Hey guys, let me just turn this chair around and sit on it backwards. Can I rap with y’all?

I love horror. It’s my favorite genre. So this feels weird to admit, but in my opinion, sometimes, in its quest to rattle or disturb us, horror can go too far. It doesn’t matter how desensitized you think you are—for every level of jadedness, there’s still probably a film just waiting to ruin your sleep patterns or make you want to write a letter to your congressperson. Personally, the two most disturbing films I’ve ever seen are a pair of ditties called Martyrs and Irreversible. (Come to think of it, both are French, which—is everyone okay over there?) Both of these films contain imagery and concepts that verge on the reprehensible and are borderline indefensible. I say “borderline” because there is one minor defense I can offer for their existence: They’re both brilliant. Just brilliant movies, as intellectually weighty as they are repulsive. For all its flash and bluster, American Horror Story hadn’t necessarily crossed any lines (from my mostly desensitized perspective, anyway). But that changed this week. Parts of the episode were strong, even wildly entertaining at times. But that opening scene, all four minutes and 40 seconds of it, was probably the most shocking, unnecessary, and gratuitous sequence I’ve ever seen on television. I absolutely despised it.

I just don’t think I’m ready to be entertained by school shootings. I really don’t. What I loved so much about last week’s appearance of the ghosts of Tate’s shooting victims was what it inferred rather than laid bare. That plotline pretty neatly stepped around the visceral awfulness of the original shooting and instead addressed the emotional, traumatic repercussions of it. I admired how American Horror Story attempted to exorcise our collective angst over too many real-life incidents by giving angry voices to the victims. I especially admired how it did so without actually trying to thrill or entertain us by portraying the actual shooting. So when “Piggy Piggy” opened on a shot of those same teens huddled together in a library looking very much alive, I had to put down my sandwich. I knew what was coming.

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The opening scene depicting Tate’s chillingly methodical library rampage was expertly filmed, frightening, and awful. My main objection—and this is really something I can’t quite get past—was that it showed us nothing we didn’t already know. Absolutely nothing new was brought to the table, so that leads me to conclude that it was merely meant to titillate us. To frighten us. There was no intellectual weightiness. There were no necessary meanings presented to justify tearing open the psychic scars we all have from real incidents like the one portrayed here. Call me sensitive, but I felt very sensitive about this! I mean, was it really necessary to let us know the poor cheerleader wet her pants while waiting to die? Also, not to nitpick, but the scene didn’t even add up to what we’d been told already! Tate didn’t ask the goth girl if she believed in God, as she said last week. Plus he used a shotgun when the football player had clearly been killed with a smaller-caliber bullet? Perhaps these inconsistencies were intentional, but to me it all just added up to one question: WHY? What was the creative decision here? To shock us? Okay, but why?

So while I’m still having a hard time justifying this scene, I will say that I’m glad we got to see how Tate himself was killed. The S.W.A.T. team’s arrival, Constance’s protestations, and Tate’s final deadly gesture were as enlightening as they were harrowing. That was good television. If that’s all we’d seen in the cold open, I doubt we’d miss the shooting scene. I mean, I’m definitely not advocating censorship, merely creative responsibility. I’m thrilled to live in an age when Ryan Murphy can include an admittedly very tame gay deflowering on network television AND present an unflinching reenactment of the Columbine shootings in the same week. Hooray for creative freedom! It’s just a shame creative freedom was used for this.

Thanks for listening, guys. I feel better now. That rant aside, I DID really enjoy the remainder of “Piggy, Piggy.” Honestly, it was crazy in a good way.

Building off last week’s discovery of Tate’s deadness, Violet hopped on Bing to learn the true events of Westfield High. Hysterical with disbelief, Violet confronted Constance, who confirmed that ghosts do indeed exist, that Tate had been living in the Murder House when he died, and that it was the house itself that had possessed him to “lose his way.” Next thing we knew, Constance was enlisting Violet to help her, I guess, coax Tate to “cross over.” To assist them Constance introduced Billie Dean Howard (Sarah Paulson), a medium she’d originally found on Craigslist. Now, first of all, this lady was amazing. She was apparently a normal, rich housewife who one day saw the ghost of her dead cleaning lady. But also: Did she remind anyone else of Constance? Are they secretly mother and daughter? Because they were clearly both born in Camp Town (you know, where they have the races). Anyway, Violet wasn’t really into having to deal with this situation and ran out of there.

Later, the realization that she’d fallen in love  with a ghost caused Violet to get back into bad habits like cutting her arms and hanging out with girls in floppy hats. Eventually she just decided to overdose on pills, but it was unclear if it was to join Tate or merely be a brat. Anyway, in one of Tate’s more redeeming moments, he saved Violet’s life, tearfully dragging her into a cold shower and forcing her to puke. That night he gave a pretty genuine speech about how much he loved Violet and that he’d respect her wishes if she didn’t want to see him anymore. She didn’t push him away though, and instead invited him over to the bed to spoon. It was actually pretty touching. Say what you will about Tate’s broken brain… Who wouldn’t want a ghost boyfriend or girlfriend?

