Scream Queens Season 2, Episode 7: The Hand Review

This Scream Queens review contains spoilers.

Scream Queens Season 2 Episode 7

Unless you’ve been chilling in the morgue since last week, the body’s out of the bag: The Green Meanie is Cassidy Cascade. And Nurse Awful. And someone else unidentified who probably emerged from the swamp. Then there’s Munsch with that cannibal disease she contracted eating brain pudding. Meaning, the entire CURE institute could be flatlining soon.

The one homicidal force in this hospital that hasn’t actually committed homicide (at least on its new body) is Dr. Brock’s hand. Not that the disembodied appendage of a serial killer doesn’t have urges. Stress makes The Hand scary. It has no brain but is obviously haunted just like those mirrors or necklaces you hear about with restless spirits trapped in them, except in this case Brock can’t just bury the thing. Its previous owner’s voice echoes in his head with a sickening laugh. It slaps him awake and forces him to watch televangelist phone-a-thons at 3 a.m. 

Accessorizing with some unsightly duct tape on a date with Chanel hardly helps when it breaks loose and brandishes a knife in her face, and neither does chaining it to his office chair in a deranged display that looks like it belongs in a 19^th Century asylum. Multitasking is nearly impossible when your one hand needs to explain a potentially life-threatening surgery and clear your laptop screen of male enhancement spam emails while the other is jangling impatiently in its chains, dying to snatch up a scalpel and stab someone.

Even getting transplanted with a knife-happy hand has some superhero side effects. One of those glorious moments of totally unexpected comedic heroism happens when The Hand warns Brock that the Green Meanie is creeping up on him and then proceeds to beat radioactive Beelzebub within an inch of his rubber suit with White Crane Kung Fu. The beast cowers and slinks away into the lurid green murk of the hospital hallway. Psycho Hand now deserves its own comic.

Back to the actual suspect. Cassidy Cascade is surrounded by death, including the reanimated corpse he believes is his own body until Chanel #3 subjects him to a mashup of Myers-Briggs and quizzes ripped from Cosmo that determine he isn’t some sort of zombie in scrubs. #3 “diagnoses” Cascade with a psychosomatic illness that had him convincing himself he was living death. Now he’s just the Grim Reaper. Chanel’s glitter-brained hypothesis still has me suspicious. Take it from a person with a 96.5 body temperature who gets a raging fever at the temp most humans would call normal—you can’t think yourself cold.

The one thing this faux med student is right about, despite the pink fluff in her ears and her tendency to have meaningful conversations with cadavers, is that her amateurish magazine tests have determined her sort-of-boyfriend is a psychopath. 

Cascade isn’t entirely dead. He still shows glimmers of remorse and humanity despite operating as the hospital’s serial killer mascot (at least one of them) to appease the vengeful thirst of Nurse Awful. She just wants to use her masked murderer to obliterate Chanel and her spacecase sorority sisters. Somehow I’m getting this creeping feeling that while Nurse Awful has been the proud psychopathic owner of a Green Meanie costume since last week’s episode, it’s as pristine as if she just opened the bag from Party City. Every one of her schemes involves slashing whoever she wants to death so long as none of the blood splatters on her sterile hands. 

So if Hoffle and Cascade have already revealed themselves behind the locked door of the O.R., who could possibly be the mysterious Green Meanie who neither of them have unmasked? We’ve already read the thoughts of Brock, who is so bent on preserving a life that he has The Hand taped to his back before surgically removing someone’s parasitic twin, and Hester, who may be a walking vault of secrets but would rather not be locked in the basement of an asylum where she has no access to luxury skincare. Munsch is just too paranoid that her hospital is one dead body away from being a human slaughterhouse.

I still can’t get over how Brock preformed what is supposed to be a delicate surgery that takes hours upon sleepless, coffee-less hours (this is the kind of otherwise useless info you learn from marathoning medical documentaries) with essentially one hand and a chainsaw. The Hand is still suspect to everyone else—but of course he isn’t the killer. It would be too easy.