Piece of the Puzzle: American Horror Story: Freakshow S4 E2 - Massacres and Matinees

In which I review the latest episode of American Horror Story: Freakshow.

After Elsa Mars set up camp outside of Jupiter, Flordia in last week's "Monsters Among Us," life amongst her Freaks has only gotten harder.  With the vicious killer stalking the town still on the loose, the police have set up a curfew, meaning that Mars' evening grotesqueries will be performed for empty seats.  Her ill-tempered strongman's new position has head of security has lead him to bullying the freaks and forcing his ideas for the freakshow through despite Elsa's objections.  Meanwhile, the police continue to search for the detective that Jimmy and the other Freaks murdered for trying to take the Tattler sisters away and Dandy Mott discovered a kindred spirit in the equally-demented Twisty the Clown.

Although Massacres and Matinees is tightly packed with increasingly interwoven characters and divergent plotlines, it fails to suffer from the same claustrophobic sense of over-crowding that has plagued Gotham since its premiere.  Despite the number of moving parts in the show, there is room for every character and for every character's narrative.  Jimmy's misguided attempts at reconciling the the townsfolk with the freaks, Dell's strong armed takeover of the freakshow, the Tattler's growing rivalry as performers and Dandy's deranged new friendship with Twisty all feel fully developed and completely unrushed.

In fact, the show's myriad of tangental back stories seem to be rapidly falling into place, creating a more cohesive story rather than a more fractured one.  Dell entering the fold as Ethel's former lover and Jimmy's secret father creates as much tension within Elsa's camp as there is directed toward it from the town.  Jimmy's obvious hatred toward the tyrannical Dell results in arrest and death of Meep the Geek, further driving a wedge between not only the freaks and the town, but the freaks and their overbearing strongman.  Dandy's rejection as a performer by both his mother and the freakshow fuels his sadistic imagination, leading to his ultimate partnership with Twisty - a killer who, until this moment, seemed closer to the isolated and abused Leatherface than the intentionally menacing John Wayne Gacy.

The only head-scratching interaction in the entire episode is between Elsa and the Tattler twins.  When star-struck Bette is forced to sing backup to her more-talented twin sister, she is understandably upset: attempting to run off stage mid-performance from embarrassment, which Dot refused to allow.  More even-headed characters would have left it at that: allowing the conjoined twins to work through their differences privately, give Bette some much-needed singing lessons and let the whole matter come to rest.

But Elsa decides to play a more dangerous game - setting the two sisters against one another.  She comes to Bette in the dead of night when Dot is asleep, telling her that she - rather than Dot - is the actual talent between them, that her sister feeds off of her lack of confidence and that Bette should refuse to allow her to do so.  While it might just turn out to be her way of building up Bette's fledgling confidence so that the sisters can perform actual duets, that does not seem to be the case.  Elsa appears to be intentionally driving the two sisters apart, although to what end can only be speculated at at this point.

For the second week in a row, Twisty the Clown turns out to be the most memorable and off-putting character on the show.  Massacres and Matinees continued to explore Twisty's, well, twisted desire to make others happy: a desire for which he obviously has no talent to act on.  He murders a toy store owner and employee in order to get a wind-up toy robot to amuse his captive children with.  When that fails, he tries what can only be described as a game of peek-a-boo with the store owner's severed head.  When his "play time" with Dandy Mott results in the man-child discovering the decapitated head in his bag,

As I watched the episode unfold, I noticed something that had slipped my attention in Monsters Among Us: that Twisty's masked face is only half-flesh.  His maniacal, big-toothed grin is actually a mask, hiding his actual mouth and jaw.  Not to be disappointed, his mask was knocked aside during his captives' failed escape attempt, revealing a horrifically ruined mouth of blackened, broken and rotted teeth.

Given his distinctly freakish appearance and his proximity to Elsa Mars' freakshow, I can't help but wonder what the connection between the two is.  Is he some escaped attraction running amok like a bored child, or was he intentionally set loose to drum up a macabre interest in Mars' show?  Or is it something else entirely?  She has already proven an insatiable, desperate need to be in the spotlight and her last scene with the Tattler twins suggests that she's willing to go to any length to get what she wants.

American Horror Story: Freakshow has kept up with the grisly promise of its first episode.  The series continues to plumb the depths of the depravity of its characters and develop its increasingly morbid narrative: proving the validity of its critical praise with each week's new installment.  I give the episode an 8.5 out of 10 and anxiously await this week's Edward Mordrake Part 1.

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