Scream Queens Season 2 Episode 3 Review: Handidates

This Scream Queens review contains spoilers.

Scream Queens Season 2 Episode 3

After Season 1’s ruthless butchering of every eligible man-boy Chanel #5 can possibly get her pink fingernails on, she still can’t seem to catch a break in the boyfriend department. Tyler is dead, warts and all. Someone else is also dead—undead, technically—but the zombie who looks more like a certain Twilight werewolf is stalking the halls of the hospital as if he was more alive than reanimated. At least an average body temperature of 67 degrees means he never has to worry about getting a chill in the blasting AC hospitals are infamous for. 

Tyler’s smoking bubble wrap body aside, people are actually getting cured at CURE Institute. It’s just that not one has yet been able to set one foot out of those double doors alive. It is ironic how none of these patients actually die of complications from their illnesses (most of which could make for a death certificate strange enough to end up framed in the Mutter Museum), but murder. You think you’ll never have anxiety again until your last moments are spent howling in agony as some slimy green masked thing slashes you to shreds. You’re so thrilled with your results that you plan to contact the local newspaper for a glowing recommendation—until your disembodied head ends up as the main form of entertainment on the candy striper’s cart. So the decapitation count has gone up since that hydrotherapy tank incident.

Munsch is fanatical about covering up deaths because death is the opposite of what she named her bizarre bazaar of a hospital. At least this hospital has a convenient bubbling green cesspool to hide the bodies out back (where they hide the bodies should always be the first questions you ask the nurses). She herself is obviously not dying yet despite her recent diagnosis of something unpronounceable and incurable contracted from eating human brains. The speed with which she races the burnt blob of warts which was #5’s late almost-boyfriend to the swamp is epic. For someone with cannibal-something-imminent-death disease, Munsch sure can sprint with that gurney. 

The Hester dilemma is still dangling in front of Munsch and the Chanels. Should they give in to her ridiculous demands for discontinued beauty products and a room with a view? She’ll have to settle for the 1985 movie of the same name while the Chanels’ mission sends them to Florida and a mansion hiding both an elusive face cream and a nurse with secrets. Secrets he was paid a cool 5 million to keep by the hospital bureaucracy. No wonder being asked about the murders at Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering Hospital 30 years ago makes his face freeze even without Botox.

So do the threatening phone calls from what could only be the Green Meanie speaking through a special horror sound effects filter. The only suspect he can name ended up dead with the rest of the Halloween party back in 1986. And the miracle cream? It’s really Jergens with an expensive-sounding rebrand and an “approved by nurses” stamp.   

With the investigation almost as dead as whoever is rotting at the bottom of the swamp, you start reexamining people you’ve side-eyed before. Brock Holt, or at least his transplanted hand, is no longer under suspicion—for now. You can’t exactly let go of the deranged hand of a serial killer that easily, even if it does belong to the self-proclaimed handsomest and highest-paid doctor who also happens to be the highest-paid sperm donor in recent existence. I’m not entirely sure this creep should be struck off the list of suspects that easily. He has a sinister sort of machismo I just can’t shake, and neither can (however vapid he is) Chad Radwell. Something tells me there is going to be a funeral following the wedding in this episode. 

Now to the question that’s probably haunting everyone right now: where is Nurse Awful? Is Ingrid Hoffle indisposed because of whatever illness she has that makes her pop pills like Tic-Tacs? Or is she taking some shady “time off” to scrub up in a certain shade of radioactive green? That psychotic laugh of Hester’s says unmasking the Green Meanie is only too easy. We can only keep following the trail of slime until more discontinued face creams can get something out of her.