American Horror Story – Take Me To Your Leader

By: Kelly Kearney

Part two of American Horror Story’s Double Feature landed like a cinematic film noir blast from the past. Paying homage to the black and white Hitchcockian sci-fi horror genre, we begin in middle class America where a visitor from the sky kicks off a series of out of this world events.

They’re Here!

Welcome to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The year is 1954 and middle-class America has finally recovered from the second world war while gearing up for a new type of colder battle with the Russians. Things are good in New Mexico as we see when we meet smiling housewife and mother Maria Wycoff (Rebecca Dayan) and her precocious son, Timmy (Henry Joseph Samiri). Maria, like most women in her time, is a stay-at-home mom with a son that surely keeps her on her toes. So much so that she needs to drown her days with house work and Capitol Records newest hit “That’s Amore.” Yeah, Maria is a full-on STAN of that song and plays it over and over again like some kind of marinara soaked Groundhog’s Day dream. She loves it, but Timmy would rather be outside riding his bike around the cul-de-sac; even with the area’s recent plague of dust storms, as mentioned in the radio broadcasts released from FX for this season. Are these dust storms a result of something more sinister in the atmosphere? Maybe something unidentified? It seems likely because when the lights flicker and the clock start spinning in time, Maria spots a dust cloud in the distance and calls for her son to come inside. This storm isn’t the rain and thunder type because when Timmy does come inside he isn’t the same little boy Maria calls “son.” No, this kid is different, almost like he is possessed by some alien being. He tells his mother not to be afraid and when he reaches his hand out to her Maria changes. Floating above the kitchen floor with the white of her eyes enveloping what’s left of her humanity, we realize the dust storm has attached itself to Mother and Son. When Mr. Charles Wycoff (Adam Noel Jones) comes home he finds his floating wife changed remarkably and, before he can get an understanding of what went down in the house, she explodes his head like a watermelon dropped off a skyscraper. Maria is a force to be reckoned and even the President of the United States can’t handle her.

Ike and Amelia

Over in Palm Springs, California, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower (Neal McDonough) is doing what his predecessor’s do best: negotiations on the golf course – a/k/a working hard to keep Americans safe. That’s why when his game is interrupted with news of an unidentified aircraft shot down in the desert of New Mexico, he flies into the danger zone to ensure the borders are safe from the Russians, Chinese and The Boy Scouts of America. Wait, what? Apparently, Ike’s list of National threats needs some work, but his lovely wife Mamie (Sarah Paulson) still thinks her husband is the bee’s knees. She says as much when he packs his bags for New Mexico and attempts to lie to her about the details of the trip. “One year in office and you still can’t lie. I guess I should be proud of you,” she says while also making mention of the secrets he hides, which aren’t always about National security. Mamie knows more than your average mid-century woman because it wasn’t so much what she said, but how she said it and the look she gave her husband when she did. It was almost as if Ike were up to more than the American people knew about and his wife was privy to it all.

When he does get to the crash site Ike cannot believe what he sees. It is otherworldly and it comes complete with a body that the President says looks like the body of a boy, but it is most definitely not a human. After Ike orders the FBI, CIA and whoever else is at the site to take the deceased to the air force base for further investigation, he is alerted to another find and this one shocks him to his very core. There, hiding amongst the wreckage, naked and scarred across her flesh sits Amelia Earhart (Lily Rabe), the lost pilot! Ike recognizes her immediately due to his interest in her flight and, obviously, her famous disappearance, which at this point in time was over seventeen years ago. So, why does Amelia look like she hasn’t aged a single minute since her wheels left the runway? It is one of the many questions the President has when he sits down with her at the nearby military base. She tells him about her flight and how all the controls inside the plane went haywire and everything went white as if they flew through, what she and her partner, Richard, assumed was an electrical storm. When he asks about her the scars on her back she shrugs them off by saying they injected her and ran tests. Who are they? Amelia never says because when she discovers the man she has been talking to is the current President of the United States she flips out and has to be sedated. The last thing she remembers was Teddy Roosevelt in the Oval! Decades went by in the blink of an eye and the pilot, unsurprisingly, isn’t handling it well. Ike orders the base to treat Amelia well but keep her reappearance under wraps until they can figure out what happened, especially since the doctors now think this should-be elderly pilot is pregnant. It doesn’t take long to get the answers Eisenhower is looking for when he checks in on the autopsy of the crash victim and all Hell breaks loose. Inside the grey oval headed creature the doctors find nothing. No organs, no blood – nothing. Its chest cavity is hollow and yet some kind of unknown jelly like creature resembling a stingray comes shooting out of the nothingness and grips the doctors’ heads setting off a chain of cranial explosions. Nobody in the general vicinity is safe and that’s when we see her- Maria – and all her flying white eyed glory like some ethereal being floating down the hallways of the base. Every person she encounters has the same explosive death turning the base into a bloody combustible mess. Eventually, she makes her way towards the President and with all the bravery of a past General, Ike orders Maria to stop her assault, but the housewife turned killer is like, “Nice try” and tells him he will be taking orders from her now.

