Summary
Grotesquerie gets off to an extremely grim start, but it introduces two very interesting leads and a serial killer who seems depraved even by Ryan Murphy standards. The potential is there.
You can’t have a spooky season without a Ryan Murphy show, and Grotesquerie fits the bill. Episode 1 introduces a couple of complicated protagonists, an extremely gruesome murder, a ton of religious theming, and a deeply provocative undercurrent that is sure to upset and annoy just as many people as it delights and terrifies.
Just what you were expecting from Murphy, then.
What’s For Dinner?
We begin with our protagonist, Detective Lois Tryon, being called to the murder, which is impressively nasty. You know it’s going to be a bad one because when Lois arrives, she’s greeted by a uniformed officer who tells her, glumly, “If this isn’t a hate crime, I don’t know what is,” as another cop vomits into a nearby bush.
Technically, we don’t get the precise details until later, but I’ll frontload them here for your convenience. The victims are an entire family posed around the dinner table, hands bound and mouths full. Of what, you ask? The patriarch, who was seasoned, roasted, ground up, and fed to the rest of his family by force. There’s another corpse on the floor sans head, and a pot on the stove in which the baby is boiling away (we’re mercifully spared a look at this.)
I mean… goodness. The official cause of death was acute shock, understandably. The cops weren’t called until the neighbors got sick of Mozart’s “Requiem” blaring through the wee hours.
Lois Has Issues
Lois drinks, which is the least of her problems, but a problem nonetheless. She has a daughter, Merritt, who is massively overweight but also very intelligent and something of a puzzle-solving whizz. I’m not raising the fat thing to be mean, either – it becomes a plot point down the line.
Lois’s husband Marshall, meanwhile, is in a coma at a very bizarre hospital, where he has spent the last 28 days languishing under the enthusiastic care of Nurse Redd (Lesley Manville doing an extremely exaggerated demented turn). Everything involving this is nutty enough that it feels like a transplant from a different show, and I have no idea what’s going on with it. Nurse Redd has an unusual attachment to Marshall and shames Lois constantly for her general disinterest in his wellbeing.
There’s much more afoot here, but we’ve got a murder to solve.
The Missionary Position
Solving that crime is proving difficult. The killer left behind no forensic evidence, only a pool of black goo, and there doesn’t seem to be a motive. The victims, the Burnsides, were upstanding folks with nothing unusual about them. But to kill them in this way requires an extraordinary level of hatred and depravity that is borderline inhuman.
As if pre-empting our assumption that this might be a crime of some otherworldly force, our co-protagonist appears. Sister Megan is a Catholic nun who writes salacious true-crime stories for a social justice rag named The Catholic Guardian, and since she’s a friend of the Burnsides’ priest, she volunteers some background under false pretenses. She clearly has a rather worrying fascination with the case, and with the macabre in general, but she’s also pretty smart – she guesses the Mozart piece that was playing immediately and identifies the acrid smell of the black goo as possibly hair – and clued up on religious matters, so Lois warms to her.
Lois even lets Sister Megan attend the next crime scene, which finds three drug users exsanguinated and separated from their legs. The goo is once again present; forensic evidence once again is not.
Fire and Brimstone
Grotesquerie Episode 1 ends with Lois experiencing some weird goings-on at home – she glimpses what she thinks is an intruder, hears chamber music playing through the window, and discharges her gun several times at what turns out to be nothing. We’re clearly heading in the direction of not quite being able to trust Lois’s headspace, at least in part because, as mentioned, she drinks.
But we get a slight breakthrough in the case. The lab report reveals the black goo comprises large amounts of sulphur dioxide. Per Megan, this is identified as brimstone, like from the Bible. Lois heaves out the depressed sigh we’re all feeling when she realizes we’re not just dealing with a garden-variety serial killing psychopath – we’re dealing with a religious one.
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