'American Horror Story: Freak Show': 'Edward Mordrake, Pts. 1 & 2,' 'Pink Cupcakes' [SPOILERS]

...in which the murdering serial-killer clown somehow

becomes a sympathetic figure — yet remains murderous

and serial-killery...

"Edward Mordrake, Pt. 1" set the stage for a few dark tales of redemption. The second half provided a very unexpected example of those tales, one that managed to turn what we all thought was this season's Big Badguy into a halfway-sympathetic figure and a ghost to boot.

Wes Bentley's bad-but-good accent — which I finally placed: Maid Marian from "Robin Hood: Men in Tights"... I figured it out between episodes and every time he spoke in "Pt. 2," I could only hear, "Oh Robin... I'm so heppay!" — and bad-but-good second face prosthetic were an effective method of exploring multiple characters' backstories, revealing their humanity, frailty and pain.

But Twisty's story was the best of all. My only issue is that, owing to his general demeanor and the dwarves' "Simpleton" nickname for him, Twisty is an intellectually-stunted man-child. The Twisty we were introduced to seemed to convey more intelligence and intent, which is a credit to John Carroll Lynch's ability to emote with only the top half of his face. But screw it, let's not quibble. 

Now it seems the true Big Badguy is dear ol' Dandy Mott, who started out pretty terrifying when he strapped on Twisty's mask (was I the only one expecting his immature side to cut through an otherwise-transformative moment and hear him go, "Oh God, that stinks!"). What wasn't so terrifying was the lazy "American Psycho" homage, which lacked only an overlong explanation of why Kay Starr's "Wheel of Fortune" is the perfect song for their day and age. (That is a fantastic song, by the way. I first heard it on the "L.A. Confidential" soundtrack. Kay Starr's whole catalog is pretty great.)

But even in his butchering of poor Andy — which will surely bring the finger-cracking wrath of Dell Toledo, Closet Strongman Who Has Yet to Perform Any Feat of Strength Onstage — Dandy was more of a morbid curiosity than a terror. He should have left the mask on when he came home to Mother. A blood-drenched Dandy with that cancerous grin would have been the perfect image to end the episode.

Back to Mordrake for a few moments. The cheesiness of the green fog aside, I have a few observations about his, and his gang's, brief run:

• Tall Skinny Black Dude is super-creepy.

• Mordrake's grainy-film-stock backstory was great.

• The rest of the gang has their gruesome injuries and retains their freak qualities — why does Twisty get his jaw back?

• Say it with me: I'm so heppay.

"Pink Cupcakes" was all about fantasy. In fact, it was SO much about fantasy that until I re-watched it, I wasn't really sure that Dandy killed Andy. I'm actually STILL not sure, because who the hell could 1) survive being stabbed in the chest and lungs several times, and in the heart at least twice, by my count... 2) then take another baker's dozen stabs in the back... 3) THEN, IF BY SOME NIGHTMARISH MEDICAL MIRACLE YOU'RE STILL ALIVE, NOT WAKE UP when the first of your arms gets sawed off? I mean, Dandy is shown coming home to Gloria at the end of the episode, so I presume the whole thing really happened. But this is Ryan Murphy, so... who knows?

Speaking of Ryan Murphy, is anyone else kind of surprised that all of the villains this season are basically closeted homosexuals? I'm taking a leap with Dandy — he may be asexual, for all I know — but Dell, Stanley... what's up with that? 

One thing I really liked is Elsa's realization that her talent — which is not all that great in the first place — is being wasted on south-Florida townies. Without the novelty and anachronism of its debut, her "Life on Mars" performance got revealed for what it was: an aging torch singer who's just kind of okay.

And I don't care what anyone says: Dandy is not as frightening as Twisty. Not now that he's essentially Patrick Bateman with a mask and a doting mother. But I don't think I'll ever get tired of Gloria Mott's grand acceptance of the perils of wealth. ("Cousins marry cousins to protect the money" ... "It becomes rite of passage to have a psychopath or two in the line... Jack the Ripper was a Windsor, for God's sake"... never change, Gloria).

I tire of Jimmy's self-loathing. Do something to avenge Meep or don't, Sonny Jim. What you probably don't need to do is finger-bang Angela Bassett right into the doc's office. That's not gonna end well. Desiree's discover of herself as 100% woman, her desire to "feel something" combined with her moving into Ethel's caravan is gonna drive her right into Jimmy's arms. 

And right into Dell's misplaced rage when he inevitably discovers that Andy is dead. I really, really hope Dandy dissolved the whole corpse, as horrible as that sounds.... I truly shudder to think what Dell might do if he finds it.

