The mothers are having a mother off! Do these words mean nothing to you? Honestly, that’s okay.
Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story: Delicate has returned for the second half of its twisty season after a brief hiatus. From the start, the season has made one thing very clear: Men ain’t shit.
With Halley Feiffer as the showrunner and Danielle Valentine’s novel Delicate Condition as the inspiration, Delicate has marked a couple of firsts in the anthology horror series’ history.
The current season follows rising actor Anna Victoria Alcott (Emma Roberts) as strange happenings occur during her pregnancy.
Episode 6, “Opening Night,” begins with a flashback to Anna’s parents. The scene shows the first-time mother, played by Grace Gummer, lacking support from her husband. He complains about the lullaby she sings while she rocks their baby to sleep and then makes comments about her hygiene. During a sleepless night, the husband berates his wife for coughing and tossing in their bed. Soon after, he finds her dead from a pulmonary embolism.
As the episode continues, Anna’s husband Dex (Matt Czuchry) — already established as a creep — gets into a heated conversation with his father about his mother. Then publicist Siobhan (Kim Kardashian) argues with Hamish, the director of Anna’s movie The Auteur, about their arrangement which implies that Siobhan pulled strings to get Anna cast.
Messy, messy, messy! And folks online picked up on it. “Dex dad trash, Dex trash, Anna dad trash, Dr. Hill’s trash. What’s going on with the men,” wrote one viewer on Twitter.
“So far this season has shown me that straight white men are senselessly cruel and dismissive to the women who literally carried their children,” tweeted another. The same viewer theorized that Anna is attracted to Dex because he’s “just as uncaring and dismissive” as her father.
A third chimed in with an epic diss towards Dex’s father: “Well, Dex’s dad has been on screen for less than a minute and I already hate him.”
Siobhan sums up the season’s theme nicely in her stand-off with Hamish. The publicist is unmoved when Hamish burns the movie script out of guilt for not having written it. She asks him, “Is this supposed to be dramatically compelling?” The director continues his soliloquy and calls his success “a lie,” to which Siobhan replies, “Just like every other mediocre white man.”
Zinger! Shortly after, Hamish gets on Siobhan’s bad side when he threatens to go to the press with his story and he winds up dead. Was Siobhan at the scene of the crime? We suspect so, although nothing has been confirmed. Perhaps that should serve as a warning sign to any man who tries to cross Siobhan — or any other powerful woman.
American Horror Story: Delicate Part 2 airs Wednesdays at 10:00 p.m. on FX and streams next-day on Hulu.
