AHS: Freak Show solved its too many people, too many story lines problem with episode 8, “Blood Bath.” Find out who lived to continue their tale in our recap!

“How dreary to be somebody!” goes the Emily Dickinson poem that Jimmy recited over his mother’s grave on tonight’s AHS: Freak Show episode 8, “Blood Bath.” Ethel was just one of the many deaths in tonight’s episode that brings out some of the best and worst performances of the season thus far. There were two focal points in “Blood Bath.” The first took place in the upheaval of the freak show grounds. The second was way out at the Mott Estate where Regina, Dora’s daughter, comes knocking for her mother.

Three wooden boxes: Two weeks ago we were left with the question, “How will AHS tell every story in time? The answer: kill off people so viewers stop wondering about them. To achieve this and not have it feel cheap or unwarranted, AHS took this week to focus on a few key characters that would serve as catalysts for the rest of the series to pick up speed.

The first to go, unfortunately, was Ethel. Bringing Elsa her nightly tray, Ethel laments on the years she felt she wasted trying to repay the woman who thinks nothing more of those she takes in than a stepping stone until her big break arrives. The search for Ma Petite turns up the tattered remains of her clothing and Elsa throws herself into hysterics. While the rest of the troupe truly mourns, Ethel does not buy Elsa’s performance for a second. She chooses to side with what her deteriorating gut tells her, that Elsa is nothing more than a fraud. And how could she do this to the people she took in under the guise of acceptance and motherly love? Ethel’s betrayal leads her to shoot at her protector, but the shot goes clean through her wooden leg.

It is here that another piece of Elsa’s past comes to light. A prop builder for Hollywood films, and a prosthetics maker in WWI, constructed the two masterpieces upon which she could stand to build her career once more. (If only the German speaking Axeman could stick around!) In the present, Ethel still holds the gun out to Elsa, who convinces her it is time to toast the end of their friendship. Before Ethel can fire the final bullet, Elsa turns around and throws a knife right through her eye.

Stanley ropes Maggie into another lie, “for his client,” and has her call the troupe together to announce that she found Ethel dead behind the wheel of a car that crashed into a tree. In order to remove the evidence of the destroyed eye socket, Stanley conjures a plan to have Ethel chain her neck around a tree that decapitates her when the car surges forward. The plan works well enough to fool everyone and obliterate Jimmy.

At the burial, Jimmy recalls the facts the everyone who knew Ethel could attest to. She was intelligent, a survivor, and from the sounds of it, more of a stable figure in many of their lives than even Elsa can claim to be. With Jimmy taken away from the grave, Ethel’s legacy becomes a call to arms for the ladies of the freak show. Desiree lost a woman who showed her great kindness and bravery in her final days. With that vigor coursing through her, she rallies the woman to take a stand against the oppressive males in their lives. First stop, Penny’s dear old dad.

The man is kidnapped and brought back to the trailer where the women tar and feather him. But it is Maggie who steps in to stop their path to murder. Instead she offers them the chance to consider the lives they are potentially throwing away. Murdering a person will change them, whether they want to admit it or not. There is still time to be a somebody without the dreary weight of the title “murderer” holding them down.

In the midst of all the death and fallout under the tent, Elsa takes a trip to Miami, but not for the sunshine. Instead she sets her sights on a massive woman named Barbara. A banished socialite from the debutante scene on Park Avenue, Barbara is taking leave in the South in an attempt to shed some weight at her mother’s request. Elsa takes this tiny window of opportunity to cultivate the show’s next featured performer, “Ima Wiggles,” appropriately named after the other largest woman in the freak show circuit, “Ima Waddle.”

For all of her efforts to cultivate a “community,” Elsa’s overly dramatic performances tonight would make even silent films beg her to tone it down. Stanley’s assurance that her dramatics are Oscar-worthy did not help.

In a house so fine:

Gloria Mott pays her faceless psychiatrist a visit when her anxiety over Dandy reaches a boiling point. As she recalls his childhood misadventures, a murdered cat here, a missing boy there, Gloria’s doctor urges her to bring Dandy in for some testing. She cannot bear the thought of losing her son, especially since he will most likely be committed, so she returns home only to be met with Regina’s pestering questions about her mother’s whereabouts.

Dandy does pay a visit to the office under the guise of testing his genius and offers yet another astoundingly creepy performance as he rattles off his answers to a Rorschach test. Dandy does not see sexual images, let alone butterflies in the ink blots. Rather he sees a murder that would require an awful lot of cleanup. Before he leaves the office, probably never to return, Dandy asks a simple question: does the doctor believe that by eating the flesh or bathing in the blood of another, a person could gain their powers?

Back home, Dandy approaches Gloria with an ultimatum, she can either kill Regina or accompany him to the electric chair for his crimes. Annoyed, and probably bored, with his mother’s apologies and coddling, Dandy decides it wise to eliminate the problem. After all, Gloria knew what she was doing when she married her cousin to keep the lifestyle she became accustomed to after her father lost everything in the stock market crash. It is her fault that Dandy is the way he is. He does not want her to suffer without him, though, and wishes her a beautiful life with a bullet to the head.

Unfortunately, it is not left up to the imagination what Dandy decides to do with her after death. In the final shot, Dandy disrobes and immerses himself in a bathtub of her blood.

Watch AHS: Freak Show episode 9, “Tupperware Party Massacre,” Wednesday, December 10 at 10:00 p.m. ET on FX.