TV Recap – American Horror Story: Hotel ‘Room Service’
5 min read
Last week I said that this latest season of AHS has been pretty average, and apparently they were listening to me. Whilst this episode still wasn’t on par, I feel like things may be starting to pick up.
We start off with new vampire Alex, who clearly wasn’t taught the make up tricks of how to look like a normal person because she looks terrible. She’s struggling a bit with wanting to rip people open and drink their blood, but she still wants to help the sick child, so that’s nice. Alex decides to give the child some of her blood to heal him, likely told by The Countess that she will now heal instantly. I doubt that she knew she’d be starting an epidemic of killer vampire children when she did though.
The killer children was my favorite part of this episode, and was a little taste of the AHS of old. First the kid that Alex turned kills his own parents and then cheerily heads off to school. He then turns his little girlfriend and turns her, and soon there’s a whole classroom of killer kids. What was intriguing was that by drinking his blood, the kids seemed to contact the original kids measle virius, and drinking blood cured that. I feel like this may (or may not) be an important point in the future. By the time the school goes on lockdown and the police are alerted, the kids have concocted a story about a man in a mask who terrorised the school.
Donovan heads to find Ramona in the dead of the night, pulling a trembling Iris behind him. With the way he’s treating his mother, I think he’s forgotten that when he turned her it was because of the realization that she’s the only good thing in his life. After Ramona’s initial disgust at being awoken, she realises Donovan is right: Iris is the perfect spy to have inside the Hotel Cortez. With the two of them both out for blood, it seems that Iris doesn’t have much of a choice. On the way out to a partay, the usually invisible Iris is spotted by Tristan and the Countess herself. They notice something off about her straight away, but Iris just states that it’s because of Halloween. The Countess doesn’t really believe her, but doesn’t care enough to continue with the investigation.
Darren Criss is one half of an acutely annoying hipster couple who check into the hotel. They want a discount because they’re ‘influencers’: Will Drake has liked a bunch of their Instagram pics, duh. Iris reverts back to her timid ways, letting the couple walk all over her. Liz Taylor pushes her to embrace her new life, and give those damn hipsters what they deserve. Whilst the couple was unsurprisingly taken by their pate (aka cat food), that wasn’t enough punishment; Iris uses a cork screw and a knife to claim her first victims.
We find out that although they’ve worked together for 20 years, Iris has never really thought to find out much about fellow employee Liz. We then recieve a touching backstory; I haven’t loved Dennis O’Hare’s AHS characters in the past, but Hare as Liz Taylor is truly something. He was an average married man, with two kids living in a nice suburb. But when he went on trips away as a medical rep, he stole some of his wife’s clothes so he could live out his fantasty in private. But this trip to the Hotel Cortez was different, when one Countess appeared in his room. At first he was ashamed, embarrassed and guilty about his appearance. But with some inspiring words from Ms Gaga – who also gives him a proper makeover – he begins to embrace his true Liz Taylor persona. I felt that this was one of Gaga’s best scenes yet, and am loving seeing her come to life on the small screen.
Makeover complete, the Countess wants to head out – no point doing all that makeup for nothing. But Taylor can’t, he really can’t. So she sets him a challenge: go down the hall and fill a bucket with ice. This mission was going fine until Taylor ran into his work buddies coming back late from a strip club. It takes a moment but they recognise him, and instantly start with the abuse and insanity. ‘Are you a fag?’ ‘Oh my god we shared a drink – do you have AIDS?!’ Unable to take anymore, the true Liz Taylor is unleashed as he embraces his personality and yells at his colleagues. Then the Countess turns up at the opportune moment and kills them, because why the hell not. Liz Taylor has been at the Hotel Cortez ever since.
Resident wackjob Lowe descends even further downer the rabbit hole this episode, getting fired from his job after filing a report about his Devil’s Night dinner with a bunch of known serial killers. His boss concedes that he probably shouldn’t have signed off on John’s psych evaluation after a breakdown five years ago. We assume that this was because of Holden, but sounds like Lowe was cray even then. Later on he wakes to find Sally in his bed, the two them naked. He’s confused, adament that he doesn’t remember anything from the past few hours. Suddenly he gets flashbacks: drinking with Sally in the bar, making out in the elevator, having sex whilst the addiction demon makes an appearance behind them (why not). This reveals A LOT about John’s character. When he claims that he can’t remember anything, Sally persists that he knows everything, and that it’s going to happen ‘again. And again. And again.’ This sounds a lot less about the sex, and a lot more about the theory that Lowe is the Ten Commandments killer. The addiction demon showing up was a nice little touch as well.
Finally Alex recieves her duties from the Countess; it’s her job to look after the vampire kids at the Hotel. They seem a lot more tame than the feral accidental ones that Alex made, and it’s her job to keep them out of trouble. If not? Well, things won’t be looking so good for Holden. We end with Holden and Alex going to sleep together in their new double coffin. Anybody wonder whats happening with the little girl Scarlett? Like, okay let’s just leave our children behind and become a vampire, that’s cool now.
So with that, things are starting to slightly pick up and we’re actually (hopefully) starting to get somewhere with the plot. Give me more vampire children on a massacre and I’ll be happy haha. Make sure to leave theories and ideas in the comments section, and check back soon for a new recap!
