SHOCK lays out a spoiler-rich recap of last night’s episode of AMERICAN HORROR STORY:HOTEL.
As passersby stop to check on Wren, dead in the street, John makes a hasty retreat. He returns to the Hotel Cortez, remembering he saw Wren in one of those glass coffins. He demands Liz tell him where the Ten Commandments killer is. John knows he is here, and that Wren has been protecting him. Liz laughs at him, and Sally appears, offering to reveal everything to John.
In a typically opaque fashion, Sally offers no answers to Johns many questions, and it takes him a while to get to the answer himself. Behind the armoire is a vault door, and in that vault are various body parts in display cases, like trophies. Each has a placard with a commandment etched into it. A hand for thou shalt not kill; two hearts for honor thy mother and father, etc. Sally insists that nobody let the killer in; he had a key. It takes a little more work, but the flashbacks start adding up. John is the Ten Commandments killer.
John finds Andy in the coroners office, standing over Wrens body. He has come to confess. Andy thinks he is confessing to helping the little girl escape; he is shocked when John confesses to the Ten Commandments murders. Andy doesnt believe him, so John goes back, back, way back to 2010, when he first set foot in the Hotel Cortez.
After the case of the dead family, John goes for a drink, his last bender before he quit. After hitting a couple bars, he ends up at the Hotel Cortez. Donovan invites him to an after-hours party upstairs. After being assured that it isnt that kind of party, and being told last call is coming up, John goes to the party.
March and the Countess are having their monthly dinner. He is none too happy when the buzzer interrupts their night, but his mood changes when he meets John. He releases the Countess from her service for the night, as he wants time alone with John. John thinks that the clothing, the decor, his vocal affectation are all an act. March tells him about his fascination with auras, and saw Johns aura as black, a most unusual color. Some say a black aura is like a protective cloak; others say it is related to a need to dominate and a willingness to do bad in order to do good. John admits he feels a constant battle not to go ape-shit on some of his suspects.
John and March talked for two straight days. A constant flow of absinthe helped muddle Johns memory. March tells the Countess he wants to mentor John, but he needs a push into the darkness. He suggests she take one of his children. He needs to hate the whole world and everything in it. John wakes in his car, parked in front of his house, with no recollection of the past two days – it was just lost time. Inside, Alex is pissed that John disappeared, but knows he wasnt cheating on her because at least he would have had the decency to lie about it. Holden is excited to see his father and he offers to take the family to the beach that afternoon. As we all know, that is when the Countess snatched up Holden.
After the case went cold and the volunteers stopped coming around the house, John never felt more alone than when he was in that house with Alex. He was never the same again, and he began to live two separate lives: one at home with Alex, and one at the hotel with Sally.
Other than sharing rhetoric with March and a bed with Sally, not much happened until 2015. It would be Holdens tenth birthday, and a triple murder case was dismissed due to a technicality. John goes to March, feeling particularly disgruntled. All I see is how justice is perverted. So March tells him about a man who brought his nephew to the hotel, and how when they left, Miss Evers found pornographic photos of the boy in the room. John rages and visits the man in his apartment under the guise of buying a collectable. He bludgeons the man to death, hoping that it would clear away the pain he felt after Holdens disappearance. It doesnt. This is the movie blogger who kicked off the Ten Commandments investigation.
John went back to the hotel and tried to hang himself in the bathroom. It should have ended there, John tells Andy. But he was cut down. Not by Sally, who was with him at the time, but by March, who was not done with John. Sally was afraid that John would die outside of the hotel and therefore not come home to her. March reminds her that he is the one who keeps the addiction demon at bay and suggests she sends an accomplice out with John. That accomplice was Wren, who was tasked with following him, covering for him, protecting him. John admits to Sally that he killed a man tonight and it felt good – too good. That was why he tried to kill himself. He loved it more than anything. March applauds the feeling and tells John to use his pain to make the world a better place.
March shows John his vault, and his eight remaining display cases. He died before he could finish his mission and wants John to complete the work. As the lead detective on the case, he wont get caught. So despite an overwhelming work load, he catches the bloggers murder. It is at this murder scene that Andy admits he is worried about John, and even had coffee with Alex to discuss him. John is jealous and goes to Sally for a fuck. He wants to kill Alex, but Sally reminds him he cant kill someone connected to him. She points out the adulterous couple who meets weekly at the Hotel Cortez. He cant kill them at the hotel, so John set up the meet for them at the Bel Air Hotel, and was waiting for them.
Andy listens to this story incredulously. He doesnt believe John and challenges him to give him one detail about the case that they didnt dig up in their investigation. John has nothing, and Andy takes pity on him. You are no killer, he says, chalking this up to a nervous breakdown. So John grabs a nearby scalpel and stabs Andy in the stomach. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife! With his dying breath, Andy tells John he doesnt deserve Alex.
John returns to the hotel with a bloody doggie bag in hand. Iris greets him and John assures her he knows everything. Iris is relieved; it was exhausting trying to figure out which John she was talking to. She was always tempted to tell John, but John wasnt ready to accept the truth before this. He has no regrets about his new chosen life path, except for Wren. Iris reminds him Wren died because of Sally, not because of John, and suggests he leaves. Instead, he goes up to room 64 and puts his newest trophy on display (I assume it was Andys penis). John now has clarity and there are still two commandments left to fulfill.
