American Horror Story Coven ‘Go To Hell’ Recap- Episode 03.12

Never before in the history of shows have I witnessed the utter disintegration of a series. Readers, it is so challenging to construct this recaps because each episode proves to be more redundant and inane than the last. I will try my best to chug along.

As always, we open with a flashback. It’s the Salem trials, portrayed in the guise of a silent film (why?) with each witch demonstrating a different “wonder”, which will come back later. There are seven of them, we will learn quite randomly.

Madison can now do transportation, which startles Cordelia. Cordelia doesn’t have any eyes anymore since gouging them out, yet she has disgusting pink bumps where her eyes should be. You’d think with the effort she put into this whole eye gouging/clairvoyant thing, she would have “seen” something profound by now. Instead she’s still bumping heads with the ever rebellious Madison. You see, Madison still thinks she’s the next Supreme, and considering she had threatened everyone in every episode before this, we wonder why she’s still kicking back and casting out unrealized threats. “What are you afraid I might see?” asks Cordelia. We cut to a flashback of Misty being knocked on the head and buried underground by Madison, just in case we, the viewers have forgotten. But Madison only says that she doesn’t have any secrets. Cordelia touches her but doesn’t “see” anything regarding Misty.

Marie, having been kidnapped, says she’ll rise again but is only speaking through Queenie. Queenie meditates and visits hell in order to find Marie. She briefly enters her own private hell which is when she was selling chicken at that horrid take-out restaurant. Then she sees Papa speaking to Marie. He tells her that she has no respect, and goes on about how for immortals, hell is on Earth. “I’ve been here 5 minutes,” she says. “Time moves differently in hell” are his last words. Basically Delphine is chopping up Marie in a super brutal torture sequence. How terrible. This is Marie’s hell, it seems.

Then, confusedly enough, we see that Delphine is now a museum guide for her own house. And it’s real-life-looking Kathy Bates, not 19th century transplant Kathy Bates, which is awesome. Hi Kathy Bates! But Queenie confronts her and finds that she has taken over the LaLaurie house. Delphine calls her prior home “a place of abject horror”. I like that; aptly named. She takes Queenie on a tour through the horror house up to the torture-attic. Delphine has been keeping the former tour guide as a hostage. She gets way too into it and kills her in front of Queenie, who begs her to let the woman go. It’s so random. How did Delphine even become a normally dressed functioning person now? What the fu*k is going on?

Then Queenie stabs Delphine to death. It seems like she was stabbed to death, even though we thought she was immortal and couldn’t die. Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s still alive like every other freaking character in this show.

Back at the house, Myrtle is decorating. Fiona has a nosebleed and fears she only has a few weeks left to live. What, seriously? She and Cordelia have a little chit chat about grievances and what not and Fiona is inexplicably being quite nice. She even gives her daughter her grandmother’s necklace. But then Fiona has a vision herself dead and Fiona taking the necklace back. Coming to, she asks about another bracelet her grandmother had, and then has another vision.  This one involves the Axeman. “It’s not safe to love my mother. I speak from experience,” Cordelia tells him. He says, “You don’t understand us.” To cut to the chase, Cordelia sees Fiona murder the entire Coven.

Apparently, Cordelia’s visions have all come in one sporadic burst, because she drags Queenie to the cemetery and they rescue Misty who is alive and well and back in our show because no one dies in this show (see above).

They return to the Coven where Myrtle is showing Madison some flowers. Madison says something about how people die after three days without water, because she’s hoping Misty dies, but no, there’s Misty! She punches Madison and nothing really comes from it. It’s pure fodder to kill the time.

But before this, Zoey comes back. No, really. After all that business last week of them getting on the bus, and heading to Orlando, and leaving the Coven for the sake of the Coven, she’s back…with Kyle… and I seriously almost lost my mind and/or punched my TV, similar to how Misty punched Madison, and similar to how badly I want to punch the writers of this show.

But there’s a flashback to their journey. Kyle killed some disheveled dude who haggled them. “I came back because there is no escaping who I am,” Zoey says. And she rose that haggling guy back to life.  “I’m clearly the next supreme.” Cool (who cares).

All this business is interrupted by the Axeman coming to the Coven wielding his axe to kill everybody. The witches thrust him across the parlor, easy as pie. Ok, that part was kind of cool. Cordelia notices he has blood on him and they determine that it’s Fiona’s blood…

There’s a flashback of him returning to his apartment to greet Fiona. He says he’s home now and wants to take Fiona fishing, wtf?. She’s all over him but he looks kind of creepy, like he’s going to kill her. Low and behold they have a huge, heated fight which demonstrates good acting but that’s about all it does. She says she’ll be an old Supreme in thirty years and that she never loved him and he says “You do love me!” and she’s says she was never “for love”. She begins to tell one of her tales about being eight years old and her mother bringing her a… and WHACK! Axeman chops her up with his axe. Whoa, so much for Fiona (not really, I’m sure she’ll be back next week.)

So now we’re back in real time (is it just me, or is the entire chronology of this show getting lazy too?) where we cut to Cordelia seeing that her mother has died. “What should they do with the Axeman’s soul?” they inquire. Kyle steps up to the plate and then Madison joins him and they all stab him and chop him up, much like the other witches did in the 1920’s episode, which was a good episode. I miss those good episodes.

But now Marie has Delphine captive. WHAT???!!!! She tortures her and is about to burn Delphine’s daughter with a hot poker. I totally don’t get it. Marie is forced by Papa to torture the girl, but she doesn’t want to. He tells them that they are in hell, so Marie is doomed to torture Delphine’s daughters in front of her and Delphine is forced to watch, presumably for all eternity because that’s what hell is. He says, “You pay a debt and everyone suffers. So get back to work.”

The show ends (finally), with every one of the witches about to embark on in a sort of competitive triathlon (septhlon?) testing out their “7 wonders”. Everyone will participate and by next week they will have a new Supreme.

I.Don’t.Care. Re-living all of this has made me so angry all over again. Have any of these writer’s ever heard of plot development before? How most shows/books/movies have something called a beginning, middle, and ending? How every plot point should build, develop, and add to a singular conclusion and/or further development and theme in the holistic story?

Guess not. I can’t believe people actually get paid to write this mess. “Oh, but Patricia, we still have one more episode,” you might argue.  Well, next week’s season finale will have to be the Citizen-fuc*ing- Kane of all cable network television finales in order to mildly rectify the absolute torture I’ve had to endure watching the tail end of American Horror Story Coven.

See you next week.