‘AHS: 13’ What in the Hell Mouth Is Going On Here?

We’re six episodes into American Horror Story: 13, and Ryan Murphy has already Ryan Murphied it. Sigh.

The first three episodes were visually stunning, but story-wise they were a mess. Ben DeSoto (Joey Pollari, Monster: The Ed Gein Story) is one of the few survivors of a Friday the 13th plane crash that killed his triskaidekaphiliac girlfriend and most of the twelve members of her girl squad. Ben has triskaidekaphobia and had to force himself to get on the plane despite his lizard brain screaming at him not to do it. So everyone saw that plane crash coming à la Final Destination.
Love, amirite?

We cut to Ben starting a new hospice/caregiving job at The Apollyon, the only building in NYC that has a thirteenth floor. Naturally.

The word Apollyon means “the destroyer” in Greek and refers to the angel or king of the bottomless pit in the Book of Revelation. It corresponds to the Hebrew word Abaddon. So, as far as I’m concerned, AHS is now part of the Hell House LLC universe. The meaning of the word comes into play later, so stick around.

On the thirteenth floor, Ben is confronted with an intensely baroque interior design scheme favoring religious, metaphysical, and supernatural iconography. He meets his ward’s daytime caregiver, Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange). We saw Constance briefly in AHS: Apocalypse, but she’s best known from American Horror Story: Murder House.

They’re taking care of “Mr. Nas,” who has nothing to do with The Queensbridge Projects or Kelis. But he is the most decrepit-looking 87-year-old I’ve ever seen. Also on Mr. Nas’ care team is a kooky-weird phlebotomist played by John Waters (typecasting?) who insists that Mr. Nas is just suffering from Lewy body dementia and is searching his blood’s biomarkers for information on Mr. Nas’ true age.

Everything about Mr. Nas’ apartment is overwhelmingly spooky. Spooky things happen at night when Ben is there on his own. Constance waves it all away in her charming (ahem) Southern manner.

While all of this goes on, we get brief clips of the witches at Miss Robichaux’s Academy testing new members’ powers and Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson) letting us know, “Something wicked this way comes.” I should hope so; otherwise what are we all doing here?

There’s also a bloody clip of Twisty the Clown (John Carroll Lynch) showing up at a night school for clowns led by Tig Notaro (OK, sure). Twisty dispatches the thirteen clowns and then heads out into the night. Again. Oh, Twisty.

We learn through background television noise that the graves of well-known, despotic world leaders are being dug up for unknown reasons. And you get the sense that things should be coming together, but they don’t. Who needs cohesion?

The third episode reunites Constance with Adelaide (Jamie Brewer), The Rubber Man (Evan Peters), as well as AHS: Cult’s Kai (also Evan Peters) and Winter Anderson (Billie Lourd) for the final night of Rauhnacht. Rauhnacht is a pre-Christian pagan celebration of the time between years. It ends on the thirteenth day after Christmas. On the Christian calendar, it’s the Epiphany. Ryan Murphy has turned it into a celebration of evil. EEEVVIIIILL. Why? Because of thirteen.

The number thirteen is the overarching theme of the first three episodes, leaving me and Winter feeling the same way:

Thankfully, episodes 4-6 were a little more unified. Or, at least, after watching them, I felt like I had a better understanding of what is happening this season. Kind of.

Here’s what seems to be going on.

Mr. Nas is Satan. And, as always, Satan requires sacrifices. In this group of episodes, those sacrifices are the souls of thirteen already dead women who never had the chance to live up to their full potential. Men just cannot leave women alone, even after they’re dead. Sheesh.

In a ceremony MC’d by Freak Show’s Elsa Mars (Lange), assisted by Apocalypse’s Wilhelmina Venable (Paulson), a parade of historic figures is ushered into the bottomless Hell Mouth of fire that sits below The Apollyon. Hypodermic Sally (Paulson), Eva Braun, Wallis Simpson, Ayn Rand, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine the Great, Mamie Eisenhower, Elena Ceaușescu, Jezebel, Tuberculous Karen (Paulson), Margaret Thatcher, and Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia (Mena Suvari), all meet their doom again. But whoops, I guess girls are bad at math because that’s only twelve. So, Wilhelmina throws herself into the pit as well.

This could have been an explosive moment, but Ryan Murphy chose to make it anticlimactic. Mr. Nas’ biomarkers have only reached 96 years old after all those women died (again) for him. He will not reach his full power until his biomarkers get to 100. I swear upon all that is unholy, if Murphy drags this out for the entire season, we’re throwing him into the pit next.

Above ground, while all of this is going on, poor, clueless Ben “dreams” about a young, handsome Mr. Nas (Love Story’s Paul Anthony Kelly) and a golden goblet of viscous, black liquid that he’s forced to drink from before being awoken by Constance and the phlebotomist.

Everything we had seen in Club Hell below The Apollyon took place while Ben was passed out after interrupting Constance’s Rauhnacht celebration. Elsewhere in the fractured AHS Universe, the witches at Miss Robichaux’s Academy are dealing with the unexpected manifestation of new powers in three coven members during the same moon. Madison (Emma Roberts) is back (for the third time) and giddy at the idea that a new Supreme may be rising to take Cordelia’s place. But all of that goes to Hell when AHS: Hotel’s James Patrick March (Evan Peters) escorts a group of long-dead serial killers into the Coven’s New Orleans home and promptly puts a sickle in the back of Cordelia’s head.

As we all know, it takes a lot more than that to kill a witch. Especially when AHS:13 has declared it open season on bringing pretty much everyone back from the dead. So that might not be the last we see of Cordelia. Even if it is, Paulson is playing five (?) other characters this season, so she’ll be around in some costume or another.

There must be some significance in the witches recognizing that their coven has reached the number thirteen. They will probably be another sacrifice for Mr. Naz’s biomarkers. Is this season just an excuse for Murphy to bloodily dispatch female figures from history, fiction, and AHS storylines? How does sacrificing the soul of someone already dead even work? Can souls be recycled that way? Where did he even get those souls from? For sure, some of those women in line at Club Hell had already been in hell. But what did poor Brigitte Bardot do to deserve her eternal rest being interrupted this way?

The other Chekhov’s 13 is Ben’s new love interest, Ashley, the other plane crash survivor, also being afraid of the number 13. She laughingly suggests that someone put a love spell on Ben to get him to date his previous girlfriend. And you know what? Maybe they did. Maybe that relationship and the plane crash were all a set up to get him to work for Mr. Nas. Anything is possible in Ryan Murphy’s magical land of number 13!

Episodes 4-6 are less sloppy in the storytelling department than 1-3, but it still feels like Murphy is playing Mad Libs with the twelve previous seasons in service of his precious number thirteen. Even in the second set of episodes, they still have more to explain about why 13 is important to the characters and the story.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the long list of people starring in this season. The plot is just going to keep getting more complicated, and the body count will continue to grow until everyone is dead, again. How many times can Ryan Murphy kills his characters? 13?

American Horror Story: 13 airs Thursday nights on F/X and streams on Hulu.