American Horror Story – Gaslight

By: Kelly Kearney

We are almost done with Double Feature’s part one Red Tide and “Gaslight” hit a homerun when it came to mixing horror with emotional trauma. After falling down the stairs in episode three, Doris has been riding out the rest of her pregnancy in a Hyannis hospital bed and this week she finally welcomes the newest Gardener to the pack. As you can imagine, things don’t go as smoothly as Doris had hoped when she returns to Provincetown and finds Ursula moved in and Alma more determined than ever to get rid of her. We also check in with Mickey and TB Karen and discover the black pill to stardom has driven a wedge between these two stars crossed friends and possible lovers. Can their bond outlast Mickey’s desire for fame? Let’s dive in and find out!

Eli

After a difficult pregnancy wrought with emotional upheavals in her final month, Doris (Lily Rabe) gives birth to a healthy baby boy they name Eli. It’s a name we can all hope was not given in honor of the biblical Eli who was cursed by God so that no son of his loins would live to see adulthood. Considering Alma (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) turned out to be a gifted homicidal sociopath, Eli is the last hope for normalcy in this family, so we hope this tyke makes it to old age. After labor and delivery Doris finds out Harry (Finn Wittrock) never took Alma back to New York like he promised and, instead, she and baby Eli will be returning to Provincetown until Harry is finished his next project. Let’s hope it is better than his current project of squeezing the labor juices out of the hospital linens and making himself a blood cocktail. This man has lost all sense of humanity as he slurps down the gory remnants of his son’s first day post-womb.

After that not-so-delicious treat, Doris and Eli arrive home to find Ursula (Leslie Grossman) has moved in to help out, but in reality the only thing she is helping with is Alma and Harry’s plot to gaslight her into clueless submission while they drink dry the neighboring towns. The manipulation ploy work as Doris starts questioning what she is seeing and hearing in her own house, not to mention the obvious “hand that rocks the cradle” vibes wafting off of Ursula who is more than happy to take the new mother’s place. It’s not that Ursula has a maternal bone in her body, it’s that she is money driven and has been working overtime to keep her eyes on rising star Alma, who coincidently has been keeping her own eyes focused on her brother and the sounds of his little beating heart. Alma can sense it as the blood pumps through his baby veins and it’s why it’s not a shocking surprise when later that night Doris finds her precious daughter sucking the blood from Eli’s foot! Of course, with the gaslighting in full effect, Alma does a decent job of getting Doris to question what she saw, which leaves poor Eli at the mercy of Harry who is livid when he hears what his daughter has been up to. Eli is off limits and if she drinks from her brother again Harry is pulling Alma off the bloody sauce!

Speed Racer and the Painter

Next, we catch up with Mickey (Macaulay Culkin) who seems to be living the sweet life when he rolls through town in a flashy new sports car given to him for research in his Speed Racer reboot script. Thanks to Ursula his career is in overdrive and he’ll soon be heading to Los Angeles where he hopes TB Karen (Sarah Paulson) will join him. His support of Karen’s talent has never wavered and he thinks now is the perfect time for her to shine and hopes she will agree to do it by his side. “A power couple” hitting the West Coast scene is how he sees them and offers her a black pill so she can take that ride. The problem is, unlike Mickey and Belle Noir, Karen doesn’t create for fame and fortune. She does it because she loves art and the feelings it emanates inside of her. The price of the black pill stardom isn’t worth it. In fact, she is so disgusted by Mickey’s offer that, in her best TB Karen screech, she demands he pull his new ride over and let her out on the side of the road.

