"Ten Commandments Killer"
Original Airdate: December 2, 2015
.........
Wow, how will I recover from the shock?
Most of the episode gave us off-screen moments that reveal how Lowe committed the murders, but most of these moments happened before the events of the show even began. It wasn’t some cleverly grand reveal, detailing what had been happening in the background the whole time that we, the audience, missed. It’s a serious cop-out in terms of the writing, and it’s starting to feel like Hotel is falling into the same traps that Asylum encountered.
Asylum started out awesome, few people deny
that. It was set in a Catholic-owned mental health facility in the 50s and
featured insanity, demon-possessed nuns, and unethical medical experiments,
with a loose serial killer to boot. But apparently that wasn’t enough to mine
for Ryan Murphy, who decided to also throw aliens in the mix. It was already a
delicate balance, and just like that, it all came crashing down. Coven rectified many of those mistakes
by sticking to a singular concept and exploring naturally-associated themes. I
didn’t watch enough of Freak Show to
form an opinion in how it handled its story, but I can certainly form one for Hotel, which now has done a breakneck
180 mid-season.
The first few
episodes of the show seemed to suggest our focus would be on the hotel (and its
ridiculous Shining rip-offs that somehow
magnified this week) and the vampires who seemed to run it. Now it’s suddenly
all about serial killers and rewriting history to fit Murphy’s weird little
narrative. There’s also the hovering idea of the hotel’s inherent evilness and
status as a “haunted house.” And like Asylum,
it’s all becoming too much, especially since Asylum covered the serial killer topic extensively. This rehashing
is more in bad taste than anything else at this point, with the shameless use
of real killers and romanticizing their stories with scenes of them worshipping
March and hosting dinner parties where the favors are more victims. I’ve used
this before, I think, but...
With that
aside, here’s what happened this week.
The episode
opens on Lowe, seconds after Wren jumped in front of the car. Recalling seeing
her among the glass coffins in the empty pool, he returns to the hotel and
accosts a heartbroken Liz for information. Sally reluctantly takes him to room
64 where he finds the preserved body parts of the Ten Commandments Killer’s
victims stored behind the armoire. Sally insists that March — the original Ten
Commandments Killer— was waiting for a successor and that Lowe was in fact the
killer all along. Oh no, what a shock.
Lowe then
visits Wren in the morgue, where he meets Detective Hahn and confesses to being
the killer. He realized he’d been to the Hotel Cortez years before, which is
what started his killing spree. In a flashback to 2010, Lowe gets served drinks
in the hotel bar by Sally and Liz, and Donovan invites him to a party upstairs.
Elizabeth and
March are having dinner upstairs when Donovan brings Lowe to meet them. March
is immediately taken with Lowe, and he gets the detective drunk on absinthe
before launching into a very lengthy conversation about the difference between
right and wrong, and murder, and all sorts of philosophy student garbage,
before Lowe finally passes out. March then insists to Elizabeth that Lowe is a
perfect candidate to be his protégé, and Elizabeth agrees to kidnap Holden to
help push Lowe over the edge. Lowe returns home hung over, and Alex is unnerved
that he was off drinking for two days. To help the situation, they decide to
have a family day, which is when Holden is kidnapped.
When he and
Alex started to lose hope in their search for Holden, Lowe began to crumble. He
constantly returned to the Hotel Cortez’s bar, where he’d drink and talk to
March, and had an affair with Sally. At one point, March suggested to Lowe that
perhaps he was in pain from a lack of justice in the world, and his inability
to seek it as a detective. March then revealed his trophy room, filled with
both hunted animals and heads of human victims. Lowe is unimpressed, insisting
he’s going to report it, but later realizes March was correct about the lack of
justice Lowe is able to bring after a murderer he investigated gets off on a
technicality.
He returns to
the hotel in 2015 on his son’s birthday, and March tells him a story about a
former guest who molested a ten-year-old boy (the same age Holden would have
been). Lowe goes after the pedophile and beats him to death with an Oscar award
the man was selling. He then attempts to kill himself before Sally arrives and
cuts him down.
March and
Sally try and help Lowe through the aftermath of his actions, keeping him from
trying to kill himself again. It’s also revealed that March is protecting Sally
from an “addiction demon” conjured up from her activities. In the present time,
Hahn insists that Sally has been dead for over 20 years and that Lowe is hallucinating
and confused. Lowe insists it’s true, recounting a time when Sally informed him
that the Cortez forces him to forget the things he’s done while he’s there when
he leaves. Lowe had also revealed to Sally and March that he loved killing the
pedophile, which March says is because using his pain was better than letting
it sit. He then shows Lowe the work he did as the original Ten Commandments
Killer, a job Lowe agrees to continue.
Lowe
continues his affair with Sally while planning out his murders. Sally provides
him with an adulterous couple as his first victims, and Lowe uses their phones
to text each other a location, and then murders the woman and mutilates the
man’s body. He then insists the suspect he thought he saw the night of another
murder was actually himself as James March. When he concludes his story, Hahn still
doesn’t believe him, insisting that he feels responsible for not catching the
real killer. Lowe then stabs Hahn, insisting that he has broken a commandment
by “coveting thy neighbor’s wife,” which Hahn does not deny, and kills him.
Lowe returns
to the hotel with a bloody bag and informs Iris he remembers everything, She’s
relieved that she no longer has to play games and dance around him. Iris
insists Lowe leave the hotel and forget, but he demands the key to 64. There he
presents March with Hahn’s severed genitals, which March applauds.
There's two more episodes of American Horror Story: Hotel left before we take a break for a bit, so stay tuned and see if you can't guess anymore obvious "reveals"!
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