area? Not sure. They just happen to stumble across an old farmhouse, built in 1792, that is up for auction. The Millers go into a bidding war between a group of guys that could have stumbled out of the saloon from Paint Your Wagon and win the house for a bargain price of $40,000. Wait. What? A giant farmhouse and many acres of surrounding land is worth that only amount? No one is alarmed by this? Nice job guys. You just traded gang violence for paranormal pandemonium.
Across This New Divide
Matt feels right at home in their new (old) house though Shelby feels danger almost immediately. They decide to break in their bedroom though and while they are getting it on, an awful sound startles them from outside. It kind of sounds like a pig being squeezed. Matt throws on some pants (not sure that I've ever seen a 'reenactment' with nudity before) and heads outside. Their trash had been...well...trashed and a trash can is launched from the fog over Matt's head. He assumes there are some locals that do not approve of the Millers as an interracial couple. Yes Matt. The hillbillies destroyed your smallish trash can because you're black. Oy.
The next round of weird shit comes when Shelby is hanging out in her dining room the following afternoon and hears what sounds like a whole mess of bugs outside the windows. What she finds instead are molars - it's raining teeth on her back porch. She's all kinds of shaky when Matt gets home from running errands and she takes him back to the teeth area... and there are none. Boy doesn't she feel silly. Turns out Matt is a traveling salesman and he needs to start traveling in order to pay for the renovations they will need. Shelby is cool about it though. She's felt a little smothered since they lost the baby and she's ready for some alone time...in the house where it rains teeth.
Shelby cooks herself some alone time dinner and drinks some alone time wine. Even though there are strange noises throughout the house, she goes ahead and has an alone time dip in the hot tub...where a hand grabs her face and holds her under water. Shelby doesn't drown but she's scared out of her mind. Matt rushes home to find the police at his house, but they are not much help. Seems Shelby told them her attackers were wearing old costumes and carrying pitchforks and torches and the cops think she's nuts.
Connect The Space Between
Matt has to get back on the road and he's worried about his wife and her pitchfork attackers and teeth storm. He sets up security cameras around the perimeter of the house and asks his sister, Lee, to stay with Shelby while he is gone. In the interview world Lee is played by Adina Porter, more famously known as Tara's crazy ass mama on True Blood. In the reenactment she is played by badass Angela Bassett. Lee has her own problems though. She's a former police officer...former because she had an addiction to painkillers that cost her a promising career, as well as her marriage and any potential custody of her daughter. Shelby and Lee don't really get along but they kind of need each other's company at the moment. Lee asks Shelby to lay off the wine while she is still struggling with sobriety, so Lee is definitely surprised when she wakes up that night to a squealing pig sound and a bottle of wine just outside her bedroom door. She thinks Shelby is messing with her and they argue....
...Meanwhile Matt is hanging out in his hotel room and gets an alert on his phone from the app linked to the security cameras he installed. He sees a group of people with torches and weapons heading toward his house and flips out. He tries calling his wife and sister but they are too busy bitching at each other to answer their phones. They do hear the front door open though as well as noises in the basement. When the women reach the bottom floor they find a Blair Witch Project style video playing on a television. A man points his camera in the direction of the squealing pig sound and we briefly see a pig-like thing before the man says "I finally found you" and presumably dies. To add insult to injury, Lee and Shelby realize they are locked in the basement and they are hearing quite a commotion above them. When all is quiet, the ladies are able to open the door and they make their way upstairs to find stick dolls hanging everywhere. So not only are the pitchfork peeps creepy...they do arts and crafts as well.
Matt has rushed home (again) and he still thinks the rednecks are just trying to scare them away. Shelby tells him the rednecks can have the house and gets in her car and drives away...because driving away in the middle of the night by yourself when people with torches and pitchforks have been roaming around is the smart choice. Shelby reaches for her cell phone when Matt calls her and drives right into a woman standing in the middle of the foggy road. This woman is in colonial garb and she stands up and walks into the forest. Shelby, currently being Stupid Shelby, follows her yelling "I need to get you to a hospital!" To Stupid Shelby's surprise (but no one else's) the road behind her disappears and she is lost in the woods. The episode ends with a terrified Stupid Shelby finding a tree filled with stick dolls...and a group of people with torches. Oh and then there's the guy missing the top part of his head! What?!?!?!
I was definitely sucked in by this episode and loooooved the whole actors playing actors thing. I have SO many questions after the first hour of Season 6 though. Do the hillbillies know exactly what is in the woods? Why did they want the house so bad? What the hell happened in the house to make it sell for only $40k? Why were the Millers not concerned with that? What's the deal with the pig face thing from the video? What do the stick dolls mean? How far away is the local craft store? Why is that dude missing part of his head? And WHY am I having a hard time moving past Cuba Gooding Jr. and Sarah Paulson as O.J. and Marcia Clark? Ryan Murphy is playing mind games with me by having these two play soul mates mere months after The People v. O.J. Simpson. Regardless, I can't wait to see what Chapter 2 holds next week. We're off to a great start!
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