American Horror Story – Blue Moon

By: Kelly Kearney

In the penultimate episode baby fever hits the modern-day group of friends when Troy and Cal give birth. What follows is a shocking discovery that changes both their minds about being a willing part of this alien hybrid breeding program. Also in the episode, we get overrun by conspiracy theories as if Ryan Murphy opened the menu and said, “I’ll take one of everything.” From fake moon landings to politicians with dark and sometimes deadly secrets, this episode went above and beyond to make the viewers question everything they thought they knew. Chocked full of AHS Easter eggs and ties to earlier seasons, this episode was an intense ride through the past that left off with more questions than it answered.

The Birth of Area 51

We begin in the year 1959 as President Eisenhower (Neal McDonough) continues to morally struggle with the idea of allowing the alien race to use Americans like kidnapped guinea pigs. He doesn’t want to sign the treaty, but it is becoming clearer he doesn’t have a choice if he wants their advanced technology before the Russians can get their red hands on it. Not to mention his wife, Mamie (Sarah Paulson), whose body has been invaded by an alien life form and is now threatening to kill her if he doesn’t sign his name on the dotted line. Alien Mamie also reminds him of the little clause in the treaty which ensures he follows through with his promise to hand over five thousand American lives a year or else they will tell the country he kept this deadly secret from them. His job is to hand over the test subjects and pretend aliens do not exist and any breech of that contract will result in the end of Mamie and the end of any future Republican win for office. Agreeing to their demands and then reneging doesn’t hurt his political power much. Tthis is Ike’s last term, but it certainly prevents Nixon from a win if the Vice President chooses to run in the future. After much deliberation with Tricky Dick Nixon (Craig Sheffer) and his flying white eyed alien wife, Ike signs the treaty knowing the fate of America’s position in the Cold War and his wife’s life hang in the balance.

Now that an agreement has been made, the aliens return Mamie to her true party planning and political meddling form. They also send an alien spokesman, Valiant Thor (Cody Fern), to deliver the technology the President was promised and it is implied that it would one day lead to a handheld computerized phone device all Americans will own. Later Ike catches word that the aliens have already begun abducting people (three to be exact) and that includes a nine-year-old girl named Caroline Gibbons. It isn’t long before the President hears screams reverberating through the walls of the White House and he tracks the source to the basement. There he finds the young Gibbons girl hidden behind a secret door protected by a fingerprint scanner made from tech that has yet to be invented. Val is experimenting on the child and Ike cannot handle the horrors he’s witnessing, nor face the fact he is ultimately responsible for them. It disturbs him so much that Mamie suggests he move the entire operation to Area 51; and so the famous alien crash site that spawned the first conspiracy theory to grip the nation was born.

FLOTUS steps out and Troy steps up

Later that same night Ike hears his wife in the throes of moaning alien ecstasy and discovers his wife having sex with Valiant Thor, who she now just calls “Val.” Ike is understandably outraged, but Mamie tells him to cool his Presidential jets because Val isn’t even a real human so it can’t be cheating. Mamie is smart, unscrupulous and with a sex drive her general husband cannot apparently satisfy. On hearing her excuses for a Presidential pardon from their committed marital bed, Ike passes out from shock and when he wakes Mamie tells him it was all just a dream. However, for Ike it felt more like a nightmare.

As if finding your wife treating the alien visitor like her own hobby horse wasn’t bad enough, Nixon arrives at the White House with a tape of Marilyn Monroe (Alisha Soper) talking about the alien abductions and, you guessed it, Dick has a murderous plan to shut her up. Marilyn has a taste for booze and pills and Nixon thinks it would be a shame if she were forcibly overdosed before she could tell the world the alien truth, he knows JFK (Mike Vogel) revealed to her before he died. Just like John Kennedy, Nixon sees Marilyn’s existence as a threat to his future in the White House, so in the next scene we see two men break into the actress’ home and force her to take a deadly dose of pills and wash them down with a drink.

Flash forward to a meeting between now sitting President Lyndon Johnson (Karl Makinen), Eisenhower and his former right-hand man Nixon at Area 51. There in the Nevada desert the three leaders are greeted by Val who takes them to a warehouse filed with alien hybrid babies floating in jars. By now the program has resulted in tens of thousands of abductions, but are they any closer to making the perfect hybrid form? This question leads us into the future where the four pregnant college graduates are about to give birth to their own hybrids. Troy is (Isaac Powell) up first and when the labor pains start he is taken to the delivery room where his questions about how he will give birth are finally answered. It is a mostly pain-free C-section procedure and Theta (Angelica Ross) is on delivery duty. Once his baby is out of his body Theta notices the infant’s deformities and, ignoring Troy’s pleas to stop, she slaughters the infant and tells him he will have another chance to create the perfect being. Troy, who in the brief time he was pregnant, felt attached to that baby and is now mourning the little one’s brutal murder. When he is sent back to his friends a week later he and Cal (Nico Greetham) are both devastated over the fact that baby was perhaps the only child the two would ever have. Kendall (Kaia Gerber) and the others are desperate to know the details of the birth and as Troy fills them in Calico (Leslie Grossman) buts in and spills the truth: they are all being held at Area 51 and there is no escaping it. She’s been there since the late sixties and given birth to two or three “pups” per year. Also, like Troy’s kid, all of them were destroyed for their abnormalities. After this shocking story she takes the four friends to a room where she claims Stanley Kubrick shot the fake moon landing in 1969 and, unsurprisingly, the friends have questions.

Calico’s Story

In a flashback to 1969 we learn Calico accidently uncovered the faked moon landing when she ran into astronauts Buzz Aldrin (John Sanders) and Neil Armstrong (Bryce Johnson) in a bar when they should have been in space. With more than a few drinks under their belts, the two fly-boys tell Calico the whole “…leap for mankind” was ruse created by the famed director and now that she knows the truth, she will pay for it with her freedom. Almost immediately she is captured and taken to Area 51 where she is treated like the head bitch of the alien puppy mill and, sixty plus years later, she seems to be thriving in her captivity.

Back to the present and Cal starts to exhibit labor twinges and worries this baby is his last chance at a family with Troy and Theta will probably kill it like the others. He tries to hide his pain, but it becomes too overwhelming and Troy comes up with a plan. He will cut the baby out of Cal and the two can escape before they are even missed. They head to the moon landing set where Cal screams through the slice and dice, but once the baby is out daddy is tearfully overwhelmed. They finally have their little perfect baby. Well, perfect might be an overstatement since this kid was born with octopus tentacles that wrap themselves around Cal’s face just like Amelia Earhart’s did after she crash landed back to earth! Parenting is no picnic, but when your minutes old baby can kill you with it’s eight alien arms, there is no telling that amount of death it could unleash onto the world. Grounding this kid would never work so it looks like the Dads, if they survive their child’s first day post-man womb and Theta, who will surely notice they’re down one hybrid, will have their work cut out for them in the parenting department.