Posted by Katherine Recap | TV

[For American Horror Story – Hotel “Chutes and Ladders” or any other recaps on Fetchland, assume the presence of possible spoilers.]

FX Summary:

Chutes and Ladders Will Drake brings couture to the Hotel Cortez; John learns about the hotel’s sadistic first owner.

This extra long episode begins as Hypodermic Sally rips apart the sewn up slit of a mattress to chide Gabriel for trying to cheat death then squeezes him back inside. The swedish blonde then dies in her neon lit cage with a vampire child biting her wrist. Ewww. It tastes gross. “That’s because she’s dead now,” Iris, the voice of reason, explains. The body gets dumped into the dusty basement down a trapdoor chute – reminiscent of Sweeney Todd. Then Iris drains the vampire child blood into a crystal decanter she delivers to The Countess and Donovan. They drink. The Countess wants to go out and hunt but beautiful Donovan wants to stay in and watch House of Cards. So Gaga glams up and goes alone. Surprise surprise… it’s just like every other relationship in the world.

Then we’re back at the Hotel Cortez where John Lowe wakes to see his little boy and chases after him crying “Holden” while running all the way to the lobby. Sally awaits at the bar there and immediately recognizes John as a recovering alcoholic. She explains that she ended up a junkie yes but used to be a poet – even wrote one for Patti Smith. John drinks ginger ale and listens. She asks John the story of his last drunk, so he regales a tale of woe. He was on a wretched case – a whole family killed in their home in a scene that wrecked John so much he boozed for two days straight while his family waited at home for him. Then Lowe tried to make amends taking them to a carnival and his son, Holden, went missing the next day. So, he stopped drinking because he, “Can’t afford to get lost.”

Next John’s at the police station where he immediately assumes a package addressed to him from the Hotel Cortez is a bomb. but when the bomb squad check it out they just find a bloody Oscar statue inside. Detective Lowe sends it to the crime lab, seemingly unmoved. Meanwhile, Back at the Cortez Will Drake throws a fashion event that inspires a visit from Claudia (Naomi Campbell) of Vogue Magazine in a fur bolero, nerd glasses, and the hots for Detective Lowe. During the runway show Scarlett, John’s daughter meets Lachlan, Blake’s jaded son. The model of the moment is a douche named Tristan Duffy (Finn Wittrock) and The Countess falls in love with his rage and drug-filled bod. After he hits the runway Tristan carves a slash into his cheek and declares he’s done with modeling. Then Lachlan shows Scarlett the child vampires in their day coffins. “Nothing wakes them,” Lachlan says right before vampire Holden opens his sapphire blue eyes.

Douche Tristan is on a rampage then, scavenging the hotel for coke in The Countess’s suite. He’s got a real nose for it, apparently. Donovan’s about to choke Tristan dead but then The Countess saves him instead. Tristan then saunters down a timewarp hallway that transports him to another era. It’s the 1920’s with FDR on the radio and the art deco designs of Hotel Cortez are fresh and new. Tristan starts to steal from one of the rooms when he’s discovered by James March (Evan Peters) who’s got a healed-over mortal wound on his throat and a propensity for murdering young, tied-up girls. Tristan then runs out of the room and right into the arms of the Countess.

Then we see Scarlett ride a city bus by herself into town to the Cortez where she returns to the child vampire coffin room and finds them empty. Winding her way through back hallways Scarlett finds the secret room with the child vampires playing on floor-to-ceiling video consoles. Holden sees her and says, “What took you so long?” and he even knows who she is. Scarlett asks why he hasn’t grown up. He doesn’t answer and doesn’t want to leave with her. Scarlett tries to take a picture with him but then he almost bites her neck and she runs away. In the hallway on her way out Scarlett passes Hypodermic Sally who chews her own teeth down to bloody nubs while laughing. This arouses deeply embedded archetypal terrors for anyone who’s had a tooth-crumbling nightmare. Scarlett, of course, runs away even faster.

Next thing we know it’s late at night and Scarlett walks down her street toward home where cop cars are a flurried collection of sirens outside. They’re all about her because she’s missing. John and Alex are all a twitter with terror. She tries to calm them saying she saw Holden at the hotel and wanted to surprise them by bringing him home. They’re understandably still upset and tell her Holden is dead. Back at the Cortez The Countess has made Tristan a vampire now. So he’s excited to sex it up with her out of gratitude while she explains all the vampire rules to him in between banging. Don’t suck on the dead, no sun, blah blah blah. She warns him not to get caught or fall in love. He pretends to listen.

The Countess tells Tristan she’s been alive since 1902 but the best days were the late 1970s when she was a disco queen. They’re lounging around the bed enflagrante when Donovan comes in all jealous and pissy. Donovan says he loves her and she tells him he’ll get better from this because that’s what makes us all better – heartbreak. Donovan’s shockingly ungrateful for this news. Then John Lowe comes to the Cortez pretty pissy himself that his daughter was able to roam the hotel halls without anyone stopping her. Iris tries to get him to drink so she can tell him why this hotel is so special.

Iris recounts the tale of James March, the sadistic pyscho original owner and builder of the Hotel Cortez. John has to understand the origin to understand the hotel, she says. In 1925 Mr. March, a filthy rich loon, was obsessed with art deco design and killing. His unquenchable bloodlust was perfectly suited for building a torture chamber with secret passageways, escape chutes and built-in alibis. He loved murdering so much that he even used it for sexual pleasure, much like The Countess. Turns out Ms. Evers, the laundress goes all the way back to James March. She’s been working at the hotel from the very beginning and has all sorts of magical methods for cleaning linens with love, as the eerie Ms. Evers loves to say.

But he was sloppy in murders outside the hotel, Iris explains, and once even left a bunch of bodies out in the road. Thus the police came after him. It was assumed his wife turned him in – the wife role a great candidate for The Countess – but not yet revealed. As soon as Ms. Evers announced to James March that the police were there he “does her the honor” and shoots her before slitting his own throat just as the police arrive. Thus, Iris has now told Lowe the story of how the Hotel Cortez is full of ghosts and ghouls. John sarcastic claps for Iris’s story before saying, “people do enough damage without help from the afterlife.” The man has a point it’s just he’s in the wrong world for making it.

Back at John’s office he’s in the straight world again, posting crime scene photos next to articles on his board of evidence. He points out a pattern and realizes the Ten Commandments are being expressed through these serial murders. Meanwhile Tristan is at the Cortez scamming a sexual conquest on Grindr. He takes the tasty man up to his room to kill him quickly after only a few kisses. The Countess watches and Tristan tells her, “Just cause I’m sucking on this dude doesn’t mean I’m gay,” which ends this extra long episode with the best line of quite a storied evening.

–Katherine Recap

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