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So has anyone been watching season 3? I've enjoyed it so far, I think it's a big improvement over last season.
I haven't been mostly because last season took such a hard nosedive. It's on the radar of things to catch up on though.
It's worth a watch for sure. The first episode is a little shaky, but once things start coming together it picks up. Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Angela Basset are all awesome, as expected.
So has anyone been watching season 3? I've enjoyed it so far, I think it's a big improvement over last season.
I haven't been mostly because last season took such a hard nosedive. It's on the radar of things to catch up on though.
I enjoyed season 1, and enjoyed season 2 up until the nose dive you referred to, I didn't even finish the last few episodes, completely lost interest.
But I still consider myself a fan of the series, and season 3 has been good overall so far. Started out great, slowly leveling out to good, I hope it doesn't slip any further. I'm biased to anything set in New Orleans, so take that into account with my comments.
One thing that kind of bugs me is how they kind of sort of are trying to make you feel sorry for Kathy Bates' character, and she's such a good actor that it almost works, then I remember how horrific and terrible her character is. I'm hoping they do a good job of tying together all the plot lines without reverting to aliens or something stupid like that. I need more frankenstein Tate in upcoming episodes, that's for sure.
I think Coven has been the best. Freak Show was entertaining, but I was kind of forcing myself to keep going. If this season doesn't pick up, I don't think I'll be able to finish it.
I think Coven has been the best. Freak Show was entertaining, but I was kind of forcing myself to keep going. If this season doesn't pick up, I don't think I'll be able to finish it.
I haven't finished a season since season 1, ha (EDIT: actually I did finish Coven). Sometimes I'll kind of half watch the last episode while messing around on the computer or something while my wife watches it, or I'll just get her to tell me what happened, but I always lose interest after several episodes.
Haven't watched the season premiere yet, but generally AHS desperately needs to figure out a sensible plot arc and stick with it, create some characters you actually give a shit about, and maintain an air of mystery so the viewer has incentive to keep tuning in.
Freak Show was close to the worst season, hard to say if it was worse than asylum. Kind of screwed up to say my favorite characters in Freak Show were the homicidal clown and Dandy. Could've cared less about any of the protagonists.
I think Coven has been the best. Freak Show was entertaining, but I was kind of forcing myself to keep going. If this season doesn't pick up, I don't think I'll be able to finish it.
lol only one episode in. and we all know asylum was the best.
Asylum was my favorite from a subject matter point of view and in terms of scary I found it to be. But, Coven was probably the one that got me hooked best. Shit Show was 100% the worst yet (only characters I cared for were the clown, Dandy, and Edward Mordrake) I have not yet been able to watch the premier for the new season, but intend to asap. The new one seems promising to me because of it being inspired by a real hotel. I hope they pull a fair amount from the history of the real hotel! It would allow for a great tie in with the first season
Considering you've found the need to respond to my threads as if you are threatened by me I offer you some peace my confused counterpart. May you find peace in your restless soul.
Considering you've found the need to respond to my threads as if you are threatened by me I offer you some peace my confused counterpart. May you find peace in your restless soul.
So far, it has been remarkably restrained and organized by AHS's standards. Admittedly, that is a low bar to clear, especially after the last two seasons, but it's off to a good start.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Murphy & Falchuk and their writers are cribbing from some of the better sources of inspiration available to them. The Shining is obviously the major touchstone, given the setting and the seeming importance of young children thus far, but it's also borrowing well from the true story of H.H. Holmes, which was brilliantly chronicled by author Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City. There's also the obvious connection to the movie Seven, from its lead cop pairing of handsome white guy and black older guy down to the murders rooted in an external sense of morality to the relationship between the killer and the white cop and his family. There's also some smaller nods to stuff like The Omen, in the way the children are dressed, and I think, obliquely, 2001: A Space Odyssey, given the strange anodyne place the children hang out.
It's hard to tell exactly where the writers are drawing their vampire inspirations from. Nosferatu obviously popped up in the first episode, and there is a bit of that, but there's also a bit of 'Salem's Lot, a bit of From Dusk Till Dawn, and a bit of the last ten years of vampire adaptations we've seen. I think it's been done in a remarkably adept way, all things considered, and the players involved have been suitably mysterious and predatory. The question I have here is what exactly will threaten the vampire brood? We know now that they are immortal but not invulnerable, but they seem to have such a leg up on everyone that it seems hard to believe they'll be genuinely threatened.