The other primary plotline of the episode involved Vivien’s stiffening backbone as she pushed Ben out of her life and the increasing weirdness of her pregnancy. After a spooky nightmare in which her baby’s CLAWS were visible on the surface of her stomach, Vivien was treated to meat “delicacies” courtesy of a very pushy Constance and Moira. Claiming they were “good for the baby,” the offerings first included sweetbreads and raw pancreas, but later included a RAW BRAIN? What. Hello? And, I’m sorry, I don’t care what these crazies claimed, that thing looked human. Which is probably why Vivien paused for three seconds before digging in. Fair enough. Demon baby gotta eat!

The other Vivien highlight involved her pursuit of the nurse who passed out during the sonogram last week. Hilariously enough, the nurse had quit her job and had become a full-time Catholic harpy, only agreeing to speak with Vivien in a church, then spouting Biblical verse (the scary verses) at Vivien as she fled. Spooky stuff! But basically, Vivien’s baby is the devil. Duh, everybody knew that.

In what represented a stand-alone plotline—and a terrific one at that—Modern Family‘s Eric Stonestreet guest-starred as Ben’s new patient, a man with a paralyzing fear of mirror-related urban legends, including Bloody Mary, Candyman and especially Piggy Man. Piggy Man was not as cute as he sounded! In a highly misguided attempt to help the patient deal with his fear of Piggy Man, it was hilarious when Ben took him upstairs (Vivien agreed to let Ben continue seeing patients in the house) and made him summon the Piggy Man in a haunted house. So obviously the dead nurse teenager made an appearance. And in an especially nasty punchline, the patient later attempted to deal with his fears in his own home, only to be gunned down by the ROBBER hiding in the shower who’d been offended at being called a pig. Normal stuff, basically.

A nice cap to the Constance storyline was when the medium character actually helped her get some closure with Adelaide. The mother and daughter-via-medium exchange included some touching words—tears were shed—about how much they loved each other and that Adelaide was indeed now a pretty girl in the afterlife. But one spooky addition: Adelaide said she was grateful she hadn’t died on the Murder House property because she knows the truth about Tate and doesn’t want to see him anymore. Haha how rude! No just kidding, Adelaide for President. Getting trapped in that joint seems pretty awful all around.

So if you haven’t yet noticed, I’m pretty conflicted about this episode. It’s been one of the best yet! It’s just that opening sequence left me so troubled. I don’t know, maybe I’ll come around on it, but for now I just wish I hadn’t watched it. It may not have been super bloody, but sometimes the scariest horror isn’t the blood but the concept. And that’s just one concept I’m not ready to be entertained by.

You know, when FX‘s nonsensical hour-long fever-dream nightmare montage called American Horror Story first premiered, I had no idea there would come a day when I would genuinely like it, or, more shockingly, be moved by it. But Wednesday’s episode, “Halloween, Pt. 2,” was just about as solid an hour TV as I can hope to experience every week. Now, nobody’s saying American Horror Story is on par with something as unimpeachably great as Breaking Bad, but fortunately it’s aiming to be something completely different. Growing less and less ludicrous by the week, this show has instead become an addictive exercise in dream logic and is in many ways just as upsetting, stressful, and fascinating as AMC’s highfalutin’ crown jewels. Believe me, I am just as shocked to be putting these opinions into writing as anyone else. Don’t make me regret this, Ryan Murphy!

This week’s harrowing, moving, and even cohesive episode picked up after last week’s cliffhanger, when Ben and Vivien returned from a bizarre sonogram session to find Violet missing and an undead Hayden pounding on the door. Well, it turned out Violet hadn’t been taken by the lurking gimp ghost and was instead whisked away to the beach for a romantic Halloween makeout session with Creepy Man Tate. Like a true goth heartthrob, he’d spray-painted a rose black for her and everything!

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Back at the house, Hayden quickly disappeared, leaving Ben jittery and an unaware Vivien focused on (1) taking a bath and (2) divorcing Ben, in that order. This left Ben with some time to confront Burnt-Face Larry in the back yard, and by “confront” I mean “hit in the face with a shovel.” For some reason Ben assumed that Hayden’s reappearance was all part of some kind of scheme Larry was using to con Ben? Not sure. It involved several preposterous leaps of logic that American Horror Story would prefer we didn’t dwell on. (Ben certainly didn’t.) To Larry’s credit, he DID laugh in Ben’s face over Ben’s refusal to face the supernatural reality of things… right before he begged Ben to kill him then and there “so I can come back and haunt you too.” Ben apparently just thought that was a metaphor or something.