Summer Lovin’ Havin’ a Blast

In a jarring and rather unwelcome vibe switch, we head into the colorful landscape of modern-day California. Here we meet recent college graduates and hometown friends Jamie (Rachel Hilson), Kendall (Kaia Gerber), Troy (Isaac Powell) and Cal (Nico Greetham). The group of tight-knit pals are home for the summer and catching up at the local bar before they head off into graduate school and the work force. Kendall has her eyes on medical school and since they’re all Ivy league grads (according to their bios flashing on the screen), success is surely in their futures. As the drinks start flowing, we learn that Cal, who was Kendall’s ex and first love, is not only gay but dating his best friend, Troy, who jokes about hiring Cal as his “Shabbos Boy” as a way of keeping his devout parents off his back. For people of the Jewish faith, Shabbos is a day of rest and activities like driving and cooking are forbidden. But people need to eat, and Troy needs to see his boyfriend, so he found a loophole and now employs Cal to turn on the oven and chauffeur him around the mattress and booty play. Cal isn’t the only one with big surprises, Jamie confides in her friends that she met a man whose ejaculate burned her like acid. They all laugh but Jamie seems distraught and emotional over her sudden seminal protein allergies. She isn’t the only one suffering through the dating pool of problematic men, not that she realizes she is, but Kendall is sleeping with her tech-phobic professor. She drops a new term Nomobophobia (“fear of tech”) and says Professor Unprofessional started a Luddite movement on campus encouraging students to ditch tech and experience life without it. Since she went old-school Kendall claims she has never felt better. Cal laughs her off thinking this is just crush inspired nonsense because pre-med Kendall cannot avoid technology in her field. She challenges her friends to join her in giving up tech for a weekend camping trip, just like how it was when they were kids. They all agree to the getaway but ditching their cell phones for a weekend in the desert isn’t exactly the brightest idea, as they soon find out when they discover a slew of dissected cows littering the sand and they’re still mooing! Everyone freaks and takes off running towards the car, but it stalls thanks to a mechanical failure and those familiar bright lights. Everything is blindingly bright and all of a sudden, the three friends, sans Jamie, are dropped back into the car in different seats. After grabbing Jamie, who somehow wound up standing in the street and looking rougher than the rest, they speed off towards home.

The next morning, Kendall checks in with everyone and she is worried about their lost time in the car. She calls her controlling professor boyfriend, Adam (Samuel Hunt), who shames her temptations to Google their experience and then tells her what to eat and drink to feel better. Jamie also feels horrible the next day, and like Kendall, cannot hold any food down. She likens it to the morning sickness she felt at age 19 before she had what we can assume was an abortion. Kendall doesn’t think a pregnancy is a possibility since she and her boyfriend are overly careful. The two women agree to meet up after Jamie stops at the drug store for a couple of pregnancy tests.

At the guy’s house Cal and Troy are feeling iffy just like the girls. And after a TMI talk about butt microbes making Cal sick after a booty-eating session, the boyfriends get ready to meet up with Jamie and Kendall about the previous night.

The news from the tests is not good: both results are positive and neither woman can understand how. Kendall wonders if Cal and Troy drugged and raped them but that seems highly improbable and just the med student grasping for straws. Time to hit up Google as Kendall falls into “her own research” hole consumed by alien abduction stories. Things go from concerning to downright insane when the guys show up complaining about their similar morning sickness symptoms and agree to take their own pregnancy tests. The results are as Kendall expected: Both men are expecting! It’s baby-bonanza.