The police-thriller part of the show is working out surprisingly well too, I feel. You can feel the breaks in the cop's family that the disappearance of the son have left, even years later. Chloe Sevigny has been fantastic in the limited time she has had onscreen in a role that is very much against type for her. I'm interested to see how exactly Holden got from the pier to the hotel, which is something we should learn sooner rather than later, I hope.
What isn't working for me so far is whatever is going on with Sarah Paulson's addict character. I get that she, and everyone else at the hotel before the Swedish girls get there, have been transfixed to its location somehow, and that she has died in the not-too-distant past. I just don't understand exactly what her function is, or why she'd be kept around. The impure blood of addicts is of no use to The Countess or her people. I don't know why she sewed Max Greenfield into a mattress, and if she has done that to all of the mattresses or what. She just seems like a piece without an anchor right now. We know that she, the laundress, and Parch have all died and seemingly come back to life, but why? Is there going to be an ongoing concern this season with the stakes of the story, like there was in Coven when we realized, in essence, that there were no rules and that no one dying mattered worth a damn?
On the other hand, Kathy Bates and Denis O'Hare are killing it at all turns. They have played characters that could have been overly cartoonish to near perfection so far, keeping them grounded and feeling more real than just about everyone else in the proceedings. Bates' narration of Evan Peters' story - which has been the utter highlight of the season so far, if not the entire series as a whole - was gripping. Her handling of the Swedish girls was great, up to and including the fact that she is dutifully turning them into the vampiric equivalent of foie gras. You can see how she got into this situation, and how she can't get out of it. O'Hare's turn as Liz Taylor has been sublime, though brief so far. In limited exposure, he has given great gravitas and a sharp tongue to what I suppose we would call a gender nonbinary or trans character, and he has made her/them look fabulous in so doing.
Speaking of oft-marginalized groups: It will be interesting to see what happens when we have more of Naomi Campbell and any Angela Basset at all. AHS has not historically done well by people of color, either by omission (first two seasons) or by bad writing and excessive violence towards them at the hands of white people (seasons three and four).
As of two episodes in, I'd say this is in contention with Asylum for the best season of the series, and it is far and away the best use of Evan Peters since the first season. I might also say that, at this point, it's probably Kathy Bates' best work on the show since she joined it, though I concede that point is at least arguable - she was one of the two good things about Coven (the other is Myrtle Snow, may she live forever in our hearts).
If you've given up on this show in the past, this might be a season to reconsider.
I'm l digging this season and thanks for that great breakdown. I'm really into horror films, so breaking down the nods to different movies is right up my alley but I'll have to rewatch the first two episodes to really weigh in. I will say that I agree that this could end up being as good or better than Asylum if it continues to be as good as it has been thus far.
However, while I agree that the cop story has been good. It may end up being the one thing that kills this season for me. Not because the story isn't engaging or anything but simply because the guy playing that cop is a horrendous actor (am I the only one that feels this way?) I have loved literally everything else that has happened and everyone has been great. But, dear god, that guy feels so fake and processed, it absolutely kills it for me. Also, the one part that I didn't like about the writing was when the daughter said she had seen Holden. The father screamed extremely aggressively at her, "No, Holden is dead!" (or something like that) and that killed me because that is not how a parent would've handled that in reality. I get that he was an alcoholic and he's going trough rough times but there is no other instance of him snapping and lashing out like that. On the contrary, he always seems to handle everything in a very level headed nature. For instance, right after that when the daughter went away, the mother made a comment about Holden disappearing being his fault and he didn't lash out at her, he just asked her if she really thought that.
Now that I'm done complaining about a very small piece of the show, I must say, I'm loving this so far, I just hope that cop's acting doesn't ruin too much for me.
Wes Bentley isn't overwhelming as the cop, but he's not bad. I do think that particular scene with the daughter could have been written with more nuance, but we don't really watch AHS for nuance, do we?
Wes Bentley isn't overwhelming as the cop, but he's not bad. I do think that particular scene with the daughter could have been written with more nuance, but we don't really watch AHS for nuance, do we?
Agreed, but it just seemed out of place for the character to do it and that, combined with his acting are real annoying to me. Honestly, I'm only focusing so hard on those two things because I've loved everything else so it's causing me to blow small things out of proportion.
Wes Bentley isn't overwhelming as the cop, but he's not bad. I do think that particular scene with the daughter could have been written with more nuance, but we don't really watch AHS for nuance, do we?
