'American Horror Story: Asylum' 206 Review "The Origins of Monstrosity"

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It was a back-story bonanza tonight on American Horror Story: Asylum as we peeled back the skin on several characters’ motivations including Bloody Face himself, Dr. Oliver Thredson. ‘The Origins of Monstrosity’ gave us some quality time with some of the darker characters on the series this year, and each was given a chance to try to defend to themselves (and thereby the audience as well) why they are the way they are. Basically, the entire episode boiled down to a study of psychopathy and it brought up the old nature vs. nurture debate.

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When you have a lead character as a primary antagonist for a show it becomes important for the audience to feel some level of pity and/or sympathy toward them or it’s just a matter of waiting them to go down for their crimes. Where AHS succeeds in bringing their trademark level of disturbing into the mix is how they twist a character's motivation even further than what we’ve seen before. When Oliver Thredson gets his big villain’s monologue we learn that mommy never loved him and now women (at the age of or around thirty-three, what an odd profile to have for choosing victims) will pay for it. Sure, it’s not the newest character quirk for a serial killer to have in a piece of fiction, but Quinto sells it. Hard. On a further re-watch (or seven) of last week’s scenes with Oliver Thredson post-reveal it became quite clear to me that there was an extremely interesting acting choice being displayed by Zachary Quinto. This week it became increasingly obvious that he’s approaching the role with these unsettling bursts of boyishness. Oliver is a little boy in a man’s body—just look at the exact mannerisms he displays when he giggles in front of Lana and you’ll see someone who never fully developed. Intelligence is one thing, emotional intelligence is quite another and for someone who grew up within the system without any real love or affection afforded to him, Oliver Thredson would be a ticking time bomb of neediness. It’s just unfortunate for his past victims that Oliver’s grand epiphany about his need for intimacy occurred as he essentially molested a cadaver late at night during medical school.

Everything is about skin and the contact it represents, contact which he didn't get growing up—hence the obsession with removing it and fashioning it into other things. He loves skin only for a short while and then wishes to distance himself from it-- abandoning it before it can do the same to him if you will. In fact, he can’t even just be rid of the skin or other remains entirely after he briefly satisfies his intimacy urge. His utilitarianism is likely a side effect of his life in a boy’s home, (not an orphanage as he firmly rebuffed Lana’s guess at his upbringing being as such and really it’s tragic that he was never even given the chance to find the love he so craved) where waste would be greatly disapproved. It also makes sense as to why he was in such conflict with someone like Sister Jude and her methods—clearly being cropped doesn’t deter anyone from their darker authentic impulses as Mary Eunice would later describe the temperament of people like him.

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Oliver is at odds with himself even with what exactly he wants from his latest captive, Lana Winters. Is it a journalist that can tell his story so the world can know that he isn’t really to blame for the brutal murders, or is it because he wants to finally fill the gap in his life left by his mother’s absence? The fact is, it doesn’t matter either way because it’s a terrifying person who craves affection all while setting up Lana to fail from the very beginning due to the unwilling nature of their uh, ‘relationship’.  He openly admits that he got into his chosen field of study to try to fix himself, but that somewhat noble endeavor has led to a much darker path.

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Speaking of noble intentions taking a much darker turn, finally we were given a bit of back-story on the mysterious Monsignor Timothy Howard and the nature of his relationship to Dr. Arden.  We find out that back when Briarcliff was a tuberculosis ward, Dr. Arden was a member of the medical staff. He was grandfathered in to the new facility with the promise of being able to conduct his so-called innovative research. It’s important to note that Howard is not himself a vicious man as some may have believed what with all the 'Unholy Trinity' talk over the summer before the premiere. He was just out of his depth and his ambition got the better of him when Dr. Arden told him that life-saving work could be done as long as he was given the opportunity. Monsignor Howard has become one of the only relatively decent characters on the side of the authority figures on the show. If he thought he could do so without going down himself, Howard would have pulled the plug on Arden’s activities tonight. At the hospital, his shocked and appalled reaction to Shelley’s condition was all-too genuine, and his decision to put her out of her suffering was as much mercy as it was saving his own ass. He’s far too complicit in Arden’s activities by now to stop him without bringing the entire institution down in the process, but it’s nice to see that some of the characters on this show truly have good intentions they just wind up in awful circumstances.

