Summary
Grotesquerie Episode 7 changes everything, and not in entirely positive ways. This is going to be the episode that alienates a significant portion of the audience.
I’m still not sure where I stand on Grotesquerie Episode 7, so here’s what I do know. A lot of people are going to hate it, that’s for certain. Some might like it. Moving forward, the show will not be the same; it might be so different that those who stuck with it until now feel cheated and put off. For once, I have no idea – literally none – what might happen, how it might play out, or what the point of it all will be.
On the one hand that’s pretty refreshing in a contemporary TV landscape that yields very few surprises, but it’s also a bit annoying because I was enjoying Grotesquerie as a demented murder mystery and, in Episode 6, it seemed to have hit a turning point. Correction: It did hit a turning point. Just not the one any of us were expecting.
Lois Loses Control
The episode begins with a very off-kilter vibe and an even meaner streak than usual. Merritt and Eddie are now together – as implied by the closing montage of the previous episode – and Lois is furious about it. And still very drunk, obviously.
The spite emanating from Lois is palpable in this scene. She claims, falsely, that she and Eddie “had a little thing”. She ridicules Merritt about her weight. She refuses Eddie’s efforts to take her to rehab. She makes a scene in the restaurant. It’s a nightmare (literally, as it happens, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)
Lois’s next move is to vindictively turn off Marshall’s life support machine, mostly to torment Nurse Redd, but also to give herself some semblance of power. That’s eroding quickly in Lois’s world. She has lost control of Merritt. She has lost control of her addiction. And, as we learn at around the episode’s midpoint, she has lost her job. It turned out Father Charlie was Grotesquerie, and Lois solved the case, but she’s being forced to retire due to budget cuts.
This is our hero?
Sister Megan Was Father Charlie’s Accomplice
The turning point of Grotesquerie Episode 7 is Lois confronting Sister Megan in a protracted and very bizarre scene in Lois’s kitchen. Through a variety of small clues and weird behavioral observations, Lois has at some point deduced that Father Charlie required an accomplice and that his accomplice was Megan.
Now, this isn’t the weird stuff. But it’s the scene that kick-starts the weird stuff because it erupts into a well-staged and oddly comedic fight between Lois and Megan, the latter of whom starts speaking in tongues and chasing her around with a knife. But when Megan gets the upper hand and starts stabbing Lois to death, things change. Massively.
It Was All A Dream
At this point, things shift into an alternate reality. Here, Lois is the spouse in a coma. Megan is a detective working under her who stole her job while she was laid up. Merritt and Eddie are married, but the latter has been cheating on the former for years – with Lois.
Having learned this news, Marshall, who is still having an affair with Nurse Redd, who in this reality is a cam girl, resolves to turn off her life support machine out of spite. It’s the inverse of the story we’ve been privy to for the previous six episodes and half of this one.
And this is the big twist of Grotesquerie. It was all a dream. Lois, in her subconscious, has been imagining the story and populating it with people in her own life (Father Charlie is one of her nurses, though admittedly no less weird.) She has imagined Sister Megan turning on her and killing her in her dream because the real Megan has stolen her job and she’s being shuffled off to the afterlife. But as she dies, we see in the “dream” Lois get the upper hand on Megan and blow her head off. At this point, the “real” Lois wakes up from her coma.
What Does All This Mean?
Having established that everything we’ve seen thus far is a dream, the remaining episodes of Grotesquerie will likely pick up in Lois’s real life, with everyone still alive and fulfilling slightly new roles. The murder-mystery plot will probably be abandoned in favor of a new story about Lois getting her life back.
Of course, at this point, we don’t know how she lost it. We don’t know why she was in a coma, what happened during her detective work, or why she so specifically imagined the work of Grotesquerie. There could still be many macabre turns to come. Or, I suppose, there might not.
People aren’t going to like this, that’s for sure. Murphy has confirmed that Lois’s comatose reality is her actual one and that it’s everything else we’ve seen that was imagined, but where we actually go from there is anyone’s guess. As much as I relish the thought of having no idea about where a show is going, I can’t help but suspect the writers may have written themselves into a corner they couldn’t get out of.
