SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the seventh episode of FX’s “Grotesquerie.”
Ryan Murphy recently shared that “Grotesquerie” is a personal project, about finding your way through a bleak time through hope and love. It’s safe to say that, so far, the FX horror drama has very little hope or love.
However, in the Oct. 16 episode, everything changed — and that will, too. Early on, it was revealed that Father Charlie Mayhew (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) was in fact, the killer and Lois (Niecy Nash) had slit his throat to save herself. Afterward, while out to dinner, her daughter (Raven Goodwin) revealed she made it on to the reality show, “Half-Ton Trauma,” and was moving in with her new boyfriend, Ed (Travis Kelce). Lois gets drunk, says a ton of awful things to both Merritt and Ed, and then sees Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), who she realized was working with Father Charlie as the killer. The two faced off in a bloody fight with multiple stabbings, burns, and ultimately, Lois blew Megan’s head off.
So, what’s the twist? Well, it’s actually Marshall (Courtney B. Vance) who was at dinner with Merritt and Ed. Yes, Lois’ husband is alive and well, not on life support, and finds out that his wife had an affair with her daughter’s husband. Lois is the one who has been in a coma. In an angry reaction, he demands she’s taken off life support. Meanwhile, no one else is as they once appeared: Nicholas Alexander Chavez isn’t a priest, but actually the person administering the drug to end Lois’ life; Merritt isn’t a reality TV-wannabe, but a brilliant doctor searching for the cure for cancer. Micaela Diamond isn’t a nun; she’s Lois’ coworker who fought for her job in the police force.
The episode ends with Lois waking up in the process of being taken off life support, somehow surviving, and realizing that all of the murder and mayhem, was actually a dream.
Lesley Manville, Courtney B. Vance
“Now she has to explain to all of these people why they were doing these horrible things to her in her dream,” Murphy tells Variety about the hope and love coming on “Grotesquerie,” which he describes as “the most optimistic thing I’ve ever made.”
“What it really is about is a person waking up from a state that was a living nightmare, which all of us are living in,” he says. “So she wakes up and what she’s trying to do is fight for herself and fight for her family and fight for survival. And she realizes that the only thing that’s going to get her through this experience is love, and that’s what I feel. That’s my world view. It’s interesting in my work. If you look at my characters throughout the times, they do outrageous things, they say outrageous things, they wear outrageous things. But what they’re really all fighting for is either to love or to be loved. That’s what I’m trying to put out into the world.”
When Murphy first thought of the idea for the show, he went to FX Chairman John Landgraf with an idea. “I said to him, ‘I’ve never done this before, but I want to write something for me.’ He’s like, ‘Well, you should.’ So I worked with my longtime collaborators, Joe Baken and Jon Robin Baitz, and we were just talking about what the world was, and we just wrote the whole first season. I never knew that I would even show it to anybody.”
He then sent nine of the 10 episodes to Landgraf, who tells Variety that he “kept being surprised by it” up until the finale, noting that even now, very few people know “what the show’s fundamentally about.”
“My work is based on a lot of interests and curiosities, and I’m wanting to learn something about either myself or the world when I make something,” Murphy says. “This to me, felt like a real meditation on the world that we’re living in. I wanted to write about what I’m living in right now, which is global warming, women’s reproductive freedoms, the election, war, identity, politics, all of that stuff… Once you get this twist, if you go back and look at episode one, you see the opening shot is her hospital curtain is on fire. The cherries Leslie Manville is eating our blood clots. I have a list of like, 100 easter eggs. In every episode, there’s around 10 to 20. A car backing up will be a medical noise. It’s not a car, it’s a medical sound.”
The executive producer notes that the show “does become something else moving forward,” as it was a murder mystery in the first half, but still doesn’t fit into one genre.
As Lois dissects her relationships moving forward, there’s also “of course” a possibility of seeing a love scene between Nash and Kelce,” says Murphy.
“Niecy and Travis had the most amazing relationship on set, because he was wonderful and a little nervous, and she instantly was like, we got you. You’re good. Come here. So she sat with him between takes, and they’re such good friends, and remain good friends,” he says. “And they do have sort of — I don’t want to say anything to piss off the Swifties. I have to be careful!”
Murphy added, “They have a wonderful chemistry, and I think you’re probably picking up on that. You never know!”
New episodes of “Grotesquerie” air on FX Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET, and are available to stream the next day on Hulu.