The denouement of the Mordrake episodes was surprisingly emotional. This week's episode picks up the tone the early installments established. But Twisty's absence was very noticeable, and most of the supporting cast, who have been woven rather well into all the episodes, were largely relegated to the background this week. I'm interested to see the Mott's plot to keep Dandy's habit under wraps ... I've learned not to put any stock in the teasers, so it's pretty hard for me to believe that all with all this talk of inbreeding, Gloria would want a two-headed daughter-in-law to have her grandbabies. 

Then again, the sixth episode is right about the time "Coven" started to run off the rails. Some of the hectic fantasy/reality editing and general weirdness of "Pink Cupcakes" had me feeling like this season may be starting to tilt and wobble. Time will tell.

'The Strain': Season 1 Review

 

'You wanted to find me, woodcarver..... here I am.......'

My feeling about the first full season of "The Strain" is, well… not to put too fine a point on it, but I felt strained myself most of the way. 

Let's hit some of the major problems: 

1) This is a vampire apocalypse show that never showed a vampire apocalypse. Our intrepid group of hunters went into the sewer and saw a room full of five-hundred to a thousand of them. Once the sun went down, wouldn't they all be roaming the streets? And then the next night, wouldn't there be at least TWICE that many? The show didn't show that. If it really is coming back for 2015, they need to bump the budget and show how New York City could really be overtaken by strigoi. I mean, once the first police officer survives an encounter with one, it's Army Ranger time in real life, right? 

2) There are things that work in a graphic novel, hardboiled dialogue in particular, that just don't work when you try to have real actors do it. But it's not restricted to dialogue. Certain devices that are acceptable in the comic and graphic novel worlds come off as lazy in real life. Setrakian's early-season entrance as a potential action-hero is a perfect example — what, was he just hiding in the basement, somehow unbeknownst to the little girl vampire, waiting for a chance to properly introduce himself to Eph and Nora?  

3) The Big Badass doesn't even scare my two-year-old son. Seriously. He sat there and watched The Master choke out Eph and barely batted an eye. That's not a good endorsement — of my parenting OR the special effects (in fairness, he wandered into the room unannounced). Here's hoping his suntan makes him good and burnt-up — and a little more fierce-looking — next season. 

4) Guillermo del Toro either wrote the World's Most Stereotypical Urban Latino Male, or he didn't challenge Chuck Hogan when Hogan wrote it. Either way, it's a bad look. I want to like Gus, but I find myself hating the things the script makes him say. I do like the path he's taking the show down, however. A little less conversation, a LOT more action. People decried his "I'm listening" response as more stereotypical gangsterism, but I'd argue it's true to his character: he was going to rob Creem for money and weapons, presumably to kill his way out of town. It's clear that Quinlan and the SWAT team aren't going to just let him go, so why not keep doing the killing he was already gonna be doing and get paid in the meantime? And anyway, as soon as the sun comes up, he can still skip town if he wants. 

5) FIND A 45-YEAR-OLD ARMENIAN TO PLAY MIDDLE-AGED SETRAKIAN. Enough with this community-theater old-man makeup bullshit. I imagine the flashbacks are mostly over, except for probably a few detailing the start of Eph's alcoholism. Boo. 

6) The entire first season turned out to be merely the setting of the table, all told. I'm familiar enough with the basic trilogy storyline to know they weren't going to get The Master, or stop the vampocalypse, but I'm struggling to think of one single storyline that's truly resolved, outside of the woeful tales of Jim the Coward and the Chain-Smoking Madre. 

7) Every character, at some point, makes a decision that is irredeemably dumb, with maybe the exception of Fet.  

8) Eph: "So, if sunlight doesn't kill him, then what does?" — well, you could have PUT A SILVER BULLET IN HIS HEAD AS SOON AS YOU SAW HIM. I'll grant you that breaking out the windows was a good idea, because [at least we thought at the time] there was no place for him to escape but [certain death] outside. Then again… 

9) The entire "big confrontation" choreography was horrible, and poorly plotted. For all of his hunting advice, Setrakian got in one good slice on the arm and then pretty much froze up. Lots of wide-eyed staring and not a lot of lifelong-grudge-indulging or wife-revenging (same with Eph: why, when their immortal enemy tumbled into the sunlight, did they not both rush up and hack him to pieces? At least cut his feet off, I mean damn!) 

