Zoe and Madison go looking for boy parts.
Credit: FX
Good morning, ladies and gentleman, boys and ghouls! We opened “Boy Parts,” Season 3, Episode 2 of “American Horror Story: Coven” on a misty day. Well, we open with Misty Day at least, and she’s not happy. Misty is lurking around the swampy bayou of Louisiana and catches two gator poachers and confronts them when she finds their den of dead alligators: “It’s wrong, all wrong.” They tell her to scram: Bad move, because little Misty Day has the power to revive the dead, and these dead gators come back to life to snap their jaws and take the poachers back into the water.
Back at witch school, or ABC Kitchen, maybe, Madison is sashaying around her shared bedroom in a leopard bra while Zoe is mourning the loss of her martyred, would-be boyfriend. “He spent his summers at United Way!” she wails. Madison hits back, “He should be canonized” and then points out, “Given your black widow status, he was living on borrowed time anyway.” She’s referring to Zoe’s ability to turn all of her lovers into bleeding corpses. And all Liza Minnelli could do was turn them gay!
Still at Miss Robichaux’s, Fiona has Mme. LaLaurie bound and gagged in a chair and tells her not to scream when she takes off the gag. LaLaurie screams immediately and Fiona shuts her up with a good slap across the face: Methinks Jessica Lange’s hand is going to get a good workout this season. Fiona’s phone rings and LaLaurie is shocked: What the hell is an iPhone? Not Fiona’s phone, apparently, despite the identical ringtone. Did you see that lockscreen? That is an aPhone from Guangzhou, China.
Flashback to Detroit 2012, when it was a different place, or at least a city that wasn’t bankrupt. Queenie is working the fryer at a chicken joint called Chubbee’s and I bet Gabourey Sidibe was like, “Fried chicken again? What is this, ‘Precious 2?’ Why isn’t Emma Roberts working the grill?”
Anyway, a customer is giving her sass and she does not appreciate it much so she sticks her arm into the deep fryer and the man is waiting for his chicken as his forearm bubbles and boils into a very crispy skin. Delia recruits her after reading about the incident in the newspaper. Queenie thought witchcraft was the arena of white folks only, like in “Charmed” or “Sabrina, the Teenage Cracker” as Queenie says, but it turns out Queenie is descended from Tituba, a slave in Salem, Mass., who was accused of witchcraft in real life. Tituba is also a character in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and my high school classmate interpreted her as having a bizarre, Caribbean Arnold Schwarzenegger accent.
Police officers come to witch school to chat with Madison and Zoe about last episode’s bus crash and Zoe loses her cool when they mention that the rapey frat bro in the hospital died the same way her boyfriend back home died. “They gang raped her!” she cries. “They got what they deserved!”
Fiona jumps into action and spits in their water and turns their brains into “scrambled eggs.” The officers forget everything and leave and the Supreme is furious at the girls and flings them against the wall with a flick of her hand. She calls Zoe soft and weak and warns the girls, “In this wild, wicked world, the only thing you have to be afraid of is me.” It seems like a good way to scare the girls straight, but of course they go to the morgue to get into more trouble after Fiona berates them.
Madison and Zoe uncover Kyle’s mangled body, among other bodies of his frat bros and Madison decides to do Zoe a totally unsolicited favor by putting together “the perfect boyfriend.” Basically, they are doing their own version of O-Town’s “Liquid Dream” except not with Janet Jackson’s smile. Madison goes body part shopping and points to one and muses, “Do you wonder if he’s a grower or a show-er?”
Meanwhile, Delia is at a fertility clinic with her husband because she’s having a hard time getting pregnant. He wonders why she won’t just use magic but she doesn’t want to “play God.” Back at Miss Robichaux’s, Fiona is trying to figure out Mme. LaLaurie’s secret to immortality. LaLaurie tells her how after she woke up from Marie Laveau’s poisonous “love potion,” she found herself surrounded by a mob of black people with torches – and sees her family lynched and dead. Laveau doesn’t want to kill LaLaurie, though – she wants her to suffer and “listen to the world go around you even what that world is no more.” Fiona looks moved, and then bites into a chicken drumstick.
Back at the morgue, Madison puts the doll parts together with Kyle’s head and tries to revive them with a spell in latin. She and Zoe cut their hands and draw a pentagram in blood and try to make him rise – to no avail. Madison steps out to have a cigarette when she sees a man drive into the morgue and she splits: “Tough luck, b–tch.” When the man comes inside and asks Zoe what she’s doing, Franken-boyfriend wakes up and kills him.
Now we’re at a black hair salon in the ninth ward where Fiona is getting her golden locks done. But at Miss Robichaux’s, trouble is brewing. Nan is annoyed by how noisy Mme. LaLaurie is and unties her and lets her out of the house. Back at the salon, Fiona is now trying to get the owner, Marie Laveau, to tell her how to stay young – forever. “When they say black don’t crack, they’re not wrong,” she says.
The two duke it out about the chicken or the egg, except the chicken and the egg are black witches and white witches. “You wanna tell me some illiterate voodoo slave girl gave me my crown?” snorts Fiona. Marie hits back, “You haven’t heard that civilization started in Africa?” Fiona wonders why tourists from “Little Rock to Hackensack” go visit Marie’s tomb when they can “come to the ninth ward to get their hair braided.” She leaves and promises Marie she’ll be in touch, but not before delivering the episode’s best one-liner: “Maybe in another century, you can have two sh–hole salons.”
Delia is rooting around her greenhouse when her husband, Hank, interrupts her. The two retreat to her bedroom and she brings an egg and the two prick each other’s fingers and smear blood over each other and have sex. I’m pretty sure that’s what people do when they’re on PCP. Anyway, the egg hatches and little snakes come out – a lot of them – but the snakes get bigger and bigger until Delia is like Britney at the VMAs singing “I’m a Slave 4 U.”
Back at the morgue, Taissa and Kyle get into a car while Kyle’s body seems to seize. Surprise! Misty Day is third wheeling it in the back seat and soon they’re in the bayou with Misty rubbing mud on the seams of Kyle’s new body parts. She talks about her “power of resurgence” and talks about Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks, who she refers to as the “White Witch,” setting the groundwork for Steve Nicks’ upcoming guest appearance, I guess. Misty is outrageously anachronistic: Didn’t she die last year? Why does she listen to Fleetwood Mac and dress like Stevie Nicks? That’s not a “thing” in 2013.
Marie Laveau is at her home talking to her boyfriend, who is still alive after all of these years – Mme. LaLaurie’s minotaur. And he still looks as terrifying as ever. She says to him, “You’ll never believe who’s back.”
Fiona finds Mme. LaLaurie hanging out on the street and gives it to her straight. “You deserved every minute you spent in that dirt,” she says of LaLaurie’s horrific actions. LaLaurie talks about how much she loved her family in spite of what a monster everyone thinks she is. She even loves her ugly daughter, though she didn’t really care when her husband died. “I planned on killing him for weeks,” she says and adds that she was going to put poison in his buckwheat. She sighs about how much she loved her daughters. LaLaurie asks Fiona to kill her, but of course Fiona won’t do that until she figures out her secret to immortality first. Fiona tells her she might, but if she runs away again, it’s back in the box she goes.
