American Horror Story – Pale

By: Kelly Kearney

Picking up right where we left off in the first hour Harry’s writing mojo kicks into frenzied turbo gear after he swallows Austin’s inspiration drug and finishes his manuscript in one night. It isn’t long before he starts to crave the unthinkable and realizes the price he will have to pay to remain at the top of his game. Success and fame come with a price but is Harry, and his wife Doris, ready to pay for it in blood?

Black Pills, Red Blood and the Blinding Lights of Success

After popping one of Austin’s (Evan Peters) creativity pills, Harry (Finn Wittrock) starts to notice the effects immediately. Visions of his manuscript invade his mind until he has no other choice but to pound the keys long into the night and shelve his family’s move back to NYC for a later date. Doris (Lily Rabe), who is concerned with her husband’s obsessive click-clacking of keys, tries to get her Harry to take a break long enough to eat a sandwich but for some reason everything he tastes is rancid. His behavior is concerning but Doris chalks it up to the quirks of artistry. However, she does worry his attitude could be rubbing off on their child prodigy. Speaking of Alma (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), she is still struggling to find her inspiration as she hacks away at that impossible Paganini piece and confides in her mother that she saw her father take some sort of drug, maybe Adderall, and it could be the reason for his mania. When Harry tells his wife he finished his manuscript in four hours she accuses him of taking speed and it kicks off an argument between the two. Harry lies, saying he didn’t take any drug and then accuses Doris of not understanding how hard it is to be successful since she is…well…not.  OUCH! Doris lashes out and tells Harry she does not feel he respects her career; everything is about him and his need to write a hit. Their anger escalates into screaming match, when Alma interrupts to throw cold water on Harry’s heat by outing him on the drug she saw him take. Boiling over with furious rage, Harry turns on his daughter and verbally cuts her down; accusing her of being jealous of his talent because she can’t even get through a simple concerto. His vitriolic attack is over the line, even for him, and he immediately apologizes to the triggered girl, but the damage is already done. She and her mother storm off upstairs and Harry gets back to work. It isn’t until the next morning when he finally takes a break to eat a sandwich Doris insists, he eat since he has not left the computer in a full day. He takes a bite and immediately spits it out because the turkey, which Doris made sure was fresh, he claims is now rancid. To please his overly concerned wife, Harry agrees to a trip to the grocery store to buy something edible for breakfast but all he seems to want is red meat; the rarer the better. On the walk there he runs into a twitching pack of Pales, who at first seem interested in his delicious smell, but the closer they get the more turned off they are. Apparently, the turkey wasn’t the only spoiled meat served for breakfast.

With a cart full of bloody steaks, Mikey (John Lacy) the shop owner makes a comment about Harry finally getting over his writer’s block. Boy, the rumors spread fast in this town, but maybe it is more like his shopping list ousted him? Tuberculosis Karen (Sarah Paulson) seems to think so because she takes one look at all the vegan nightmares he’s buying and starts screaming about him taking the pill. “You never knew thirsty before now,” she yells and, sure, TB Karen might be five-packs of crazy a day, but our girl screeches the truth! Harry was an idiot for taking some random drug from a guy he knew for one day. Now, he is craving beef tartare and wondering if this means he is turning into one of those Pale blood sucking people. He’ll get to that fact finding mission in a minute, but first it’s bloody smoothie time. That’s right, when Harry gets home he blends up the meat he bought and chugs it down like a five-star meal. You’ve been warned, vegans! As if that is not gruesome enough, when Doris cuts herself chopping carrots, Harry pauses his manuscript bragging to dive across the kitchen and suck the blood straight from her finger-tap. It’s enough to freak them both out and send Harry back to Austin to find out exactly what was in that pill.

“There’s Nothing More Addicting than Success”

