Main cast: Denis O’Hare (Van Wirt), Kristine Froseth (Coby Dellum), Houston Jax Towe (Otis Van Wirt), Abby Corrigan (Aurelia), Simone Recasner (Harlene), Maryssa Menendez (Faye), Emily Morales-Cabrera (Bonnie), Matt Lasky (Eustace), and Caitlin Dulany (Fiona Goode)
Director: Loni Peristere
It’s 1961, and Coby Dellum arrives at the Van Wirt Toy Factory in Natchez for an interview to be a secretary. She is deemed unsuitable for the job, but she also gets a cloth dipped in chloroform in the face.
That’s right, the twisted Van Wirt has his assistant Eustace collect prospective candidates for another job interview: a mother for his son Otis. He’s looking for a mother with a difference: he wants a living doll, a woman still alive but encased in plastic to resemble a doll.
In this house of his, a real life dollhouse of sorts, he and Eustace will conduct daily tasks for the bunch of women they have abducted for the task. The loser of each task will be eliminated in the fatal sense of the word. It’s a trial in which winning may not be much better than losing, so will poor Coby and the other women get out of this job interview from hell with their lives intact?
Dollhouse is a pretty decent opener for the second season of American Horror Stories, and Denis O’Hare is always reliable in his varied roles. However, this episode is written by Manny Coto, the fellow responsible for most of the worst episodes of this show and of American Horror Story, so I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Well, it’s made pretty clear long before this episode airs that it has ties to American Horror Story: Coven. Yes, that season that started out well but, as per the norm with that show, became a convoluted, unwatchable mess by the midpoint; its biggest impact on the show is that it attracted a coven of really sad women that boast on social media that they watch this season without fail over and over to this very day. These same people will screech that Evan Peters is the best actor of the millennium, and feud with equally demented fans of the other bland pretty boys on this show like a war of the whales.
Because of that tie, I suppose it’s not a shocker that Coby is a budding witch with telekinesis powers, and in the end, a young Fiona Goode leads the cavalry to show up out of the blue to save the day.
That’s when this episode shows its hand: it doesn’t care that it has completely killed what it has done up to that point with this deus ex machina of an ending. All it cares about is to being meta.
I admit this episode gives some background as to why the character that will later show up in American Horror Story: Coven as a much older person is what he is, or does what he does. Does it matter in the long run, though? That character went nowhere in that show, just like many other characters, and that season probably doesn’t even exist anymore given how that stupid devil boy season reset the whole universe or something.
So, this episode is almost a solid creepy tale of a psycho versus his bevy of stereotypical female victims, until it decides it’d be more fun to engage in some self-pleasuring display and drops the ball entirely in its last act. I may be disappointed if I hadn’t anticipated this show doing exactly that to me.
