This show may not make any sense, but at least it’s full of loving details: a short black and white 1950s horror film out of nowhere, the meticulous way Chad Radwell vacuum-packs his t-shirts, and Lea Michele’s Hester prancing around in a bedazzled neck brace for one night only as if to foreshadow (fore-sparkle?) her impending death. Well, maybe not death. She took a tumble; that’s all we know.
Episode 9 was all about old ghost stories, which Denise Hemphill of Secure Enforcement Solutions made new again with her sassy and long-winded spin on things. (Hey, just like Scream Queens.) I loved how from her dramatic peach-hued perch by the fireside, Denise was — in spirit and fashion sense, anyway — a dead ringer for one of the classic house mothers of fine cinema: Phyllis Nefler in Troop Beverly Hills. Phyllis had drawn on personal struggle for her fright-fest material (“He permed me!!!”), but Denise stuck with Japanese folklore to replace her charges’ current fears with new ones. Another detail stood out to me here: I like how the girls barely ever use their phones. (Chanel No. 3 flinched as if she were about to Wikipedia “The Kappa” during story hour, but of course she couldn’t be bothered.) It’s refreshing, like any trip to the toilet where you shockingly don’t get killed.
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We now know that the Red Devil killers are bathtub baby Boone (Nick Jonas) and his mysterious twin sister, hard at work for their childhood caregiver Gigi. Apparently Boone was never even gay and desperately wanted to sleep with Zayday? So random, but I guess it gave the show a chance to kill off a laughably minor character: Zayday’s British crush interest Earl Grey. More revelations: Boone is the Red Devil whose hand Zayday stabbed with a fork in that chilly Silence of the Lambs-esque murder lair. He’s also the one who fake-attacked Gigi with a chainsaw in the Kappa house “just to get the scent off” of her at the time. The poor kid devoted his entire life to carrying out Gigi’s master revenge plan against her former sorority. And now he’s DEAD. Ugh!
See, we thought the other Red Devil (good God this show is confusing) was about to kill Gigi at episode’s end — but once Boone ventures into whiny “You’re not my mom!” territory, Other Red Devil slashes him instead. “Your commitment to revenge is clearly greater than your brother’s was,” Gigi approves. According to tonight’s hot slice of 1995 scoop from Dean Munsch, “The girl in the bathtub let out a death rattle so loud and powerful that she expelled a second child from her freshly dead womb.”
Speaking of pregnancy scares: In an effort to screw Chanel over and score an invite to Thanksgiving in the Hamptons, Hester convinces Chad she’s carrying his baby, even though most of the time they “porked” in a way that could not result in pregnancy. TMI forever, guys! Now he’ll have to marry her despite her “Pooh belly” and despicable poverty, because that’s just how Chad’s family rolls. “We make our beds and lie in ‘em with our creepy neck brace scoliosis wives.” What a cool squad. Their real wealth must lie in their character. But this does NOT match the imaginary future-life Original Chanel signed up for, so she shoves Hester down the house’s ridiculous curlicue stairwell without a second thought. Consider this “a cautionary tale about hog-faced bitches who try to steal hotter Kappas’ boyfriends.”
Here’s a theory: I think the Other Red Devil is Hester and that she just had a busy night. I’ll admit off the bat that Chad’s unfortunate comparison of Hester’s mid-coitus fart to a death rattle got me going on this train of thought, but just go with it for a sec: Of all the women on the show, Lea Michele looks the most like Nick Jonas. We know Hester has weird mommy issues. Her ghost story (a spinoff of High Beams) came true for No. 5 the same night she told it – maybe she sent Boone to lurk in the backseat and kill that trucker guy? Her interpersonal schemes were always more about satisfying her death fetish and wielding her own power than establishing relationships. She was clearly cold and calculating enough to kill her own brother. Hell, maybe the reason she even wore a neck brace was because that rubber costume was so uncomfortable.
But how dare I use the past tense on a Ryan Murphy Universe superstar? Hester’s probably not really dead. Why bedazzle a neck brace if it can’t save your life?
In Hester’s absence, Chanel gets to spend Thanksgiving at the Radwell Family Compound, a cranberry bog Chad’s ancestors bought from a bunch of Indians for six glass beads. Told you they were rich.
See you next week, when everyone not named Chanel shares Thanksgiving dinner because why not?