Later that day Harry meets with Austin’s at the playwright’s house for a drink and the truth about the drug he was given. As the story goes, it all started with a mysterious person locals called “The Chemist” (Angelica Ross) who took a bit of this and a bit of that and threw in a pinch of methamphetamine, and voila! The inspiration pill was born. There is just one catch though, Austin explains, it only works on people with natural born talent. People like Harry and romance novelist, Sarah (Frances Conroy), get the full of effects of the artisanal overload. If someone lacking in talent takes the pill it turns them into the twisted ghouls “always thirsty but never satisfied” Pale People. Harry, obviously, has nothing to worry about because he turned out a killer script and still has all his hair and a decent tan. He is in no danger of turning into one of those Nosferatu looking inspiration suckers…except for the fact he has to drink blood to keep the creative juices flowing. When Austin handed him that drug, he forgot to mention it depletes four major minerals in the human body and the only way to replenish them is by drinking blood – and not his meat smoothies, but human blood. Horrified by this discovery, Harry says he will never kill for his art, until he sits down to write and his mind draws a blank. He is no longer filled with ideas to pour out of his brain and onto the keyboard and now he needs a fix. Talk about setting a bad example for his kid. Alma is already asking her mother if she can take her father’s pill to help boost the little violinist to stardom, but Harry is too consumed with his own addictions to notice her problems. Especially after his agent, Ursula (Leslie Grossman), calls with the good news: the manuscript was a hit and Joaquin Phoenix signed on to be the leading man! The drug might be out of Harry’s system, but the creative withdrawal hits him hard now that he knows the pills are crucial to his continued success. After struggling to write a single sentence, he heads to Austin’s to score some more pills. There he sees Sarah and the karaoke duo gives him what he came for and then invites him to dinner. And, you guessed it, it’s not at any of the local restaurants. On their way to hunt for food Sarah explains the rules all the P-town bloodsuckers follow. First rule of parasitic culture: only eat in the winter months. Lucky for them, they have an all-you-can-eat menu of losers in the local Craigslist ads. The dregs of society nobody will miss are always the easiest to spot because they are usually the ones selling stolen goods to fund their opioid habits. Typically, Austin and Sarah will split one human’s life fluids which gives them a week of sustenance before they have to feed again. Sarah also supplements her weekly meals with volunteers like Mickey (Macaulay Culkin) who are willing to cut a vein for the right price.  The two see themselves as some sort of community street clean-up crew, cleansing the region of its undesirables. As long as they wear gloves and kill outside of the Provincetown city limits, Sarah says they’re golden. In the past, they used to be able to dine in-town but ever since Chief Burleson (Adina Porter) joined the force, they have been forced to stick to the outskirts to avoid an arrest.

Etu, Mickey?

Across town Mickey lets TB Karen stay in his cabin and the two talk movies and the Cape Cod horror classic JAWS. Mickey, who admits he has written five unfinished screenplays of his own, is a walking film encyclopedia. His guest is smitten until he shows her the little black pills he has been carrying around in his pocket. On brand Tuberculosis Karen freaks out and snatches the pills from his hands, reminding him of how those things turn people into killers. She cannot watch her only friend turn into one of those Pale fails. Her care for him doesn’t go unnoticed. In fact, he seems to feel the same way about her too and shows her how much when he points to the stack of Karen’s landscape paintings he bought from the local thrift store. The whole town sees these two as bottom-feeding pariahs, good enough to eat from the trash and force to live a life of servitude for the bloodsucking elites. Little do they know Mickey and Karen harbor their own hidden talents and that’s why Mickey knows the pills will work. Karen looks on in horror as her friend, and the man she hoped would one day be a lover, swallow Austin’s pills.

Back to the Craigslist buffet where Sarah, Austin, and Harry feed off a guy selling a stolen iPad. Harry, who is starting to feel better but also riddled with guilt and shame for what he has done, had a few issues getting a clean feed. His teeth are not pointed enough to sink a decent fang into a vein, but Sarah and Austin know a dentist who can help. Meet Dr. Lark Feldman (Billie Lourd), fang dentist, tattoo artis, and blood-sucking goth-Queen extraordinaire. Lark grinds Harry’s teeth down making it easier to get his first clean feed under the boardwalk with a sex worker.

Alma Says Yes to Success

While her Father fills up his creativity tank under the “dick-dock” Alma is at home still struggling to nail her violin piece. When Doris is consumed with trying to determine which best bland on bland color pallet works best for the upstairs bedroom, Alma sneaks downstairs and finds Harry pills and pops one. Immediately the child is overcome with musical brilliance and she practices for hours until she passes out. When she wakes she picks up her instrument and continues to play until her mother, who is suffering from a headache, asks her to take a break. Pumped up on the artsy juice, Alma goes from sugar and spice to nasty and abusive when she starts to belittle her mother’s mediocrity by accusing her of getting in the way of her and her father’s greatness, a goal Doris could never hope to achieve. Alma is cruel and calculating and knows which of her mother’s buttons to push that would hurt the most. Horrified by her precious angel’s rotten behavior, Doris takes her daughter’s violin and orders her to stay in her room. But, of course, Alma doesn’t listen. When Doris awakes from her afternoon nap and cannot find her daughter she runs outside assuming Alma went for a walk. Eventually, she finds her kneeling down in the graveyard with a face covered in blood as she rips an animal apart with her teeth. Was this kid counting roadkill or appetizers in the last episode? First Harry and now Alma. Is Doris next to join this bloodsucking family affair?