‘American Horror Story: Roanoke’ Recap: Butcher Strife
Warning: This recap of the “Chapter 3” episode of American Horror Story: Roanoke contains spoilers.
Question for discussion: Do pigs go to heaven? If so, there is no more room in heaven! All the pigs went there and it’s Kathy Bates’ fault! Heaven is now Pig Heaven due to all the pigs that are there now! Bye, pigs. We didn’t deserve you.
You know, we can debate and predict and speculate about the premise (and title) of this season of Nightmare Tales Specific to the U.S.A. — doing those things IS very fun — but ultimately it will always come down to entertainment value. Are you scared and therefore entertained by Roanoke so far? Last week I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I needed another haunting/home invasion narrative in my life and I got down on my knees and BEGGED for a twist of some kind. But then this week’s episode happened and it at least had the decency to load up on reveals and plot points and truly deranged imagery. We got no twist and the Roanoke season continues with its original format, but darn if it didn’t work. Kathy Bates killed all the pigs and Cuba Gooding, Jr. did sex to Baglady Gaga and Leslie Jordan wore a pageboy wig. Truly what else could I have asked for?
“Chapter 3” was a fun and nasty episode. Let’s talk about it!.
We began with the town getting together to look for poor lil Flora!
First they got that yellow hoodie down (which was a real eye sore) and gathered the town together (there’s a town?). It was time to find Flora! Unfortunately, all Lee, Shelby, and Matt found was THIS:
I cannot begin to explain the what or how or why of this particular scenario but I can explain the who. This was my best friend and I will stop at nothing to bring her killer to justice. Anyway, the trio stifled their horrified gags for a few minutes and continued onward into the woods where they found the same thing AGAIN but with the parts reversed. (Doll-head on a decapitated pig, duh. What else could I have meant?) Also they found a house with a bucket of sh*t in the kitchen and a goat’s head in the freezer. I was like, “How did they film in my home without a permit?” but then I realized it was probably fake. (Is TV fake sometimes? Been wondering this for a while now.)
Then they went in the barn where they found two feral children suckling on a hog’s breasts. Why do you ask?
Also the kids screamed “Croatoan” at them for some reason. Don’t ask me, ask THEM.
Lee’s ex-husband was real steamed at her for legit kidnapping their daughter and then allowing her to get abducted by unseen forces. That is one of the biggest pet peeves of divorced fathers: mothers who abduct their children and get them kidnapped. So he stormed right outta there with every intention of, like, writing a letter or something. He was MAD.
Unfortunately shortly thereafter he was a charred corpse. WHAT HAPPENED?
Shelby immediately believed that Lee had done this, probably to get out of having to go back to family court. The home security system even witnessed Lee leaving the house for 4 hours for no reason. Was she a killer? And wasn’t it SLIGHTLY weird that Flora was actually the SECOND child of hers that had been abducted? These questions no longer mattered, because guess who just waltzed right in?
It was Cricket! Cricket had arrived! Cricket was sort of a male version of Tangina from Poltergeist and as you can see, Cricket was FABULOUS. That pageboy haircut was like a message from the afterlife. “All will be forgiven.”
After the trio looked into Cricket’s credentials — he’d assisted in several FBI missing persons cases — they agreed to let him lead a seance upstairs. And within seconds he and Kathy Bates were having a shouting match!
Kathy Bates was a woman Cricket referred to as The Butcher, and her message to them was simple: Leave. Like, seriously, hadn’t she sent enough messages already? The teeth rain, the stickboys, the literal ghosts? Why hadn’t these bozos vacated yet? Anyway, nobody felt like leaving yet, so Kathy Bates broke all the windows and ran outta there like a pissy jerk.
Cricket offered to lead them to Flora for the small price of $25,000, and Lee counter-offered with a LOADED GUN pointed at his face. If I ever save up $25,000, which at this point is impossible on account of the raccoons who steal all my things, I would absolutely pay Cricket his asking price if only to just hang out. I don’t even need to track down my children (they’re fine on their own, wherever they are), I would just like to shoot the breeze with such a fun and zesty friend! Anyway, although Shelby and Matt believed Cricket was a scam artist (because they were in the habit of personally witnessing the supernatural and then immediately forgetting about it), Lee believed he was legit and visited him the next day with a hot check. There she got ANSWERS.
As it turned out, Kathy Bates had been the wife of the leader of the lost Roanoke colony of the 1500s. One time he left to run errands and she made the mistake of feeding everyone weak soup, so they locked her head in a spiky cage and forced her son Wes Bentley to affix the padlock. Basically, Roanoke was the worst colony of all time.
But after Kathy Bates was left in the woods to die, a pig tried to eat her, but then guess who ran up and ate the pig first? Baglady Gaga. In my opinion Baglady Gaga is some kind of witch, because she offered the still-beating pig’s heart to Kathy Bates as a snack and Kathy Bates ate it. Then she returned to the colony and murdered her enemies!
After that, Kathy Bates forced everyone to immediately uproot their lives and move to the place where Shelby and Matt’s house now stood. So that’s how Roanoke disappeared! Kathy Bates had forced them all to move at knife-point!
So then Cricket led the three city slickers to the woods and attempted to make a deal!
The deal was: Flora, in exchange for their immediate exit from the property (and they’d even burn the house down for good measure.) And do you want to know something? Kathy Bates seemed INTO the idea. But just before they could close the deal, Matt disappeared and Shelby wandered into the woods to look for him. Do you know what he was doing?
He was doing this.
And by “this” I mean he was doing sex to Baglady Gaga!!
Shelby was extremely unenthusiastic about this discovery. Later Matt claimed he didn’t remember doing it, but Shelby wasn’t having it!
And THAT’s why Shelby called the cops on Lee for having murdered her ex-husband. Yep, after weeks of firsthand supernatural experiences, Shelby went and blamed her sister-in-law for their misfortunes.
Nailed it! Shelby was going to sleep so well that night with the knowledge that she had solved the mystery and everything was going to be fine now. (How weird that this season is only three episodes. Just kidding, something tells me the story isn’t over yet.)
If it wasn’t already clear, “Chapter 3” made it official: Shelby is awful. The only question is, are we supposed to accept her lack of logic, or is this a classic case of Unreliable Narrator. Like, what is UP with Shelby? Does she have mental problems? And are the re-enactments truly indicative of what the IRL Shelby had experienced? And while we’re talking about the re-enactments, WHICH ACTOR is providing the voice of the unseen producer during the talking head segments? Is it Evan Peters or Cheyenne Jackson, both of whom are listed in the closing credits but haven’t appeared yet. (Right?) These are my questions for the moment, and my big one still stands: What on EARTH is the twist going to be? And how meta? But it’s a huge compliment to AHS:R that I care enough to even ask these things. The entertainment value is very much there for me and I’m definitely here for it. Let’s go wild.
What did YOU think of “Chapter 3”?
American Horror Story: Roanoke airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX
