Recapping AHS: You’ve Got the Cutest Little Bloody Face

As we begin, Jude is out of the habit and arriving at the apartment of a Mr. Goodman at the urging of Mother Claudia following last week’s conversation. Jude asks Goodman if he requires payment, but he demurs saying he sees what he does as a calling. Jude gives the man, clearly a Nazi hunter, the lowdown on Arden. Goodman tells Jude about Operation Paper Clip and says that if Arden is indeed a former Nazi doctor, he’ll have a tattoo of his blood type on his bicep. In the asylum, Anne has dragged Arden by gunpoint to Sister Eunice. She demands to see Jude, but is stopped by Frank the security guard.

Act I! Jude is waiting over a sedated Anne in her cell, something she has a tendency to do. Anne tells Jude to check Arden’s lab for the “monster” that she saw there. Arden has been taken to the hospital, so Jude doesn’t have much time. Jude has already done this, but found nothing, certainly not Shelly. Meanwhile, Anne’s husband has arrived. He reports that her real name is Charlotte and that she started acting strange after their son was born, reading Anne Frank’s diary and seeing a play about her. Charlotte even went so far as to tattoo her own arm with an Auschwitz number and filling a room with newspaper clippings about the Nazis.  Dr. Thredson overhears this and suggests that it sounds like post-partum depression. Jude agrees that Anne should be returned to her home and kept out of the asylum. Anne is brought to the lobby, but insists that she doesn’t know her husband and that she really is Anne Frank. Once her husband shows her a picture of her with their infant son, however, she begins to remember and allows herself to be escorted out. Something tells me she’ll be back. Thredson, meanwhile, wants to know why Jude is going to sterilize Kit and Grace.  Jude is all Whatever, my house, my rules. In their separate cells, Kit and Grace try to comfort each other. Kit says that Alma always wanted kids, so this sterilization thing is, like, harsh, yo! Grace says no one is to blame but Jude, who Grace thinks is the devil. Cue Sister Eunice’s sudden arrival. Very sly, show! Eunice tells Kit that Jude has changed her mind and that he will not be sterilized, however Grace is not going to be so lucky. As Kit is released from solitary, Grace screams and cowers in her room. As the night drags on and she is left alone, a bright light appears at her door, shaking everything.

"Get away from her, you bitch!  Oh, sorry - wrong movie. Carry on."

Act II! Thredson tells Lana to be ready to leave at 6pm in the lobby. He then goes to Kit for another session, bringing along a tape recorder. He tells Kit that maybe if he heard his own voice recounting his crimes, that will trigger his memory of what really happened. Ummm…’kay. Anyway, Kit agrees and begins to make a recording. Meanwhile, Grace is strapped naked to a table somewhere very white with an extremely pregnant Alma who tells her not to fight. Suddenly there are aliens cutting into Grace’s abdomen as she screams. In her office, Jude’s Nazi theory about Arden has taken a hit with the revelations about Anne. Arden has returned using a cane with a wolf’s head to walk with. Jude attempts to apologize and start afresh with him, but he tells her that he’s going to press charges against her, claiming that her ineptitude caused his injury and that he will demand of Monsignor that she be removed from the asylum. Arden retreats to his rooms to change the bandage on his leg and finds Eunice waiting for him. She offers to help, apologizing for her sexy talk previously and then getting down on her knees in front of him because Sister got GAME, you guys! Eunice admits she was the one who dragged Shelly out of the lab and into the woods before she could be found. Eunice believes once Jude is gone, Arden will take over and he’ll need a strong right hand. At that moment, in a local schoolyard, a little girl hears wheezing coming from down a stairwell behind the school. When she looks down into it, she sees a mutated Shelly crawling toward her.

In fairness, her left side is her better one.

Act III! Anne is being dragged back into the asylum. CALLED IT! Apparently she didn’t take to civilian life too well and tried to smother her colicky son with a pillow. Anne’ husband wants Thredson to look at Anne again. This is horrible timing, because guess who is waiting for Thredson in the lobby to spirit her away to freedom? Lana makes her escape while Thredson distracts the front door guard with a cigarette, which just goes to show how lax the security is at Briarcliff. Back at Anne’s cell, her husband comes across Arden who is just leaving it. Arden tells him that there is a way to make Anne “a new woman” and it can be done right away – transorbital lobotomies, anyone? Yes, that’s the one where they shove an ice pick into your eye to sever the tissue in your brain. In his lab, Arden straps Anne down and sedates her while her husband watches nervously. With a confident flick, Arden hammers the pick into Anne’s eye socket. Jude, meanwhile, is praying in her room when Frank the guard tells her that Lana has gone missing. Jude recounts a story from her childhood about trying to keep a baby squirrel as a pet because she was lonely, only to have it die despite Jude’s hours of praying for it. When young Jude asked her mother why God didn’t answer her prayers, mother said through a glass of whiskey that God always answers prayers, just not how we expect. Jude knows her time at the asylum is over and Jessica Lange just nails this scene as per usual. She removes her habit and puts on civilian clothes, does her hair and heads off the local bar where a man buys her a drink. 

Man, when Jude falls off the wagon she really skydives off that sucker, huh?

Act IV! Thredson has brought Lana to Don Draper’s house his swanky apartment. He says they’ll go to the cops in the morning and blow the lid off Braircliff, but Lana must not contact anyone in the meantime since he technically has broken the law getting her out of there. Lana accepts a glass of wine that he has poured her as Thredson says she’s going to win a Pulitzer for writing about this and how she’s the perfect one to tell his story. Right about this time, Lana notices that the lampshade next to her has…um…nipples. And the mint dish on the table looks like a hallowed out cranium. Um… Lana needs to find the bathroom. She heads down the hall, checking for unlocked doors and only finding one – it’s a cross between torture chamber and hobby desk. Thredson finds her and says he uses it to make furniture, lamps mostly. Using skin. He presses a button and the floor underneath Lana gives out, plunging her into a dungeon. Back in the asylum, Grace is found on a chair in the common room, bleeding from between her legs. The cops come to arrest Kit, saying Thredson gave them his taped confession. Grace screams that Alma is alive! Back on the set of the movie Saw Thredson’s basement torture room, Lana awakens chained to the floor with Wendy’s corpse next to her. Thredson says he would normally have removed Wendy’s skin and head, but he wanted her fresh for Lana. He asks Lana to kiss Wendy’s lips, which has built into his mask of human skin. Yup, Thredson is Bloody Face. In the morning, Jude wakes up in a cheap motel next to the man from the bar and Anne has turned into a Stepford wife, making pot roast and preparing martinis. She’s cleaned up all of Nazi clippings and is throwing them away. We see one of the pictures is of Hitler addressing a crowd. Hey, who’s that very Arden-looking guy standing next to Adolph in the picture?

Next week! The devil in Sister Eunice…