Last week’s huge twist on American Horror Story: Roanoke proved to be exactly what the season needed, and it’s helped save this season from the typical mediocrity of the average American Horror Story midseason. As we wait to see which of our characters will survive the remaining episodes, let’s take a look at this week’s new episode, “Chapter 7.”
The episode opens with Sidney watching Dominic’s arrival on the cameras that he’s got set up in the house, and it’s completely clear that he think’s Return to Roanoke is going to be his next hit. Before long, though, Rory’s stabbing (from the end of last week’s episode) takes place, and it leads to a series of very unfortunate events with death playing a huge role. The coolest thing about the twist (or one of the coolest things) is that the entire feel of the season is different than it was before. For the first half of the season, there were no real stakes. We knew Matt, Shelby, and Lee survived their experience in Roanoke, and all of the actors “experiencing” the horrors were just part of reenactments — they weren’t going to die. Now, though, we not only see that death is happening at a rapid pace, but we know that the reaper is going to find all but one of the characters before the story is done. We went from no stakes to incredible stakes, and Roanoke is benefiting tremendously.
Back at the house, nobody is able to find Rory. Matt insists that the “R” in the wall’s “MURDER” message is for Rory, but the actors brush it off as nothing important. They do end up finding a pool of blood upstairs, but Audrey thinks it’s just Rory playing a joke on them to go take the job that he was offered in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Agnes is completely deluded by her Butcher persona (obvious after the opening scene), and it’s clear that something is affecting her in an unexpected way. During this time, we get an incredible monologue from the incomparable Kathy Bates, and she is standing out at the real MVP of Roanoke. She’s been great throughout her entire time on American Horror Story (particularly in Coven), but her turn as Agnes/The Butcher here is easily her best to date.
If the stakes are the most impressive result of the season’s twist, the second most impressive is easily pacing. For the first time, American Horror Story hasn’t had a problem with pacing all season, but this second half is some of the quickest and most satisfying storytelling on television. The stakes angle plays toward that a lot (killing all of the characters in four episodes tends to do that), but the writers really deserve a lot of credit for the story that they’re crafting in Roanoke. The horror, too, is absolutely incredible now, and it’s really setting Roanoke apart from the five seasons that came before. One of my new favorite sequences on American Horror Story is when Audrey, Lee, and Monet encounter what they initially believe to be Rory in the secret escape tunnels below the house, and it proves once again that found-footage horror is not even close to dead.
This week’s episode is absolutely insane, but it’s so clear that this is the best season American Horror Story has ever produced. After five seasons of a formula that (while I personally appreciated it) started to get incredibly stale, Roanoke is exactly what this series needed.
What did you think of this week’s new episode of American Horror Story: Roanoke? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!
[Photo Credit: FX]