10) The Worm Problem: Kelly ground a Cuisinart blade into her boyfriend's face and a worm squirted onto her eye… Fet blows up a sewer tunnel full of strigoi and then they walk right through a room where every surface should be covered by worms desperately seeking a new host… Dutch headshots a vampire two feet away from Eph and Zack and no one gets any worms on them… Eph does the same thing 30 seconds later, and then that vampire jerks her worm-juicing head wound forward within six inches of Zack… and no one gets infected. But that's not a scripting problem, that's just basic ignorance of physics. WIth all of the scientific gobbledygook the first half of the season threw at us, there was never any discussion of how long these worms can survive outside of a host. Eph had some in an blood-free glass cube and they looked to be surviving just fine. Setrakian kept a jar of them alive for more than half a century on, presumably, a couple drops of blood every once in a while. If being infected turns you into an immortal strigoi, it stands to reason that, absent death by UV exposure, these worms can survive indefinitely and crawl around looking for a new host. I would've loved to see a scene in the sewer-storming episode where a worm crawls out of a decapitated strigoi, up through a sewer grate and into someone's shoe. 

11) Too much is telegraphed. Did we really need a thirty-second "scene" of Eph handing the pawn-shop keys to Zack? OOOOH, I WONDER IF HE'S GOING TO LEAVE THE SHOP? The dialogue telegraphs a lot as well. These are all pretty good actors. They can convey the conflicts and emotions of their characters without speechifying all the time. Nora's scream when she had to chop her mother's head off was horrifying; Eph's whispered, teary-eyed "No," when Strigoi Kelly came to the back porch was heartbreaking. I didn't need all of their handwringing asides and private conversations to build up to those moments. 

12) The Wig. No need to beat a dead horse. Let's just pause to recognize that at times, it looked like Fizzgig from "The Dark Crystal," and it's a gots-to-go situation. And that Strigoi Fizzgig would be awesome. He's already got the full-tilt jaw! 

And yet despite all this, I'm still totally on board for season two. The enticing promise of a true fully-budgeted NYC vampocalypse, with Quinlan and Gus wreaking havoc, Fet blowing shit up and Nora taking over as the new Chain-Smoking Latina is too tempting. Now that the vast majority of main characters has been introduced, the new chapter should be able to delve right into the shiznit. I'm interested to see how Alonzo Creem fits into the story, because they didn't just cast Marlo Stanfield for a one-and-done season. If he joins up with Gus's daywalker Strike Team, that's great, but I also wouldn't say no to him firing a stinger out from between those chromed-out grills. Given that he still tried to shoot Gus even with a shipping crate full of strigoi coming at him, he seems the type, as Quinlan might say, to maybe want a little revenge.

Overall, I think this show would have benefited from more of the quiet moments that FX's "The Bridge" has worked into its run so far: showing rather than telling and building out the world of the show rather than having characters lay their motivations bare in boring ways. I both liked and disliked the "Kelly Transformation" episode. I liked its focus on Kelly's gradual, pretty frightening change without a lot of expository dialogue. What I really would have liked, though, was to see it happen in real time along with the show's other ongoing events, rather then a flashback. The show wanted to tease out the mystery of did-she-escape-or-is-she-turned, but we all knew she was gonna be turned. 

In the season-ending voiceover — boo — Setrakian revealed that the entire first season happened over the course of one week. Earlier in the season, he also revealed that once turned, strigoi would be "fully formed" in one month. That would be the perfect time to drop in for the start of the second season. Check in with everyone, show how they're handling the new-and-improved bloodsuckers... show me an extra-crispy Master that'll force me to stop the DVR the next time my son wanders downstairs... show me more Eichorst, who so far, BY far, is the best villain on this show... show me Corey Stoll's bald dome... for that matter, show me Zack's, too, let's get rid of that stupid 1979 haircut.

I just can't quit you, "The Strain." You have too much potential.

Would You Read This Book?

So, based on the following description - which I've patterned after what you'd generally find on a book jacket - would you read this story? I've been working on a novel for a couple years now, and my recent tenuous employment situation has allowed me the time to finally wrap it up. I am editing it right now, and will be shopping it to publishers ASAP. But I'm trying to gauge potential reader interest, so let a brother know. The working title is Chupacabra:

Southern Delaware is just the right place for homicide detective Jack Trappone. He traded in hundreds of murders a year in his native Baltimore for the relatively sleepy streets of Redden Lake, where he spends his days fielding complaints about the town's illegal immigrants and occasionally catching a case. But lately, his days and nights are getting darker. A dangerous gang is making inroads into the local drug market. A strangely-dressed, badly mutilated body has turned up in the woods, and some folks in the Hispanic neighborhood think it is the work of the supposedly fictional 'chupacabra.' As he investigates the case, Jack will join the residents of Redden Lake in following the rabbit-hole deeper than they can imagine, into a terrifying new world where their nightmares are real enough to touch.