TV Review: American Horror Story: Roanoke (Season 6, Episode 9)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

EPISODE: CHAPTER 9

THE SCOOP: Three young new characters going snooping around the Roanoke house in order to attract internet buzz. They aren't met so kindly.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. IF YOU'VE NOT SEEN THIS EPISODE, STOP READING HERE!

THE SKINNY: Never mind the nonfictional American Horror Story that took place last night, The ninth and penultimate chapter of AHS: Roanoke set up for quite the f*cked up finale, ay? With only Lee, Audrey, Monet and now Dylan left alive, the show lead off by giving us a look at a familiar face. Did you all recognize Taissa Farmiga from AHS of seasons past? Yup that was her among the trio of go-pro and selfie-stick rocking hikers – Sophie, Milo and Todd – intent on interloping on the infamous Roanoke abode. Cool little tie-in, no doubt. Well, that is until the three spot Monet wounded and ambling about in the woods, their chase of whom leads to the discovery of that car-crashed P.A. we saw a few frames back. Could we have an additional triad of Roanoke victims on hand? After all, the blood moon is nigh. These young media-socialite, amateur documentarians seek help from local police, but are essentially berated for trying to dangerously drum up their own followers or likes or whatever. 

Back at the house, Wes Bentley gets a chance to shift gears, playing an actor named Dylan who portrayed Ambrose on the fictional show. He sees what carnage has been exacted in the house, and decides to, along with Lee and Audrey, sneak back into the Polk farm and serve some sick sadistic recompense. Audrey finds Monet stowed away in the barn, Lee makes a run for the incriminating tapes from last week. A Polk redneck approaches, only to catch a hot round of lead in the dome from Audrey that blows his brains out the backside. Dylan proves utterly useless, as he fails to hot-wire a truck and ends up getting carved and sliced to death by dirty roving hayseed who appears out of the ether. Speaking of, the real Butcher and her minions soon materialize, which prompts Monet and Audrey to dart back to the hell house. Lee got left behind. The two gals play the tape Lee dropped, and they witness her confessing to her husband's murder. We then see Lee on some nighttime surveillance footage being stalked by what appeared to be Deer Woman, who exhorts Lee to surrender to her by taking a bite out of an animal heart. Sick shite! She does and soon Lee turns into f*cking Jason Voorhees. She skulks around, runs into the three Go-Pro kids and savagely rips Todd's chest until a shower of grue cascades down his body.

Sophie and Milo stumble their way into the production trailer, learning of all the real life bloodshed that has occurred on the sets of Season 2: Return to Roanoke. They hole up, fail to contact the cops before they witness Lee approaching the house toward Audrey and Monet, who are getting drunk and stoned in the bedroom. Predictably, they opt to stop Lee from committing more homicidal horror. Not so easily foreseeable was what followed. Lee enters the house, Audrey and Monet find her muttering in a trance. Shit talk is exchanged, then Lee pushes Monet over the spiral staircase and sends her plummeting down to land on a giant spike that impales her through the heart. Lee chases Audrey, the two trade literal barbs until the former finally cleaves the latter in the clavicle and shoves her down into the root cellar. Sophie and Milo soon approach the house, only to find the butcher's gang nastily disembowel Dylan's lifeless corpse until his entrails coat the dirt. My favorite part of the episode, mercilessly mean, happened when Sophie and Milo are caught by the butcher's clan, hung up as sacrificial totems and burned alive at the stake. The cops rush in at daybreak, find their charred bodies still smoldering before canvasing the place. They find Lee, alive and no longer possessed, and help her into the squad car. The cops spot Audrey crawling around, and when she spots Lee, she pulls an officer's gun with intent to kill, and WHAMMM…the cops fire a hail of shells and kill Audrey on the spot. Finito. One left, Lee.

All in all, another solid frame of AHS: Roanoke. I quite dug how the show not only wove in a character from past seasons, but also gave us fresh blood to spill in so doing. Milo and Todd got whacked in spectacular fashion, which we had no idea was coming after left to believe only three survivors remained. I also dug the corresponding camerawork, the Go-pros, the body-cam shots, the surveillance feeds, all of it. It was also pretty cool if not unsuspected how Lee would go from being one of the heroines of the show to being evilly corrupted to the point of going on a slaughtering binge. Did not see that coming at all. I am still a bit bewildered by the whole Butcher character, and how she and her clan seem to come and go as they please with no real explanation. Not quite ghosts, not quite zombies, what the hell are those bastards? Other than that, the show continiues to prove itself to be one of the best seasons AHS ever produced. I really can't wait to see how they wrap the whole thing up. Will Lee come back to the House to settle the score once and for all? Will we see some kind of weird season 2 retrospective or even designs for season 3? Is the butcher and the Deer Woman still roaming around in the woods? Will they be dealt with in some form or fashion.  All answers worth sticking around for when American Horror Story Roanoke comes to a dramatic halt next week. Be there!

KILL OF THE WEEK: A lot of easy and obvious gore to call out here, but given the way it went down, Audrey getting blasted by police without knowing what she knew at the time was pretty intense. Was it stupid of her to grab a cop's gun like that? Maybe. Did she deem it necessary after being brutally assaulted by Lee? I think so. 

BLOOD & GORE:

• Dylan gets stuck, slashed and stilled to a bloody pulp with a carving knife
• A Polk hayseed catches a bullet in the head, brains splatter on the wall like Private Pyle
• Todd gets torn from ear to ear, a huge dousing of blood trickles
• A monitoring of past deaths: entrails, desiccated body parts abound
• Monet gets gorily impaled by a large spike
• Audrey gets bloodily cleaved in the clavicle
• Audrey gets plugged full of shells, blood seeps from her wounds

WTF CHARACTER MOMENT: Those two dumb kids. Why on Earth given all they know and have seen would they run toward the hell house of Roanoke? "I wanna go home" says Milo. "I'm Sorry" retorts Sophie. Then both burnt to crisp. WTF!

MOST BIZARRE SCENE: One shot, really. Lee standing in the hallway upstairs, leering off-screen as if totally entranced. Audrey and Monet see it after we do. So simple yet so bizarrely effective. Loved it!