WELCOME TO BRIARCLIFF

AMERICAN HORROR STORY

It's allll happening again. The crassness. The perversion. The contempt for the laws of God and nature. And that's just Adam Levine in the first five minutes. Yes, Our Show is back, and nobody's the same. It's 1964 in New England, and Kit Walker (played by Season 1's mopey undead teen Evan Peters) is working at a gas station and surreptitiously married to an African American girl. One night, she heads for the kitchen for some post-coital munchies, and while she's gone, aliens descend and the lights get bright and gravity inverts and probe-ables get probed.

Meanwhile, at Briarcliff Manor for the criminally insane, Jessica Lange is the morally rigid, sadistic Sister Jude; Lily Rabe her quivering understudy Sister Mary Eunice; Joseph Fiennes the kindly Monsignor Howard; and James Cromwell the man of science Dr. Arden. And since this is American Horror Story and the show's motto is still "Show everything, all at once," no time is wasted on speculation. Might Sister Jude hold a torch for Monsignor Howard? Her heavy-breathed fantasies of straddling him in red lingerie say YES. Think Sister Eunice might have a dark side? Well, she's into getting whipped and secretly in cahoots with Dr. Arden, who -- and I know you were wondering -- is absolutely experimenting on patients and removing their brains in order to study the nature of human evil. No more questions? Good.

So into this madness steps Sarah Paulson as Lana Winters, inquisitive reporter (with a secret lesbian partner at home, played by Clea DuVall) ostensibly writing a story on Briarcliff's dual role as sanitarium AND successful bakery (!!), but really she's there to get the goods on a newly-arriving patient who is said to have murdered three women, wearing their skin on his face, and thus earning the moniker "Bloodyface." When Bloodyface is led into Briarcliff in shackles, we see it's our alien-abducted friend Kit! Kit maintains his innocence (it was the aliens, man!), not that Sister Jude believes him, and he's introduced to the rogue's gallery of inmates, including Chloe Sevigny as "Shelly the Nymphomaniac," Mark Consuelos as the aggressively unpleasant Spivey, and Lizzie Brocheré as the seemingly kind and helpful Grace. (All this, and we don't even see top-billed Zachary Quinto in this episode at all, by the way.)

So Dr. Arden abducts Kit from his room on his first night and intends to experiment on his brain, while at the same time Lana gets Sister Eunice to sneak her into the asylum so she can find Kit and get her story. Lana gets attacked by... something, while Dr. Arden discovers an implanted microchip in Kit's neck... which proceeds to sprout arachnid-like legs and scurry away, so there's THAT running loose in this hellhole now. The next morning, Lana wakes up strapped to a bed, and Sister Jude informs her that rather than let her leave and report what she's seen, she went and threatened her live-in ladyfriend with exposure (she's a schoolteacher) unless she signed the papers to commit Lana for treatment of her unnatural inclinations. So Lana will be staying for a while.

Oh, and there's also a framing story in the present day, where Adam Levine and Mrs. Channing Tatum are taking a sex-and-horror honeymoon tour of sites of famous atrocities, so obviously they're in the ruins of Briarcliff. You know how this goes: they have sex on an operating table, they find a secret door, something tears off Adam's arm, and as Mrs. Channing runs down the corridor, she comes face-to-face with the flesh-mask-wearing Bloodyface!

Featuring Doubt, as performed by Jessica Lange and Lily Rabe; the Multiple Miggs scene from The Silence of the Lambs, as performed by Mark Consuelos, Sarah Paulson, and Lily Rabe; and selections from the Beasts of the Southern Wild score for no goddamned reason.