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As for Arden's monstrosity he truly does not see himself as any kind of monster so take that, title of the episode! Instead he has a fucked-up take on the Cold War paranoia that was so rampant back then. Instead of worrying about building a bomb shelter and hoarding canned goods, Arthur Arden has decided to make humanity as invincible as the almighty cockroach and about three times as nasty. He believes his own story so much and it’s interesting how this could partly be an expression of his shame from what he likely took part in at the concentration camps. He can be prejudiced against Jews and wish to create a master race—both tenets of the Nazi party—all while truly wanting to distance himself from who he was back then. Even when people bring it up, such as when Mary Eunice did by calling him his real name after dealing with the Nazi hunter on Arden’s trail, he strongly rebuffs them on a level that goes past not wanting to be found out about and prosecuted for his crimes. At least that’s what James Cromwell is bringing to the role in this episode as he puts on the perfect pained expression of someone who wants to do something so significant that it will erase the misdeeds of their past for good.

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Mary Eunice is less of an origin of monstrosity as society making her an outcast sets her up to be the perfect canvas for the Devil to come along and do its finest work yet. In fact, we were also given the chance to see that Oliver was an outcast among his peers, and it just goes to show that these characters are being affected by circumstances beyond the ones they actively blame for how they turn out.  With Mary Eunice it’s all very Carrie, eventual telekinetic abilities and all, but what’s working about this storyline is how the Devil is converging with Mary Eunice not just taking over the steering wheel.  It also seems to be setting up a subversive take on women’s liberation by having a female form slowly but surely taking control of the asylum against the highly patriarchal leadership of people like Dr. Arden and Monsignor Howard.

In the episode, Sister Mary Eunice gets to provide advice and encouragement to lil' psycho in training, Jenny. Your prototypical, ‘something just ain’t right with that girl’ kid who sure enough turns out to be a killer. Jenny had her mother’s love and it didn’t keep her from turning out twisted, do you hear that Oliver? Might want to work on that self-diagnosis a little more because some people are just born that way—born with the urge to kill and to harm.

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Devoting an hour to deeper levels of character development also pushed the plot forward with how the actions of the resident monsters of American Horror Story had an effect on others. Kit is in the clink with the realization that Dr. Thredson probably put him there intentionally, Lana’s stuck in an utterly repulsive sadosexual pseudo incestuous situation with her captor in order to placate his urges and still survive, and Jude’s on her way out of Briarcliff so that she can stop causing so much trouble with her managerial ineptitude. Everyone on this show is winding up in a completely different point already and we’re not even half-way through the season. Let’s not forget either about the 2012 storyline and how it relates (that’s going to be a pun in a minute) to the action in ’64. All of the impostor Bloody Faces are found dead at the ruins of Briarcliff after the cops were informed by an anonymous source, with a voice exactly like S1 cast-member Dylan Mcdermott, that they were there. Leo’s actually dead, but where oh where is Theresa? Oh she’s just IN BLOODY FACE’S KILL ROOM STRAPPED DOWN AND WAITING TO BE CARVED.

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And so we shall leave this review tonight with our ‘crack-pot theory that’s probably true’ of the moment: Dylan is playing Oliver and Lana’s forced lovechild who’s going on to continue daddy dearest’s work. The voice in the beginning IS Dylan and the voice at the end is different, like an old man. You may scoff at the notion that Oliver would still be involved in killing at his likely advanced age, (unless the live-forever serum Arden worked on was perfected but I digress) but with an apprentice, nay, a protegee any man’s body of work can be continued. Maybe Lana will wind up giving him something he truly wants after all, the chance to be the kind of parent to a child that would know a whole new take on unconditional love before they joined the family business. I mean the furniture making, of course.