An eclipse, a new American Horror Story: Delicate recapper, a trip back to Brooklyn in the blog-rock era: Great changes are afoot in AHS land — if not on the show itself. Episode seven reinforces the cyclical and eternal nature of the Satanic cult that’s moving in on Anna Victoria Alcott in the present day, which is a polite way of saying it’s more of the same but with a little additional context.
Anna — who’s off, I don’t know, starring in a gritty indie where she gets called brave for not wearing makeup — doesn’t appear in “Ave Hestia.” That’s fair enough, considering this week’s episode is all about filling in the backstory. (We even get an origin story for the dog if that’s something someone might want.) Siobhan doesn’t appear either, which is interesting given that she’s most definitely part of this millennia-old conspiracy to birth the Antichrist using “the purest product possible.” Her pact with Satan is more recent, one assumes.
As for the “purity” of the “product,” Dex comes from a line of wealthy Satanists, which makes him a suitable sire — or at least a suitable patsy. Virginia was right, as it turns out; not only is Dex Sr. an abusive tyrant, he’s also an evil occultist who drinks his wife’s blood in bizarre sex rituals. Asserting the validity of Satanic ritual abuse in fiction is always troubling, given that innocent people are still being exonerated from wrongful convictions dating back to the “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s and ’90s. But honestly? I’m not going to get too sour-faced about it because this show is too silly to give it that much credit.
Anyway, it seems that Dex’s brain wipe took much better than Virginia’s, as hearing his mother’s allegations in previous episodes didn’t shake loose any memories of what he very clearly witnesses in “Ave Hestia.” (To be fair, no one wants to remember seeing their dad in a bondage harness, thrusting away.) Either that or he’s in on it, too, and was actively gaslighting Victoria right up until her death last week. And why not? Everyone else in Anna’s life is part of this conspiracy, from Talia on down to Nicolette. And in 2013, Dex is pushing Adeline, who doesn’t want a baby, to have one anyway, reminding her that she’s the decrepit age of 30 (rude, Dex) and better get going on that before her womb pickles or whatever.
One thing that isn’t clear yet is why Anna, in particular, is such a pure vessel for Dex’s seed. (Which Dex? That also remains to be seen.) First, we must attend to the unruly, linen-clad threat that was Adeline, who defected from the coven and traipsed off to Brooklyn to open what her self-proclaimed evil twin sister, Sonia (another suspicion confirmed), calls a “vegan feminist utopia.” Adeline’s restaurant, which is indeed vegan, is named after Hestia, the virgin goddess of the hearth. It comes with a mission of “redefining domesticity,” as she tells her staff before service begins for the evening.
Hestia is also Adeline’s patron goddess, which suits her whole earth-tone, green-witch aesthetic. Up to this point, Delicate has been all about the severe hairdos and sharp, spiky stilettos, which makes Adeline’s sack-dress-dried-flowers vibe all the more noticeable. (When Sonia arrives at Hestia to play a little game of five-finger filet, the sisters have equally perfect but aesthetic opposite manicures, one black and one beige.) It also suits her desire to remain childless — Hestia is a virgin goddess, remember — lest she birth a “creature” like those produced by her sisters in Satan. Again.
If that’s the case, she probably should have changed the words of her invocation beyond just swapping out Satan for Hestia. Translated from Latin, “Vivant liberi domini nostri, salve puer” means “Long live our master’s children, hello child,” which sounds like a chant for someone who wants to get pregnant to me. And pregnant she is, as confirmed by the test Adeline takes shortly after she starts noticing that she’s being followed by witches everywhere she goes. (Brooklyn in 2013? That tracks.)
Unlike Anna, Adeline is both a fertile vessel and a natural nurturer, which makes her defection from the goth-fashionista fertility cult into which she was born all the more offensive. They’ve been chic for millennia, as we learn in the cold open to “Ave Hestia,” where Ivy (or whatever her name is in “Western Europe, 42 A.D.”) gives herself a double Cesarean section on a pile of hay and somehow manages not to pass out in the process. Then one of those familiar veiled women with the club-kid feathered horns comes and takes the children, beginning a matrilineal cycle that continues through “Galway, Ireland, 1243” up to the present day.
In the 1243 flashback, medieval Ivy tells her daughters that women “cannot create anything,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense given that pregnancy and birth are kind of their whole thing. Perhaps she means in the non-gestational sense, which would explain why modern women like Adeline, who wants to make a name for herself as a chef, and Anna, who wants it all, “deserve” to be punished by the cult. But the cult also enables Talia to become independently wealthy and, therefore, powerful in the world of men.
It is best not to dwell too long on the inconsistencies in this very messy season of television. (One might also ask how Adeline passes out from a knife through her palm but is very much awake after also having fetal tissue ripped out of her uterus by hand with no anesthesia.) Let’s instead concentrate on howlers like Ivy growing, “Finish the placenta, Sonia!,” and indeed the very fact that the youth-granting properties of “fetal juices” (ew) are a theme on a show that co-stars Kim Kardashian, whose family is famous for eating placenta both as a bit and in earnest. Could all this to-do really be over a beauty treatment? At this point, I wouldn’t put it past them.