Then, in the episode’s most amazing subplot, Tate and Violet were confronted by a handful of angry teens sporting highly realistic-looking gunshot wounds (not to mention some recognizable faces: Dexter‘s Brando Eaton, Awkward.‘s Ashley Rickards, and Caprica‘s Alessandra Torresani). Now, we were already fully aware of Tate’s school-shooting “fantasies,” and it was also safe to say by this point we knew that Tate was definitely a ghost. So the creeping dread that these angry teens were in fact Tate’s victims wasn’t as surprising as it was just generally upsetting. Because it was Halloween, these spirits were free to roam and they literally chased Tate down in order to shout at him about what he’d done to them. These kids were angry, hurt, and confused about their fates and merely wanted to know WHY he’d done what he’d done? These scenes just skirted the edge of tastelessness (the subject of school shootings probably isn’t the classiest thing to turn into a horror device), but they were surprisingly well-handled and easily as sad as they were terrifying. Also enlightening: One girl mentioned she’d be 34 today if it weren’t for him, so now we have a better understanding of how long Tate’s been dead (17 years or so).

The one bum note in this otherwise enthralling subplot was that Tate seemed to not remember the shooting and denied knowing who the kids were. It was understandable that he’d pretend to not know who they were when Violet was around, but then he continued to deny it when the dead kids had him all alone? They certainly seemed to remember the incident vividly (which included the infamous Columbine final question, “Do you believe in God?”), so at best Tate committed his crimes in a fugue state, but at worst he’s lying. What is there to lie about? They’re all ghosts! Anyway, this seemed like an emotional letdown from the intense scenes that led up to this point. Also, since all the important confrontations happened after Violet took off, she STILL doesn’t seem to suspect Tate’s dead (although his reluctance to let her feel under his shirt may have given her a clue that something’s up).

The meat of the episode involved Hayden getting her revenge on Ben by attempting to inform Vivien that Ben had knocked her up too. At first this entailed creepy phone calls and messages written on foggy mirrors, but then Hayden enlisted Burnt-Face Larry to help her knock Ben out and tie him up in the basement so that Hayden could have her run of the place, which included setting bath towels on fire and also this delightful dog-related incident:

Don’t worry, it ended up being tomatoes, but guess what wasn’t fake? Hayden confronting Vivien with a shard of broken glass and offering to “cut the baby out” of her. Because the Murder House can’t have that, it dispatched the original abortionist-homeowner’s wife to untie Ben and let him intervene. However Ben is awful at intervening, so it was fortunate for everyone that the handsome new Security Company rep (Morris Chestnut) responded to Vivien’s silent alarm and “arrested” Hayden just in time. (Fun fact: Ghosts can be arrested!) So then the immediate threat was over, but by that time all of the cats were out of all of the bags and it looked like Vivien and Ben were officially dunzo.

Meanwhile next door, a distraught Constance guilted Violet into joining her at the kitchen table for a cigarette and some reminiscing over the recently departed Adelaide. Call me a soft touch, but I started tearing up during her admiring descriptions of her daughter. It was a rare moment of decency for Constance. But then WHOOPS, that was nothing compared to the devastating montage of Constance crying while applying makeup to Adelaide’s placid face in the morgue. If that wasn’t one of the most insane and emotional images I’ve ever seen, I don’t even know what to tell you. Give Jessica Lange all of the awards, Emmys, Golden Globes, Oscars, soccer trophies, ALL OF THE AWARDS. This was such good stuff, and then it was punctuated by the casual revelation that Tate IS HER SON.

Now, again, we more or less guessed this already, but the moment still packed a punch, particularly in that it finally explained Constance’s bizarre connection to the Murder House and why she’d continue to live next door after having moved out so long ago (aside from her double homicide, that is). Also: I’m guessing that the reason Tate won’t speak to Constance has to do with the manner in which he died in the house, post-shooting?

Then the sun rose, thus ending the Halloween-enabled big day out for the various housebound ghostfolk. In a chilling but poetic moment, they all trudged through the neighborhood, returning to their spectral prison, including the dead twin gingers (twingers?) and the perpetually bitter gay ghosts Patrick and Chad, plus Moira, the abortionist’s wife, and even the teenage murder victims from the home invasion episode. Additionally, Hayden, riding in the backseat of the security guard’s patrol car, mysteriously vanished just as he prepared to turn her over to real cops. Get back under that gazebo, young lady!

So all in all, what proved to be a particularly terrible Halloween for the Harmon family ended up being a fairly awesome episode for us. I don’t know about you, but I’m already looking forward to NEXT Halloween. Hopefully by then Vivien will have remarried and adopted a better teen? Fingers-crossed!

QUESTIONS:

… How will the Murder House conspire to get Ben to stay?

… What DID the nurse see on that sonogram?

… Was Tate lying about remembering the shooting, or is there more to the story?

… Getting hit in the head with a shovel: Are you pro or con?

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