Are there really only ten episodes this season?? We’re THIRTY PERCENT DONE, Folks!!
We start where we left off last week, watching several cops with a ladder attempting to pull down Flora’s sweater from the top of a 40+ foot tall tree. It’s bright yellow and has flowers sewn on it, but Lee still needs to smell it to confirm that it belonged to Flora. The cops conduct a search party consisting of volunteers, FBI and several town cops, and they all go out into the woods to look for the little girl.
It doesn’t take long before Lee finds:
Piggy-Doll Art
Made out of a dead pig and half of Flora’s doll.
A hundred yards out they find an old abandoned house with another piece of Piggy-Doll Art in the yard, and rooms filled with garbage and flies. But no Flora. They go out to the barn and find a dozen more dead baby pigs in the yard, and inside:
Momma Pig nursing her Piglets
So basically we’re just going for shock value. I laughed hysterically. Why hasn’t Countess Gaga come to rescue these kids? She was so concerned about bad parents last season. Say what you want about Countess Gaga, but she took good care of the Demon Blondies.
Suddenly this is now the home of Hillbilly Chaz & Bros Inc. It was just an empty house when they got there, but now Lee says Chaz & Bros abandoned the house and kids, in order to flee with Flora. The kids, now in police custody, can only screech the word “CROATOAN!” so they’re no help at all.
So now it’s been over 72 hours, and Daddy Mason has arrived and is pretty damn pissed. He thinks Lee is just hiding Flora because she knew she was going to lose custody. He wants her arrested for kidnapping. But they’ve all been up for days so they decide to just go to bed.
But in the middle of the night, Matt’s cell phone rings. He and Shelby and Flora drive out to the woods again, because they’ve found a body. Turns out it’s not Flora’s body, but:
Daddy Mason
Yes, Ryan Murphy really went there, and burned a black man on a cross. A Blair Witch cross, but still.
The next morning Matt realizes there were two CCTV motion alerts on his phone overnight. So far those cameras have done SHIT to help the family. But the recordings show that Lee left the house at 10:17pm, fifteen minutes after Daddy Mason left. Then she returned alone at 2:28am. So we are to believe that in that time, all 110 lbs of Lee went out and overpowered 220+ lb Matt, dragged him out to the woods, lifted him up onto a giant Blair Witch cross that just happened to already be out there (or she took the time to build it herself during that time), set him on fire, and then came home and went to bed. Got that? Good. Let’s all have a Drink of Disbelief before we go on. Take a BIG gulp of it.
But Lee walks in just as Shelby is pointing out how it’s obvious (?????) that Lee killed Mason, and she’s pretty angry and offended. Matt decides once again that maybe they should leave the house and stay at a hotel. As he’s talking, in walks a little white-haired troll of a man…
Leslie Jordan as Cricket!
Long lost nephew of Captain Kangaroo.
Little Cricket says he was called by the spirits to help them. He says he’s the ONLY person who can help them find Flora, and that he has experience finding missing children. Shelby did The Google and found Internet Writings that say he’s telling the truth. He walks through the house banging his cane into their wood floors, and heads right for the Hidey Hole in the wall where Flora had been earlier. Little Prescilla’s bonnet is still there, and when Cricket touches it he announces that Flora is not dead, but she wasn’t taken by The Living.
Cricket explains that Prescilla is not an imaginary friend, but a real girl who died in the late 1500s and loved corn husk dolls. And because Shelby is a new-age yoga-loving spirit believer, she gives Cricket permission to conduct a séance in the house.
This involves pricking his finger and letting blood drip into a candle, which is when I would have called an end to the whole thing. And sure enough, Cricket calls the wrong spirit, “a dark woman” who happens to be ghost Kathy Bates. Ghost Bates doesn’t give a shit about the prayer card that Cricket holds up for protection, and she slices the candle in half.
Cricket says Ghost Bates has a cleaver, she’s called The Butcher, and she passed away a long time ago. The Butcher says this place is hers, and something about “the colony”. Bates’s accent is killing me. She says she doesn’t have Flora, that “that bastard seed Prescilla” has hidden her away somewhere outside of the property that The Butcher seems to think she owns. She says she won’t set foot off her land, but will protect it from trespassers such as them. But Cricket, channeling Zelda Rubinstein, says the property does NOT belong to the dead, and that SHE’s the trespasser, so she breaks out all the windows and yells “CROATOAAAAAN”.