American Horror Story: Coven may close a few doors, but blows open an entire wall of possibilities as a pair of mothers take a hard look at their daughter’s lifeless eyes in “Burn, Witch, Burn.”
The first half of the fifth chapter “Burn, Witch, Burn,” may have led viewers to mistake American Horror Story: Coven for AMC’s The Walking Dead. Following last week’s summoning, Marie Laveau’s zombie army arrive to pay the residents a visit and make up for lost time. Particularly interesting this week is the exploration of mother’s guilt through the eyes of two women, paying their debts for time gone by.
All Hallows Eve 1833: Ain’t no party like a LaLaurie party! In 1883 New Orleans, the Halloween party at the LaLaurie mansion is the place to be. Madame’s examination of potential suitors involves a test of brawn. What good mother would want a man in her daughter’s life that flinches at the touch of eyeballs or intestines? The “little birds” would probably settle for their father cleaning a shot gun in the front parlor approach to protective parenting.
Little do they know that mother dearest does not take kindly to the girls’ plot to murder the matriarch of the family. LaLaurie locks the girls up in the true “chamber of horrors” with the slaves and promises their release in a year or so. Getting your cell phone taken away doesn’t seem that bad, now does it?
A Tale of Two Mothers: Cordelia’s burning eyes turn out to be the result of sulfuric acid. Fiona demands the doctor tell her whether Cordelia is blind or not. Unable to take much more of the insufferable sitting and fighting doctors, Fiona pops pills until she finds herself in a druggy haze, wandering the eery halls of the ICU floor. Recognizing the mistakes of the past and amending them with the person you wronged is hard business. Fiona and LaLaurie each take a different path to ease the painful reminders of wasted time.
Fiona enters a room where a mother of a stillborn baby grieves her loss. At Fiona’s insistence, the mother takes the stillborn into her arms and repeats an almost creed like proclamation to always care for, love, and be a mother to that child until the day she dies. As Fiona walks away the baby begins to cry. Fiona gave a mother a chance to live indebted to a miracle.
LaLaurie, alone in the kitchen, faces her eldest daughter through the window. “My daughter, my child,” she chokes out trying to revive the long gone spirit of the daughter she once wronged, promising to make amends. Unfortunately, the command of Marie Laveau has other plans. The corpse strangles LaLaurie as the scene cuts to Queenie wondering where the maid is. Spalding goes to find out, but is attacked in the hall. Queenie uses her voodoo doll power to inflict several unsuccessful attacks. It isn’t until LaLaurie stabs her own daughter with a fire picker from behind that the body is once and for all returned to its resting place.
As the gravity of what just occurred sinks in with Madame, she takes to the bed and tells Queenie, “She has a monster for a mother. This last act was the kindest thing I ever did for her.” LaLaurie of 1883 would not recognize herself 130 years later.
The Walking Dead: The congregation of the dead waiting outside the Academy sends the house into chaos. The literal boy next door, Luke, finds Zoe’s instance to hide a bit absurd considering there are plenty of neighborhood kids playing pranks tonight. Zoe calls Spalding and demands that he take Queenie upstairs, giving similar orders to LaLaurie who tries to go speak to her resurrected daughters. Nan has other plans and runs after Luke who tries to inform the zombies to go home and stop scaring a house of girls.
Luke suffers a deadly blow to his back from one of the zombies and Nan tries her best to get him to safety. The real hero of the scene is Zoe, with her impeccably straight non-frizzy hair. Seriously, get this girl a L’Oreal contract! After distracting the undead with pots and pans, Zoe resorts to a much more suitable weapon; a chainsaw. An overly gory sequence follows as Zoe slices and dices the risen in half until only one remains.
Out of gas, Zoe is able to mutter some semblance of Latin and not only take down the final taunting zombie, but also the entire voodoo séance. Back in Cornrow City, Marie Laveau plummets to the ground from her floating trance state and declares, “I don’t know what that was, but they got some real power in that witch house now.”
Fiona returns to the Academy in time to aid the removal of the undead corpses. The Supreme commends Zoe for performing a service to the Coven that she will never forget. Zoe may be in Fiona’s good graces for now, as long as she remains in the dark about that final spell. In a giant bon fire, the bodies are thrown in, where the flames turn the remains to ash. Fiona states, “What blows away need not be explained.” The winds that morning blew directly to The Witches Council, who appear at the gate to discuss matters most urgent.
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