Thursday, April 04, 2024

My Review of American Horror Story: Delicate - Opening Night

 


Written by Halley Feiffer
Directed by Bradley Becker

Siobhan (to Anna): "Why don't you stop whining about what you're scared of and focus on what you can change and that's how hard you fight for that little gold man?"

Has it really been over five months since the first half of this season has aired? It's certainly felt longer but it's back with four more episodes to conclude this nightmare pregnancy season with some flair.

An expansive pre title sequence showed us the birth of Anna Victoria Alcott to a reasonably nice bunch of parents in White Plains, New York where Mommy sang Rockabye to soothe the baby Anna while Daddy noted how creepy the song's lyrics actually were.

Then one night, the mother died of an embolism and the father couldn't cope at the hospital. Oh and apparently Nicolette doesn't age because she was the nurse who sang that lullaby to calm Anna down. Not suspect at all, huh?

Anyways, present day had Anna reacting to Babette's death and being blindsighted by Siobhan and the Ashleys by being the speaker at Babette's funeral. Yup, and it was a rather awful and insincere speech that Anna gave at the funeral to boot.

Fortunately other interesting stuff happened in this episode, such as Dex not being a dick to his wife and realising how awful his father (Reed Birney) was. I even felt sorry for him when he found his mother dead in the bathtub. I mean Dex's still a weak character but he wasn't awful in this episode, so that's a step up, right?

As for Anna, when she wasn't getting her face scratched by a cat and finally paying attention to that other scar on her, she was getting new scars around her belly, making the link with the locations of all her dolls and even managed to cut through Talia's passive aggressive bullshit to boot. Anna also called out the lack of CCTV in the basement, which Talua poorly deflected from.

However where this episode really soared was with two specific scenes. At Dex and Sonia's opening, we had Anna surrounded by Sonia, Nicolette, Ivy and Talia in a manner that gave off some serious Coven vibes. Then there was Siobhan slapping the shit out of Anna when the latter almost threw in the towel for her Oscar campaign. I rather enjoyed the campiness of that particular scene.

- Ivy told Anna that she was an assistant at the art gallery and failed three times at biology.
- Hamish tried to expose both his and Siobhan's deception and ended up dead. Anna's weird stalker from the second episode was back with similar results from last time.
- Babette died while performing oral sex on her limo driver. Both Ashley and Ashleigh pointed out that Anna's reel only did so much to save her.
- Ms Preacher finally reached out to Anna with her card. 
- The cat that scratched Anna was a stray that Nicolette named Felix. I genuinely thought Anna was going to eat the cat at one point.
- Chronology: Aside from the opening scene in 1988, the rest of the episode picked up from where the previous one left off.

Opening Night felt like a bit of a step in the right direction but also, not too much really happened. It seems every woman except Preacher (and Virginia, who's now dead) really is out to get Anna. Saying that, Sonia did seem to cure Anna of her face scar but it's definitely time for more concrete answers with what's going on with these women and their fixation on Anna.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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