Scream Queens: Warts and All Review

This Scream Queens review contains spoilers.

Scream Queens Season 2 Episode 2

Attention, idiot hoo—there’s something on the loose that looks like an enormous horned plant that decapitated Werewolf girl in a hydrotherapy tank and smeared a trail of swamp slime down the hallway. At least according to Chanel #3.

Something sick is going on at C.U.R.E. institute, and it isn’t medical malpractice (yet). It doesn’t exactly help that Munsch was on a Skype chat worrying about her WIFI while someone’s head was flying, and the detective is shining her flashlight on #3 as a both a murder suspect and a delusional puff of cotton candy.   

When I saw the Red Devil stalking the hallways and then ripping off his mask to reveal himself as the most unapologetically vapid frat boy since Animal House, I almost thought I was hallucinating myself, but Chad Radwell is back. The even worse news is that he wants to be a doctor. Exactly how much hope there can be for someone who spends most of his time having impromptu hot body contests with Dr. Holt in the showers, and whose definition of surgery is picking at innards with a pair of tongs, is questionable. 

Hester is also back, and she knows things—things that could majorly affect the Green Meanie investigation—but she’s only willing to talk if Munsch can somehow get her out of the maximum security prison basement she now lives in sans bedazzled neck brace. She also demands the price of a hospital room with a view and a list of high-end beauty products that were all discontinued at least ten years ago and can now only be procured through Craigslist or possibly a French red-light district. 

This week’s illness of the hour is something that can only be described as toad syndrome. Tyler’s (Colton Haynes) skin is crawling with tumors that give him the Freddie Krueger-esque look of being covered in infected bubble wrap. When boyfriend-starved #3 gets a glimpse of his “before” picture, she launches a smartphone-filmed TV fundraising campaign to buy the supercharged laser that will make Tyler hot again, except said laser doesn’t exactly work as planned when it lands in green claws.

This time, the patients aren’t the only ones who are inevitably going to die of either disease, murder or botched surgery.

Never mind that Dean Munsch pretty much is a disease, but Zayday’s suspicions that she opened the hospital to lure in and kill off every former Kappa Kappa Tau she can trap lead Munsch to admit the truth. Opening a hospital for the most bizarre incurable diseases that no one ever knew existed had nothing to do with (new) New Feminism or putting a band-aid on the American Health Care system. The only life she was trying to save was (predictably) her own ever since being plagued by something that sounds like a mashup of every possible diagnosis in a med school textbook.

Turns out Munsch’s mystery pathogen is a fatal disease contracted from eating infected human brains, and it isn’t exclusive to zombies. She has a suspicious custardy dessert, aka the most delicious thing she ever ate, at a party in Papua New Guinea to thank. Except the party was a funeral. A cannibal funeral. This is reason #20938507 you never ingest anything without knowing the ingredients first.

Zombies and zombie body parts explain the history behind Dr. Holt’s transplanted hand, and why he’s able to snatch up scalpels and steal Twizzlers from the person behind him in the movie theater at warp speed. The hand belonged to a squash-player-turned-serial killer who was a one-handed magician with his knife. Whether it passed on psychopathy from beyond the grave remains to be seen. 

So back to the Green Meanie and his radioactive trail of goo. Last week’s episode left us suspicious of Dr. Mike, but an autopsy of the hospital’s history reveals he was stabbed to death one Halloween later. We can’t yet rule out that patient he drowned rising from his swampy grave to exact revenge. However, in the wake of her secretly planting surveillance cameras and investigating the Chanels’ schedules down to the minute, I’ve seriously started side-eyeing Nurse Hoffle. Let’s also not forget Mr. Magic Hand. 

In other words, Season 2 of Scream Queens continues to get more and more ridiculous in the best way possible.