American Horror Story Roanoke Episode 2

Further developments

Matt and Shelby (Andre Holland and Lily Rabe) talk about being stuck with the damn house, pondering selling it. Lee (Adina Porter) gets visitation with her daughter, but bringing her to Roanoke will be her undoing, placing the girl in danger. She talks of a girl, and offering her doll as a trade for her and the family's lives! Matt sees two psychopathic sisters, in nursing uniforms, killing an elderly patient in cold blood. MURDE was spray painted on the wall, and Matt learns later by a taped recording from a raving author/professor (Dennis O'Hare, in a cameo; it appears he was the victim in a pig mask in a recording Shelby and Lee found in the basement they were locked in last week's episode), the sisters he saw were real people and his home was their assisted living facility (for the elderly abandoned by children who wanted them out of the way, allowing the nurses to kill them through various means like rat poison and sock suffocation).
 

Kathy Bates is briefly seen as the matriarch of this backwoods bonfire clan, roasting someone with a pig face, but Shelby’s claims to the police turned up nothing when they investigated the spot she says was the location of the murder and ritualistic shenanigans. Wes Bentley could also be momentarily seen as a member of Bates’ clan. This was visualized at the end of last week’s episode and just touched on quickly and ambiguously at the beginning of Chapter 2. The Polks are often mentioned as the folks giving the Millers grief, but so far the new season hasn’t decided to get them seriously involved.

Lee and her frustrated husband (Charles Whitfield) are going through a divorce and custody issues further fractured their relationship. Their daughter mentioning violence while hiding in a little closet, regarding a negotiation with a murderous ghoul, doesn’t help matters. Neither does Lee essentially kidnapping her daughter, bringing her back to the Millers’ haunted house, with the conclusion freakily unveiling a little jacket hanging off the branch of a tall tree reaching high to the sky.

This episode seems more geared towards a paranormal presence in the home and how the Millers question their own sanity at times, wondering if certain experiences were just a dream or illusion. The police sure felt they were “kooks”. With the Polks out there somewhere and something evil among them in the house (the Millers also see a woman outside guiding them towards the basement entrance which led to the O’Hare tape and camcorder from 1997), the Millers are tiring of it all. Now Lee’s daughter is nowhere to be found! 

Enough good mystery to keep me going, this second episode might be a bit heavy on sound design and musical scoring but at least the plot is busy enough (O’Hare’s taking his camera into the house after a lengthy history lesson on the nursing home psycho sisters is a highlight) to create the possibility for multiple developments knitted to the Millers and their house. The inclusion of a former occupant, the specters of the nurses, the idea that something in the house is more evil than the nurses (their absence when the police arrive at the home before finishing “MURDE” a sign they were “interrupted”), and the missing child provide reasons to turn in next week.

The format remains the same: Rabe and Holland playing the *real* Matt and Shelby while Sara Paulsen and Cuba Gooding, Jr. portray them in reenactments. Angela Bassett was the reenactment of Lee while Porter is the *real* version. At the beginning, the bonfire scene is maddening enough (some poor soul has the head of his skull gone, with his brain showing!), with Bates talking in some type of “backwoods-speak”, to wet our appetite as to their gradual emergence as the season continues.