We did finally go back to the 2012 part of the story, and this time it was quite frankly one of the highlights of this week's narration. A voice behind the screen calls 911 and tells to send the police to the abandoned sanitarium, the voice clearly belongs to Zachary Quinto. Does that mean that Bloody Face 2012 and the one from 1964 are the same person? Who knows. So when the police enters the Briarcliff, they see the Bloody Face copycats (or the impostors, as the voice calls them), hanging with their masks on.
Then the policemen hear the iphone ring, and find Leo's hand with the phone. Guess who's calling? Mr. Bloody Face! He just wanted to say he did not kill Leo, only the impostrors. As one of the officers starts to wonder where Teresa is, we see her lying on a table, tied, just the way she normally likes it. And Bloody Face is in the room.
About forty-eight years earlier, Mrs. Reynolds brings one of her daughters, Jenny (Nikki Hahn), to the Briarcliff, she suspects the girl stabbed her little friend in the woods. Despite all the pleas of a devastated mother, Sister Jude, who apparently hasn't really left the asylum yet, was relentless: there's no children ward in the institution. And so the woman did what she had to do: left the bad seed behind. Little did she know that her daughter's babysitter in Briarcliff would be the Devil herself. And that was the second highlight of the episode.
The way Sister Mary Eunice taught Jenny the cruel truths, like that there's no God and that people should do what they want - it all felt so authentic, this is exactly what the Devil would say. I loved it. I also loved how the girl went back home and stabbed the entire family, and how she made the statement to the police about a bearded man in a brown jacket, almost word-to-word repeating the story she told after she killed her friend.
Sister Jude received a call from Sam Goodman. Ann Frank could have been fake, but Hans Grouper really got his new name, Arthur Arden, with the help of the Red Cross. Sam gives Jude a task: she has to obtain Arden's fingerprint.
Monsignor Timothy is called to perform the last rites on transformed Shelley, whom he recognized despite all the blisters. He strangled her and for the first time realized how horrible the experiments that Dr. Arden carried out really were. Turns out when Timothy came to take a look at the purchased Briarcliff two years ago, Arden was there, working as a physician for TB patients. He saw the ambition in Timothy's eyes, he convinced the monsignor that the experiments on human subjects would lead to a medical breakthrough, which won't be unnoticed in Rome. Now that Timothy saw the nature of these tests, he calls Arden a monster and threatens to expose the horrible things doctor did. Dr. Arden says that he won't go down alone, so why not forget about the whole thing instead and concentrate on the real threat here: Sister Jude, she's onto something.
So the monsignor sends Jude to run a place in Pittsburg. But she won't go so easy: she comes to Arden's lab with a bottle of cognac and gets his fingerprint. Unfortunately, Sister Mary Eunice, celebrating Jude's departure while wearing her red lingerie, answers the phone and talks to Mr. Goodman. She then goes to his place and stabs him. When Jude arrives it's too late, but Sam, covered in blood, managed to tell her that some nun killed him. In a meanwhile, Mary Eunice gives some of the materials Sam found to Dr. Arden. He's now safe and can continue working on a super race that would resist Russian nuclear bombs (perhaps, this idea came to Arden after Cuban missile crisis?)
Lana wakes up to the kitchen noises. She looks around and sees photos of Wendy's pupils and Wendy herself and happily thinks it all was a dream and she's in her bedroom now. Alas, the moment of blissful ignorance did not last: Oliver's loud sigh made her realize that she's still locked in the basement of a serial killer. She yells. He says it won't help: "Obviously, the basement is soundproof". But he made her croque-monsieur and tomato soup - "the nutmeg makes all the difference...in the world" (does it, though? I only feel the difference when I overuse it). It's breakfast that a typical mother would make. Only Oliver had no mother, he grew up in an orphanage, with no access to human touch. He was always self aware, and so he knew there was something wrong with him. Seeking for the cure he turned to psychiatry and only when he saw the corpse of a 33 years old woman, he realized what he was missing. He mentions the Harlow studies to Lana, a series of experiments where baby monkeys, separated from their mothers, faced the choice between two surrogates: one covered with terrycloth and the other one being made out of mesh wire.
-Every monkey preferred the terrycloth covered mother. Even if it didn't have milk, - Oliver explains.
-Because of the warmth?
-Because of the skin!
But the corpse's skin was no good. Neither was that of a freshly killed women. It is all behind him now that he has finally found his real mommy - Lana.
Lana gets manipulative. She thanks him for the breakfast, she holds his hand, she says she understands how it's like to feel abandoned, but when Oliver is distracted by a phone call from Kit, who calls his former shrink a liar, she tries to break the chain and escape. He obviously finds out and is crashed. She wants to abandon him! She's just like all of them! He puts his mask on, he has to finish it. And it's all her fault! He had such great hopes for her when he saw her for the fist time, no silly, before the Briarcliff, when she was all polished and ambitious, almost cold blooded, telling her colleague she wanted to see the child, the precious baby inside Bloody Face. Eventually, Lana manages to convince Oliver that she is his mommy, so he doesn't kill her yet.
What can I say, the acting, the dialogues and the camera work: all of that was amazing, as always. I just wish there was a little more progress, that's all. Among the performances my favorite was definitely Lily Rabe's, she rocked! Also, a tip of the hat to Joseph Fiennes - before this episode I felt that he was overshadowed by other actors, this time he really delivered.
The main question for me is if Mary Eunice tried to frame Jude with Sam's murder, like she framed that poor chronic masturbator, who ended up injected with a mix of TB and syphilis on Arden's table, or will Sister Jude just leave for Pittsburg now? The second question is if Dr.Thredson really is the one killing people in 2012?
We haven't heard anything about Grace or the aliens either, I hope the creatures will abduct Kit from prison. Otherwise, I don't see how he could get out of there alive.
Update: Murphy has confirmed that Dylan McDermott is the modern Bloody Face and not Quinto. Oh well.
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