Back to the Gardeners, and after Alma was caught drinking from the baby tap to aid her in mastering a difficult violin piece, we start to realize what is truly driving this pint-sized killer and that’s the abhorrent hatred of mediocrity. She believes her mother is holding her and Harry back from their ultimate success. She has no use for the woman who gave her life and starts to think taking hers is the only answer to Alma and Harry’s happiness. Maybe she was born with this contempt for the average or maybe it was Ursula who pumped these ideas in her head. After all, the publicist has a lot to gain from keeping Doris in the dark about the black pills since her ultimate plan is to profit off of a world-wide wholesale of inspiration. She even doubles down on Alma’s accusations that Doris is a talentless hack and says her sad lack of creativity won’t hinder her lifestyle now that Harry is the new “it man” in Hollywood. It’s as offensive as it sounds, not that Doris has much energy to fight her on this. She is a sleep-deprived mother getting gaslit by her entire family and now Ursula, too. Something has to give or Doris and Eli won’t survive Harry’s next script. Speaking of Harry, he returns from a bloodletting with a snack for Alma, assuming this will curb her thirst for family. He seems satisfied with keeping Alma fed as long as it gives him time to crank out scripts and keeps Doris upstairs and out of the picture. Unfortunately, his daughter has other ideas when she offers to take her mother her pills but slyly slips a black one into the mix. Doris catches on and drama ensues when she screams to Harry that their first born is trying to kill her. She now knows what’s in those pills and she is devastated Alma tried to dose her without her consent. Grabbing Eli and nothing else, the terrified woman flees from their home only to be confronted by the Pale Fail People in the street. Harry runs after her and, thanks to his black pilled turn, the Pales leave Doris alone making it clear her and Eli’s safety depends on Harry since “they can’t hurt you as long as you’re with me.” Not only is Doris trapped in this town of parasitic beach combers from Hell, but she is also trapped in her proximity to Harry and a child who would happily feed her to the Pales on a child’s whim. Things are not looking good for the new mom.

It’s also not looking good for TB Karen, who is enjoying her day painting on the beach when she is rudely interrupted by the harshest art critic in town, Belle Noir (Frances Conroy). Belle has a job for TB Karen and, you guessed it, it has “new kid in town” written all over it. Belle heard Doris gave birth and newborn blood is the tastiest elixir going. It’s the proverbial fountain of youth, when the blood fountain actually comes from the youngest youth in town! TB Karen wants no part of Sarah’s infanticidal hunger pains and refuses to steal baby Eli, but is then reminded of how the only thing standing between Karen’s sad life and the Pales tearing her apart is Belle. That message is driven home when said Pales show up in all their jerky disjointed glory. Like Doris, Karen is stuck between death or bending a knee to it, and it’s not a choice either seem to be able to escape.

Blood in the water

This takes us back to the Gardeners, who seem to be moving on from Doris and her “post-partum issues” with finishing the design job she was hired to do. Enter Holden Vaughn (Denis O’Hare) who Harry invites to the house to step in for Doris, who never asked for any help with her design in the first place. It is just another attempt at pushing her to the side while also questioning her talent, as if she doesn’t get enough of that from her husband and first spawn.

Speaking of questioning talent, Karen, who probably feels bad about how she left things, stops by Mickey’s as he is packing up for Los Angeles. Once again, he offers her the passenger seat in her best friend’s new ride to Hollyweird but she still not taking those pills, no matter how much she seems to love her Speed Racer buddy. He tells her the pill will protect her from Sarah and her Pale goons, but at what cost? Becoming the very thing she needs protection from? Karen is livid and throws Mickey’s pills on the floor and then asks him to help her steal Doris’ baby and hide him from Sarah instead. She wants to save that kid before Sarah hires someone else to serve her Eli for dinner. Mickey questions what Karen is planning on doing with a baby since her normal days are dumpster diving for snacks and smoking meth. She tells him she hoped he would raise the baby with her, and it would be a jumping off point for a new drug-free life for the both of them. There is just one problem, Mickey already has a new life and it’s a flashy one that he isn’t about to give up for Daddy duty with TBK. Nevertheless, he seems to love this phlegmy volatile woman so he begrudgingly agrees to steal baby Eli with her before Sarah can turn the kid into a Slurpee. And it couldn’t happen soon enough because things at the Gardener house went from bad to so much worse when Alma manages to manipulate her mother’s weakest spot: her self-esteem. The girl tempts Doris with a black pill by saying it is the key to her own design career success. She can be like her husband and daughter and filled with creativity if she just says yes! Alma does an excellent job at homing in on her mother’s insecurities until Doris breaks down and agrees to try it. She takes the pills and just as Alma was hoping, they start to turn her mother into one of those pale fail cretins. Her lack of talent means an almost instant change, which is shockingly revealed when Mickey and Karen break in to steal Eli. Doris’ hair is almost gone, and her skin’s pallor is diminishing into a color of a pasty parasitic anemic. Karen takes one look at the woman’s freaky skull-let (bald on top, long and flowy in the back) and takes off without the baby or Mickey by her side. It was a mistake because a pack of Pales are waiting out front of the house to surround her. When Mickey shows up to save the day, he, once again, offers her an out by taking a pill but she is steadfast in her refusal and even tells him those things made him “not human” whatever that means. As the Pales draw closer to the duo, Mickey hands TB Karen a pill and abandons her to the mercy of the killers, forcing her to take the drug rather than be eaten alive.

