Written by Ian Brennan
Directed by Ryan Murphy
Mildred (to Father Andrews): "You see Father, Edmund Tolleson is my brother. He wasn't born a monster. Someone turned him into one. God bless you, Father."
Ah, the lengths someone will go to protect their sibling. It's not that Mildred isn't aware that Edmund is a cold blooded monster, if anything she seems all too aware of that, even if there's the impression that Mildred thinks she can control her brother. Of course, it's obvious that we'll get to a point where Mildred won't be able to keep Edmund under wraps.
However, she was desperate to prevent him from getting the electric chair and while she was able to have influence over Hanover who even chatted to Edmund this week, there was the problem of Father Andrews (Hunter Parrish) to deal with head on.
In the first episode, we saw Mildred nearly kill one patient and directly cause another to commit suicide. Here she perfectly the transorbital lobotomy that Hanover himself didn't seem widely adept on the traumatised priest, leaving him unable to send Edmund to his deserving fate. While I felt sorry for Father Andrews, at least the show is cementing on Mildred's evilness here.
Of course with Mildred going to the extremes to protect her brother, the episode saw Edmund putting on an act of schizophrenia that even Hanover wasn't fooled by. Some brilliant acting between both Finn Wittrock and Jon Jon Briones in that particular, even if my opinion on the latter's character has not changed since the first episode.
Moving away from the Edmund plot, we also got to see Mildred forming a connection with Gwendolyn Briggs and promptly being terrified by it when she realised the latter assumed she was a lesbian. I'm pretty sure Nurse Ratched was not an LGBT character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and I'm not sure about the show going there but at the same time, there's no denying that Sarah Paulson and Cynthia Nixon are electric in scenes together.
As for Nurse Bucket - I'm really enjoying her and Ratched's rivalry and this week's kerfuffle over a peach added some nice comedy to the episode as well. Mildred didn't even have to enact any direct revenge as Bucket's own squeamishness became her undoing. As for Dolly, she probably shouldn't go out of her way to antagonise Mildred. Bucket may be a worthy adversary for Ratched but Dolly strikes me as someone that Mildred could easily crush without putting much thought into it.
- We got the title sequence in this episode (why wait for the second episode to do this? Anyone else find that a bit annoying?) but no Sharon Stone as of yet.
- The episode nicely depicted Gwendolyn's opposition to lobotomies before outing her as a character while two of the current patients are also lesbians, one of whom an actor named Ingrid played by Harriet Sanson Harris.
- Standout music: Glen Miller's Moonlight Serenade and Sandy Williams Afterhours On Dream Street.
- Chronology: Not long from where the pilot episode left off.
Ice Pick was a bit of an improvement on the first episode. It was nice to get some insight into characters like Gwendolyn, see Mildred plummet to another low as well as the intense scenes with Hanover and Tolleson and those lobotomy scenes were not easy to watch either.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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