American Horror Story Season 6: Roanoke Chapter 6 Review

This American Horror Story: Roanoke review contains spoilers.

American Horror Story Season 6 Episode 6

Just when you thought it was over, did you really think American Horror Story would just vanish with a happy ending, if that’s what you call a frantic escape from homicidal ghosts? 

Reality show director Sidney doesn’t think so. If he isn’t the most delusional ignoramus in all of fictional Hollywood, then I don’t know who is. His arrogance made me seriously hope the butcher would just appear around the corner of the studio and finish him off before he did something epically stupid. Return to Roanoke: Three Days in Hell will be a faux reality series follow-up to the faux docu-drama that had more people tuning in than The Walking Dead in a parallel universe. He thinks My Roanoke Nightmare has nothing on locking both actors and victims in the house with some gimmicky special effects for maximum drama (and maximum revenue). When you have someone oblivious enough to brush off hauntings as hallucinations, you know it’s going to be a bloodbath nine ways.  

Among the multitude of Sidney’s so-called brilliant ideas—besides scheduling the show to be filmed during a certain lethal week in October—is putting Matt and Shelby in the same room. That marriage has been dead longer than the ghost who was seducing him. It was obvious there were affairs brewing under the glittery fairytale façade of that marriage since the not-so-newlyweds were first interviewed. Matt already got much more intimate than anyone ever should with a non-corporeal entity, so a human mistress is hardly a surprise. If she was human. No word on whether Matt’s other woman was alive or undead. 

By the way, Shelby’s double Audrey and Rory (the resurrected 17^th century phantom of Edward Mott) are now married. Shelby doesn’t exactly try to hide that she’s seething with jealousy. 

There is one person who won’t be returning to the house—and not because she’s dead. Never mind that Monet, the actress who played Lee, is an alcoholic who can’t be anywhere near the liquor cabinet, or that Matt’s TV doppelgänger Dominic spontaneously explodes into fights with him. Mary Agnes Winstead, aka the Butcher, will not be reprising her “role of a lifetime” that she because a little too obsessed (and possibly possessed) with. When someone throws on a bloodstained costume and storms the streets of LA screaming murder and waving a prop hatchet until she’s charged with assault and sentenced to 6 months in a psych ward, you have to wonder. Psychiatrists swear it’s schizoaffective disorder. I’m not so sure. 

Suspicions that the fragile psyche of Mary Agnes is being mentally taken over by the disembodied spirit of Tomasyn White don’t stop at her highly unglamorous Hollywood arrest. She gets frighteningly into character at the most inopportune moments, having a Butcher outburst when Sidney demands the police place a restraining order on her. Whatever compelled the actress into moving so close to a house that eats people for dinner has to be paranormal. There is no way anyone who was aware of the echoing rumors, anyone who pretty much memorized a firsthand account of the haunting for her role, would ever be excited over living a short drive from the paranormal carnage. The fact that she’s stolen props and costumes from the set is also disturbing. Anyone who wants to keep an eerily realistic bleeding pig’s head that close is being manipulated by otherworldly forces.   

Even so, Sidney is too ignorant to cancel the show because of anything supernatural. Ignorant enough to worry about whether an exploding sink works at the click of a remote control rather than the body count. Maybe that unfortunate run-in with a chainsaw really was an accident. Maybe the ring of fetal pigs found at the edge of the woods in broad daylight was easy to blame on Mary Agnes. Even if a Saw-esque demise and strategically placed dead things can be quickly buried, there is no backwoods prank that can explain the fragmented camera footage of a car accident in which the last thing you see before everything goes black is the face of a ghastly man-pig. Then comes the afterword that by the end of filming, the stars of Return to Roanoke ended up a cast of corpses—except one. 

Ryan Murphy keeps sadistically torturing us with tension. I am ravenous for more.