Summary
Nurse Redd’s connection to Marshall is revealed and there’s a killer fake-out at the end, but there is clearly lots more to come from Grotesquerie.
Since the premiere of Grotesquerie, I’ve complained pretty reliably about the inclusion of the inclusion of the Nurse Redd storyline, which has always felt like a transplant from a different show. Episode 6 reveals Nurse Redd’s motives, and also potentially the killer, though season crime-thriller aficionados among us know that whoever is under the mask is unlikely to be the real villain.
After the more formally daring Episode 5, this feels like a bit of a downgrade, but not to worry. It’s still packed with deeply awful developments – including the reveal of where all those stolen babies are – that should satisfy curious viewers, and it sets up some proper reveals down the line.
Glorious Developments
Lois learns quickly that the woman she discovered in the orange grove clutching a blood-spattered infant is named Maisie, and is not the child’s mother. This should have been obvious given her age – Kathryn Hunter looks great but you know what I mean – though stranger things have happened in Ryan Murphy shows.
Maisie’s rather tangential testimony does make several mentions to “Glorious”, though, Lois’s old pimp nemesis who has really been released from prison early on the grounds of being a confidential informant. She’s in a witness protection program but has clearly been up to no good, since she seems to have a pretty firm idea of who the killer is – “false prophet” is a very specific descriptor when the prime suspect is a priest – and why he’s so interested in Lois.
Mr. Grotesquerie doesn’t seem like a lone wolf, but an influential leader with presumably several very devoted followers. This means that the previous crimes could have quite easily been committed by a dedicated network, which would solve a lot of potential logistical problems.
Nurse Redd Reveals Why She’s So Fond of Marshall
As promised at the top, Grotesquerie Episode 6 does indeed reveal why Nurse Redd is so obsessively devoted to “caring” for Marshall. And it’s not an especially interesting reveal.
Redd visits Lois at home, where she’s still receiving crank calls and being photographed by a stalker. She has a bottle of Croatian vodka straight from Dubrovnik as a peace offering – this is still a cynical gesture given how often she has criticized Lois’s drinking – and offers to explain everything inside.
The explanation is this – she had an affair with Marshall. That’s it. Given we already knew about Marshall’s affairs way back in Episode 2, this is hardly news. Redd attended a class he was giving on terror management – an evolutionary psychology theory about how humans stave off fear of their own mortality – for two semesters in a row. Quite the meet-cute.
Lois isn’t thrilled by this development – she holds Redd and gunpoint and tells her if she ever goes near her husband again, it’ll be her on life support. It’s a funny moment but I’m not sure she’s thinking it through, since Redd has a point about her general disinterest in Marshall’s care. The guy needs a bed bath from someone.
Got Milk?
Maisie, albeit reluctantly and somewhat cryptically, leads Lois to the location of the missing babies, which is an old milk bottling factory where, in the episode’s most horrific image, several women are fastened into an elaborate milking machine. They’re being drained directly into the mouths of the missing kids, all lined up in cribs nearby.
It probably says a lot about Grotesquerie that this, given the women and children are all alive, is the most upbeat crime scene we’ve seen thus far.
In a back room, Lois finds what she feared she would – dozens of photographs of her taken by some hidden stalker, plastered all over the wall. If she wasn’t sure that the case had a personal connotation before, she certainly is now.
While she’s looking at the wall, we see multiple snapshots of different characters elsewhere – Eddie and Merritt being rather cozy with one another, Megan waking up wide-eyed in the hospital – and I’m not totally sure if the implication is Lois is experiencing these as visions or they’re purely for the audience’s benefit. Either way, the distraction allows the “killer” – dressed exactly how we last saw him when he kidnapped Andrea – to sneak up behind her and hold a knife to her throat.
Lois is able to spin around and shoot the man, seemingly fatally. When she peels off his mask, though, Grotesquerie Episode 6 frustratingly ends, the killer’s identity still unrevealed. All we get a glimpse of is a few centimeters of a chiseled jawline that looks a bit like Father Charlie’s. But surely the killer wouldn’t be this stupid, and this easy to kill?
There’s more to come, that’s for sure.
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