“American Horror Story: 13” opened on Thursday night with three half-hour episodes on FX, and Jessica Lange walks away with all three of them. The premiere puts her back in the role that started the show, Constance Langdon, eight years after she said she was done with the franchise, and the rest of the cast list is exactly as crowded as promised. What the first ninety minutes actually deliver is narrower than the marketing: this is a Murder House reunion with a few guests, and the full crossover is still a promise.
The trailer sold the question of whether thirteen short episodes could carry four eras of the show without turning into a curtain call. Three episodes in, the answer is a qualified yes: the pieces are moving, the tone is right and Lange is superb. But ninety minutes of a thirteen-episode season have mostly been spent assembling the guests. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “American Horror Story: 13” episodes one to three and for the fates of several legacy characters.
What the first ninety minutes actually deliver is narrower than the marketing: this is a Murder House reunion with a few guests, and the full crossover is still a promise.”
The season’s way in is a new character. Ben DeSoto (Joey Pollari) is a hospice worker with triskaidekaphobia, a crippling fear of the number 13. His girlfriend Kira (Madelaine Petsch) drags him on a birthday trip themed around that exact number. The plane goes down, and Ben walks away while Kira and her friends do not. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk wrote this blunt opening and Murphy directed it himself. It does its job fast.
Ben’s next job puts him on the 13th floor of a Manhattan building called the Apollyon. That name is not subtle, because in the Book of Revelation Apollyon is the angel of the bottomless pit. His client is Mr. Nas (Fedor Steer), an 87-year-old man with a list of strange demands. The recaps agree that he has cloven feet and a habit of looking briefly demonic at night. His doctor Mr. Phibes draws thirteen vials of blood from him every week and keeps them in the same bag as a collection of live snakes. Mr. Phibes is played by John Waters, which is the most “American Horror Story” casting in years.
Nas’s day caregiver is Constance. Lange plays her exactly as she did in 2011: sharp, snobbish, funny and quietly monstrous. She tells Ben her children are “alive and thriving”, and anyone who watched “Murder House” knows that should not be possible. That line is the key to the whole premiere, and it pays off in episode two.
Here is the continuity problem the show sets up on purpose. Constance’s daughter Addie (Jamie Brewer) died in season one, hit by a car outside the house. Tate (Evan Peters) was shot dead by police in his bedroom in 1994. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia (Mena Suvari), was murdered in the house decades earlier. All three ended up as ghosts, and the Murder House does not let its ghosts leave. By “Apocalypse” Constance was a ghost as well, yet all four are now walking around New York.
The premiere’s answer is Nas. By the end of episode two, Addie is back in the flesh, and the clear implication is that Nas can raise the dead. That is the device the entire crossover hangs on, and it is a smart one, because it does not require the show to explain how thirteen separate seasons share one universe. It only needs one creature powerful enough to pull people out of any of them. Whether that holds up for ten more episodes is the real test.
Episode two also brings back the franchise’s scariest face. Twisty the Clown (John Carroll Lynch) from “Freak Show” massacres a class at a clown school taught by Tig Notaro. He kills thirteen students of course. It is the one sequence in the premiere that feels like classic “American Horror Story”, ugly and funny at once. It also sits completely apart from the New York story, and nothing yet explains how he connects to Nas.
The rest of episode two belongs to Constance and Ben. She tells him to treat Nas with kindness rather than fear, and he learns that the last caregiver took her own life. She confesses her own history, including her husband’s affair and what she did about it, and says she took the job to atone for being absent from her children. It is a strong scene, and Lange plays it without a wink, which is harder than it looks in a show this camp.
Episode three, “Rauhnacht”, is where the guests arrive. Rauhnacht is the name for the “rough nights” of German folklore around Christmas, when the boundary with the spirit world is meant to be thin. Constance throws a black-tree holiday party for the occasion, and Tate turns up along with Kai Anderson from “Cult”, also played by Peters. Winter Anderson (Billie Lourd) arrives with Elizabeth Short as her plus-one. Constance calls Elizabeth “one of 13 leading ladies, all as legendary as you are.” That line tells you the season’s plan outright: thirteen iconic women, collected for something.
Ben objects, and Constance drugs his eggnog with a promise that he will understand who he really is when he wakes up. That is a loaded line for a man Constance thought looked familiar the first time she saw him. Then the party moves down to a basement speakeasy called Club Hell. Sarah Paulson is waiting there as Wilhelmina Venable from “Apocalypse”, at what is plainly a gateway to hell, and every recap reads Elizabeth as the first offering. The premiere ends there.
So who is actually missing? Quite a lot of the cast list, starting with the witches. Cordelia (Paulson) and Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts) get one scene at Miss Robichaux’s Academy in episode one, where Cordelia senses something wicked coming. That is the entire Coven storyline so far. Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates and Frances Conroy are all announced and do not register in any recap of these three episodes, while Taissa Farmiga and Lily Rabe are not back at all and nobody has said why. Ariana Grande was announced and then left over a tour conflict before shooting a scene. For a season billed as “all the seasons”, three episodes have used about two of them.
That is where the half-hour format hurts. The old seasons ran up to an hour an episode, so three of these add up to roughly one and a half of the old ones, and that is about how much story they tell. The show has cut its running time by a third in the same season it staged its biggest reunion. That is a bet on nostalgia over time commitment, and on this evidence it works for Lange and costs everybody else.
The stakes are real. “Delicate” was the best-reviewed season in years with critics, and very few people watched it, while nothing beyond this season has been ordered. Three more episodes arrive on October 1st, and they need to bring the witches and the rest of the ensemble into Nas’s building. If they do, this becomes the reunion fans were promised. If not, it is a very good Constance Langdon spin-off with some famous faces waiting in the lobby.
What Do You Think? Is Nas raising the dead the right way to explain the crossover, or does it make death meaningless in a show built on ghosts? Why do you think Constance thinks Ben looks familiar? And after three half-hour episodes, are you sold on the shorter format, or is the reunion already running out of room?
Catch up properly: every American Horror Story season in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s American Horror Story timeline.
See you on the next binge!
