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Last night, American Horror Story: Freak Show premiered on FX. This new edition of Ryan Murphy’s psychosexual horror anthology features some familiar faces, some new terrors, and some finger-banging. Ryan Murphy is basically a little kid who wants to show you all the crazy things in his room (“Wanna see my scary clown? I even have Kathy Bates in here!”), so this season is sure to be packed with all kinds of insanity.

Dot and Bette Tattler (Sarah Paulson) are conjoined twins who are found by the local Jupiter, Florida, milkman, who also happens to find their dead mother lying bloody on the kitchen floor. They’re rushed to the hospital because they have a bloody wound of their own (plus, holy shit, they are conjoined twins). The murder and the girls’ discovery hit the radio waves, which catches the attention of Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange) a mysterious German woman (it’s 1952, is there any other kind of German woman?) in a fur cape snatched right out of Cruella de Vil’s closet. Elsa has some sort of internal Google alert for deformed humans, and she convinces a candy striper (played by one of the Gummer sisters — Meryl Streep’s daughters, who I can never tell apart) to give her an outfit so she can sweet talk the twins into joining, you guessed it, her traveling collection of human oddities.

Meanwhile, across town, a couple of teens are having a picnic and discussing rubbers, because this is 1952 (and condoms come in weird packages, apparently). Right before they’re about to get all Pleasantville all over each other, out pops a pretty terrifying clown who does some parlor tricks before beating them both with bowling pins stolen from the local duck pin bowling alley. The girl wakes up to see the clown hovered over her beau, stabbing him with a pair of scissors. It’s all very Zodiac (complete with John Carroll Lynch playing the murderer), only with a krazy klown and a total lack of artistic subtlety.

Elsa, who is probably some sort of Nazi (if there’s a German in a Ryan Murphy show, she’s probably a Nazi) (or maybe the baroness from The Sound of Music? I’d be cool with that), is a savvy business woman in the .biz of show, and she has a wide assortment of freaks in her tour, which is very bad at actually touring because she signed a year-long lease with one of Jupiter’s landowners to keep her camp in the middle of a field. Did I say she was savvy? Well, I just made that up, because she’s not bringing in a very big audience. But she recruits the twins (who I will refer to as Blue Headband and Brown Headband, because I can’t tell them apart, much like the Gummer sisters). The twins meet the rest of the gang: a tiny Indian woman, a bearded lady with Divine’s accent (Kathy Bates), a geek (naturally), some pin-heads (including Pepper, who was a character on American Horror Story: Asylum, because the Ryan Murphy Universe is probably all connected like that Pixar thing), a giant lady, and an Evan Peters, whose fingers are large and fused together.

Peters plays Jimmy Darling, an attractive young man with a chip on his shoulder (naturally) who has an affinity for dressing like Marlon Brando in The Wild One and finger-banging unsatisfied housewives at Tupperware parties.

Seriously? Ew.

He’s also the son of Ethel, the bearded lady. I don’t understand how genetics work in Ryan Murphy’s world. I’m not going to ask any questions, because it makes my head hurt.

Alright, fine, I can’t help it. Here are all of the burning questions I have about this insane show already because none of it makes sense:

1. Where is Ethel Darling from, exactly?
2. How does a bearded lady give birth to a child with lobster claws, and what does it mean?
3. How come Jimmy Darling is smooth-faced and his mother is not? Does she just not want to shave?
4. Do you think the bearded lady is protesting the patriarchy?
5. Blue Headband and Brown Headband can hear each other’s thoughts. Does that mean they can hear each other’s voiceover while they write in their diaries?
6. Did the creepy clown go to Evil Clown College or did he go to a normal clown college and major in Evil Clown Studies?
7. Is a geek born with the insatiable desire for chicken heads or is that a learned behavior? I really hope we get more chances to think about Nature vs. Nurture this season.
8. Where the hell is Angela Bassett?

While that Gummer is hanging around the freak show smokin’ dope and boning anything that moves in some freaky orgy that Elsa hired some intrepid cameraman to film on a Super 8 camera (I like to picture Meryl Streep watching this at home, feeling very proud), Elsa realizes that she’s got a show to put on. After a cop shows up to arrest the twins for murdering their mother (oh yeah: they killed their mother, which Elsa figures out because Germans generally know what evil lurks in the heart of conjoined twins) and Jimmy murders him, the freaks assemble for the giant floor show for a whopping audience of two: the mother-and-son team of Gloria and Dandy Mott. Dandy seems to be a little unhinged and weird, but I imagine I would be too if Frances Conroy was my mom and she named me Dandy. But never mind that, because Jessica Lange comes out and signs David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” You crazy for this one, Ryan Murphy!

It turns out the Motts have come because they want to buy the twins from Elsa, who is already pissed about the fact that no one showed up to hear her sing. True to American Horror Story form, Lange and Conroy throw all kinds of white lady shade at each other, because Ryan Murphy loves nothing more than watching those old bitches fight.

After the show, Jimmy brings all of the freaks together for some sort of “One of us! One of us!” ceremony in which they all take turns stabbing the body of the murdered cop. All of this happens while the crazy clown stands off in the distance, either hoping he can join or jotting down ideas for the very first Gathering of the Juggalos. Back in her room, Elsa kicks back and takes off her legs. Because she has wooden legs. She’s a freak, too! I have a feeling this season will feature a lot of uncomfortably awkward subtext concerning ableism (remember last year when Ryan Murphy tackled racism? Woof), and also zombies, probably, because at this point Murphy will stick zombies into anything.

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Photos: FX Networks