Agreed, but it just seemed out of place for the character to do it and that, combined with his acting are real annoying to me. Honestly, I'm only focusing so hard on those two things because I've loved everything else so it's causing me to blow small things out of proportion.
Idk how do we know that daughter didn't really piss him off earlier in the week. She had it coming.
I just wanted to say that the fact that they used Jesus and Mary Chain in last night's episode (in addition to using The Cure in the first episode) makes me extremely happy
I just watched the most recent episode, and here are some thoughts.
Up front, Angela Bassett. She's playing a thankless and vengeful version of Pam Grier. She's got it out for The Countess. These are fantastic developments that assuage some of my concerns about the first two episodes. The Countess' greed, pride and bloodlust, which don't necessarily break the ten commandments (about which more in a bit) but they are, in essence, three of the seven deadly sins. It only follows that in her century of life, she'd backstab someone she had previously made immortal. That it should be someone as fearsome (and generally indispensable to the show) as Angela Bassett means that this conflict should grow and develop nicely over the next 6 to 10 episodes. I will say that the backstory narration she gives us via Donovan felt much more ham-fisted than the story of James Patrick March as told by Kathy Bates, though I think it's the fault of clunky writing that crosses too many time periods.
Speaking of March, we get another great scene with him and Tristan this week, as the latter seeks out the former to regale him of his first kill, the gay hipster from last week. The two are delightfully anachronistic to one another - the great joke of the scene comes when Tristan says he Googled March, who replies with excitement that "That sounds obscene." There's a sort of father-son relationship developing here, and to an extent, the laundress is filling a motherly role. In an episode titled "Mommy", it's intriguing that arguably the most interesting story line is this one, wherein March essentially bequeaths the hotel and its murderous contraptions to a found son in Tristan.
The other story that continues to impress is the psychological trauma of the Lowe family. We see them this week in family therapy - which, yes, they should absolutely be in, and good for the show for having people actually try to deal with their shit - talking about Holden. The adults give Scarlett just enough agency to let us see why they don't believe her. When she describes, to great and near-perfect detail, the room that Holden and his adoptive siblings spend much of their time, or the glass coffins in an empty swimming pool in which they sleep, you can instantly understand why her parents don't believe her. Alex's story of new motherhood with Holden rings strikingly true, relative to the birth stories I've heard in my life - particularly the parts about smelling his head and how she never felt love as clearly and purely before. The subsequent suicide, and now, the divorce papers, all stem from her strongest positive emotions being flipped in the other direction when Holden was kidnapped.
Her husband's story, which now involves Gabriel the junkie killing Naomi Campbell's character, and a bunch of TMZ-type folks with their tongues nailed to tables, falls flatter this week, at least when his family is not involved. The gossip mag's entire staff being killed, save for perhaps the one person who left their tongue behind, is too brief a blip on the radar to really have any impact. The subsequent discovery of - or perhaps collision into - Gabriel, who is able to identify Sally as the problem before he ostensibly dies doesn't carry a lot of weight, and the scene with Sally and John in the elevator doesn't do a lot to make Sally's story - which, by the way, now involves Iris' assisted suicide - any more compelling. Sally and Gabriel are really just one dimensional characters, even after both appearing in three episodes, and it's hard to care, frankly.
It's similarly hard to care about Donovan and Iris, even as Kathy Bates continues to knock the ball out of the park. Her scenes this week are charged, and I'd be surprised if this episode weren't her Emmy submission next year. The problem is that her sparring partner is Donovan, who is just kind of a garbage character still. He's more or less occupying the space that had previously been filled by Emma Roberts - pretty face who does nothing but bitch and connive. Until we get some depth out of these characters, and some more convergence from the disparate stories going on here, it's going to be hard for Hotel to reach its potential, which remains high after the successful introduction of Bassett this week.
Quarter Post Grades: *James Patrick March and the murder palace - A- *The Lowe Family psychodrama - A- *The Countess and her vampire brood - B+ *The Ten Commandments murders - B- *Iris & Donovan - C+ *Sally and whatever she's doing - C-/D+
New season is Cult, based off of Trump's rise to power. Didn't watch any of last year's season. Waiting for it to get on Netflix. I randomly remembered how much I love this show
New season is Cult, based off of Trump's rise to power. Didn't watch any of last year's season. Waiting for it to get on Netflix. I randomly remembered how much I love this show
Last season was okay but not "good"... I don't think they really ever knew where they were going with the story. It did have some great acting, though.
I am excited for this season. It looks like the most promising since Coven. I love the new trailer.