American Horror Story: Asylum Episode 205
“I Am Anne Frank, Part 2”
Written By: Brad Falchuk
Directed By: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Original Airdate: 14 November 2012
In This Episode...
Sister Jude goes to see Mr. Goodman, a Holocaust survivor who is now a Nazi hunter. She asks him to look into Dr. Arden. When she returns to Briarcliff, a man named Mr. Brown is there to collect his wife. According to Mr. Brown (I didn’t catch his first name) his wife is the woman who came in, claiming to be Anne Frank. Her name is Charlotte Brown (nee Cohen), they have an infant son named David, and his crying seems to have literally driven her crazy. Dr. Thredson overhears and suggests Anne is suffering from postpartum psychosis. Mr. Brown assures Sister Jude that time with her loving family will help her. Anne doesn’t remember any of this, until Brown produces a photo of the happy family. But a few days later, Mr. Brown returns his wife to Briarcliff. She has gotten worse and tried to suffocate the baby. Dr. Arden runs into Mr. Brown and offers a cure: a lobotomy. He agrees and the lobotomy is a “success.” Anne/Charlotte becomes the perfect Stepford wife, throwing away her obsessive collection of Nazi news clippings. Before we fade out, we zoom in on a photo of Hitler and some of his SS. The officer standing directly behind Der Fuhrer is Mr. Brown.
Dr. Thredson promises Lana that tonight is the night he sneaks her out of Briarcliff. At 6pm, he distracts the guard and the two simply walk out to his car. It was too easy. Thredson takes her back to his place because when it is discovered she is missing, her house is the first place people will look. Lana grows more and more uneasy. She excuses herself to the bathroom but goes into the wrong room: it is a workshop. An Ed Gein-style workshop, complete with human bones and skin. Thredson sneaks up on her, and pushes a button. The trapdoor floor gives away, and Lana falls through. She wakes in a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo-type killing room, chained to the floor. There is another body there. She crawls to it, turns it over - it is Wendy, very dead and very frozen.
Also: Arden threatens to sue Sister Jude for allowing the attack under her watch. Sister Jude is convinced she is done, so she puts on a tight dress and high heels, picks up a man in a bar, and goes to bed with him, sneaking out before he wakes. After Arden was shot, Sister Eunice (still possessed, I assume) sneaked into his lab to “dispose of” Shelly before Sister Jude found her. She doesn’t do a very good job, for some school children find her at the bottom of the stairs in a dark corner of their playground. Kit is given a reprieve from sterilization, as long as he continues with his treatment by admitting to what he did on tape, then listening to it, to make it more real. Thredson turns this recording over to the police, who arrest Kit. Grace does not get a reprieve. The night before her sterilization she is abducted by the same aliens that took Kit. Alma is there, naked and pregnant, telling her it will hurt less if she doesn’t fight. Grace doesn’t listen and the aliens slit her stomach. When Kit finds her in the common room the next day (just before the police arrest him) she is bleeding between her legs.
Dig It or Bury It?
I feel a little embarrassed, but it wasn’t until this episode that I figured out that Thredson was really Bloody Face. I mean, it was early on, when he made Kit record his confession so he could “hear it,” but usually I pride myself in figuring these things out quicker. What I did see coming was Anne Frank’s husband being a Nazi. The moment he walked in to Briarcliff, he seemed suspicious.
I am impressed with this season. Season one got more and more insane as it went on, but season two, honestly, keeps getting better. Even the more ridiculous plot points, like the alien stuff, is handled in such a way that feels organic (to this story, anyway) and properly fleshed out.
Patient History
According to Mr. Brown, Charlotte has always had an unnatural obsession with the WWII concentration camps. Seeing a theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank when she was eight months pregnant seemed to push her over the edge and she began to believe she was Anne Frank. Things got worse after she had the baby, who was colicky and cried all the time. She ignored him, instead obsessing over the concentration camp children who she needed to save. She herself was never in the camps - her inmate tattoo was self-inflicted.
Bloody Face
Again, no “modern day” Bloody Face attacks. Thank goodness. Linking Bloody Face to Ed Gein and even more to Leatherface, BF has a lamp made of human skin (complete with nipples) and a mint bowl made of a hollowed-out skull.
Prophecies?
A mysterious little girl shows up at Briarcliff, and Bloody Face gets an origin story.