Over at the Gardeners, what’s left of Doris’ humanity is sitting at the bottom of her bathroom sink. After cutting off the remnant strands of her skull-let, she picks up the pair of scissors and heads to Eli’s room. The temptation to feed is overwhelming but Harry finds her before she can kill the baby and locks her in the bathroom to keep Eli safe. Screaming and pounding on the door, Harry is confused, and a bit freaked out knowing it cannot contain her forever. He goes from distraught to irate when he learns Alma was the one who gave the pill to her mother, and current babysitter Ursula did nothing to stop her.

As the episode draws to a close, we are left with the destruction of two women who only ever wanted to do the art they loved regardless of the whether or not they were talented enough to do it. We find Karen and Mickey at the beach where he tells her she needs to feed to stay alive. If she meant it when she said earlier that she didn’t want to die, then it is a soul crushing shock for viewers when we are forced to witness the strongest character in the show give up and give in to her suicidal tendencies. With hunger pains gripping her every thought and her best friend heading to California while she stays in P-town to manage the fall out of her black pilled choices, Karen does the unthinkable and consumes Mickey! Tearing his throat out, she kills the one person she trusted the most, but like she said earlier, she no longer sees him as human and thus, ripe for the drinking! High on the juice, Karen fanatically paints her masterpiece, proving her dead friend right, she is a natural talent. Too bad she never cared about the fame Mickey was hungry for because without him and her humanity there is nothing left for Karen. She will not kill to live. So, with her work left for future generations to enjoy, she walks to the water’s edge and slits her wrists. As the saline sea mixes with the life pouring out from her veins, Karen walks into the water and gives her life over to the ocean’s landscape she loved to paint. It’s a scene filled with the sort of emotionally tangent pain that can only be felt by a brilliant performer like Sarah Paulson, who managed to turn this vile woman, Tuberculosis Karen, into this sympathetic anti-hero and the soul of the story.

Karen isn’t the only woman in need of some sympathy from viewers, Doris has gone full Pale and now gets to listen to her husband’s man-pain confessionals through the bathroom door. According to Harry, he always saw himself as a family man, but that was just a cover up for his professional failures. Now, he has fully embraced his art and that means he has no use for the former persona he tried wear. With that piping hot spilled tea, Harry releases Doris into the wild where she is forced to live with the rest of the Pale Fails, feasting on whatever wildlife scraps or clueless tourist she finds. Which leads us to the final scene of the episode where we see Alma and Ursula on their way to the Chemist to pitch her on a plan for black pill distribution across the planet when they spot a bloody-faced Doris eating a rabbit in the graveyard. For a brief second Doris has a glimpse of recognition for the daughter who cursed her to this life, but it only lasts a moments before she returns to her meal. The sight of her hunched over and ripping a bunny apart seems to effect Alama in some way, not that she verbalizes it to Ursula, who mocks the girl’s mother for how she squandered the good life Harry made for her. What comes of Alma’s reaction, how it manifests, and what the Chemist’s ultimate plans are, we will have to wait and see in next week’s wrap up of part one of AHS’s Double Feature.