Episode Title: "Burn, Witch. Burn!"
Episode Grade: B+
Up until the last minute or so of "Burn, Witch. Burn!," I was very much on board with this episode. And even with that minute, it still represents this season's best episode. However, that last minute is groan-worthy enough to drop this episode a notch or two in my estimation, and it can be read as a dangerous sign for the show going forward.
Lily Rabe's Misty Day is, at this point, more of a get-out-of-jail-free card for the writers than an actual character. Giving her the ability to raise the dead means that no character is truly out of the show. She's a human reset button.
You can have a character like that hanging around, but you need to use her carefully, with a measure of discipline. "Discipline" has never been a strength of Ryan Murphy's, however, and using Misty to wipe away the crucial result of your episode's most essential plotline is disappointing.
And it was such an awesome plotline! Jessica Lange got to sneer and shout and then burn a witch. It was awesome!
The fallout from last week's acid attack on Cordelia is tonight's primary concern, which is nice because it gives us a lot of Lange in self-loathing mode. There are long, lingering, creepy shots in the hospital where Cordelia was taken, and they're masterpieces of composition and camera work. There's a vague haze over the lens as Lange wonders through the corridors of the hospital, and the viewers are made to share Lange's disorientation.
We see these scenes from a new perspective later in the episode. Lange, hauled before the witches' council to answer for all the nonsense that's gone on at the coven, pulls her trump card: it was Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy, you'll remember) who threw acid in Cordelia's face, and Lange has proof.
How did she know? She (and we) dimly saw a hooded figure pacing through the hospital, which is fair enough and appropriately creepy: of course Lange would see her daughter's attacker at the moment.
What we don't see until Lange tells the council, however, is that she followed the hooded figure into the elevator and caught a glimpse of Snow in the mirror. She then tracked Snow down to a hotel, found her little stash of defaced Fiona pictures and, whammo, proof.
If we're being honest, this is all kind of bullshit. As I wrote, we don't actually see any of this when it happens. The hotel investigation can be forgiven (it happened at some indeterminate time, and it's OK for things to happen off-screen), but we were with Lange in the hospital throughout. When did she tail Snow in the hospital? When did she have that opportunity? Cutting out that particular moment without letting us know you're doing is, again, bullshit.
But...ah, screw it, this is all too much fun. Lange is exceptional throughout all of this, running the gamut from self-loathing in the hospital corridors to righteous fury in the scenes where she confronts Myrtle Snow. And when Snow is taken to the stake to be burned alive for her crimes, Lange's seething contempt is perfectly expressed when she sparks the fire with a lit cigarette.
And then Misty Day comes along and revives Myrtle's corpse, and one wonders what the point is.
Look, this can work out. As we learn more about Misty Day and we discover what her agenda is (making everyone listen to Fleetwood Mac, perhaps), this might turn out to be an interesting development. And maybe we'll learn some of the rules that govern Misty's powers, bringing some limitations to the god-like being. At the moment, however, it's hard to see beyond Misty's status as Plot Eraser.
But this little twist doesn't erase the fun that came before, and for now I'll grudgingly accept it.
If there's a theme to "Burn...," it's the regrets of motherhood. Marie Laveau's zombie attack ultimately peters out without killing anyone, though we do get the admittedly awesome sight of Taissa Farmiga wiping out a horde of zombies with a chainsaw, which marks the first interesting thing Zoe has done in this season. However, this does give Kathy Bates a chance to re-connect with her daughters.
(Full disclosure: after posting last week's review, which made no mention of the presence of Bates' daughters among the zombie horde, I discovered that a bunch of viewers...OK, every viewer, had noticed them where I hadn't. My apologies.)
The episode began with a flashback to 1830's New Orleans, and it turns out Bates was a monster to her daughters as well as her slave, condemning them to spend a year in her horror attic after overhearing them plotting against her. Seeing them return as part of a zombie attack is, as comeuppances go, pretty effective.
A century and a half in a coffin will mellow anyone out, however, and Bates sells her evolution. A lesser actress probably wouldn't be as convincing here, but Bates' regret and horror at the realization of her own cruelty is effective and compelling.
"Burn..." is a little too overt about the parallels between Bates' and Lange's characters, but it earns some credit for pointing that out and having Lange shoot it down immediately:
Bates: Perhaps this shared tragedy will bring us closer together.
Lange: I doubt it. After all, you're the maid.
These regrets and resentments and disappointments drive "Burn...,"which asks a question that has obsessed artists for centuries: how much is a mother to blame when her daughters come back as murderous undead slaves of a voodoo priestess?
Notes:
- So, Zoe has a new power: she stops the zombie attack with a command. Yes, she's probably the next supreme.
- Awesome Jessica Lange Manipulation, Part One: Fiona proves Myrtle threw acid in Cordelia's face by showing the burns on Snow's hand. We find out later that, just off-screen, Gabourey Sidibe was dunking her hand in acid.
- Awesome Jessica Lange Manipulation, Part Two: This troubles Sidibe's conscience, but Lange talks her down with some expert manipulation in a great scene where she dangles the possibility that Sidibe might be the supreme.
- Cordelia's husband shows up at the hospital and seems to genuinely care about her (remember last week: cheated on her, shot the lady he slept with). But when he takes the hand of a permanently blinded Cordelia, she gets a sudden mental vision of his affair.
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