This week on American Horror Stories: An episode that finally feels like it belongs in the AHS universe!
I had a good feeling about this episode. I don’t know why. I guess maybe I just felt like after two episodes of silliness, we had to be getting back on track eventually?
And I was right, for the most part.
This week’s episode, titled “Ba’al” starts off with a couple, Liv and Matt, at a fertility clinic. Apparently they’ve been trying and trying to conceive a child for awhile now and have just gone through their fifth round of IVF procedures, at which point their doctor tells them this is generally when most couples give up and start to consider their other options, such as adoption or surrogacy, but Liv absolutely insists that she has to be pregnant and is willing to spend whatever money she needs to (She’s absolutely loaded thanks to a dead grandfather. Like, beyond rich.) to keep the procedures coming. I’ll go on record as saying this type of storyline is not something I normally enjoy, because I just simply don’t relate to it in the least, but I can’t even tell you how relieved I was to realize we were getting a storyline revolving around actual adults for this episode, and not just another round of “If FX Cancelled AHS And It Got Picked Up By The CW”.
Anyway, on the way out of the fertility clinic, Liv is approached by the receptionist, Bernadette, who seems to feel bad, having watched Liv struggle so much to get what she wants, who offers her a tiny carved talisman of a fertility god, which Bernadette insists is the only reason her parents were able to conceive her. Liv reluctantly takes it, and, per Bernadette’s instructions, keeps it under the bed during intimacy. We get a sex scene that is almost weirdly tame by AHS standards, probably because the producers are so used to dealing with underage characters at this point, and then break for an absolutely badass opening sequence, easily the best so far of this series and I dare say on par with some of the best that the main show has had to offer.
When the main show resumes, we see that the fertility idol seems to have worked, as Liv now has her baby, a little boy named Aaron.
Only problem is, Aaron doesn’t seem to like Liv much, always crying in her presence and more responsive to Matt (who’s away attempting to be an actor about 90% of the time but only ever seems to be a step up from an extra) and the housekeeper, Norma. The stress gets to Liv more and more, to the point where she swears she’s seeing things, like a demon on the baby monitor, and Matt writes it all off as postpartum depression (at one point scaring the shit out of her by showing up in corpse makeup because apparently the biggest role he’s ever going to have is a dead body on a slab). He gives her the name of a therapist who suggests some new-agey baby-calming remedies and it seems to work for a bit, until one night Aaron has a crying spell again. This time, Liv is positive there is a demon in the room with him; it’s clearly there on the baby monitor but of course nowhere to be found when she enters the room. What she does find, however, is the fertility statue, sitting on Aaron’s pillow, when we clearly saw her pack it away earlier...and the thing has changed shape.
More and more of these strange happenings go on, until the statue eventually becomes a fully formed demon.
Liv eventually googles “Sumerian fertility deity” and realizes the statue she now possesses is a talisman representing a demon called Ba’al, and all signs seem to point to Ba’al wanting Aaron for his own. (There’s something very “Labyrinth” about this whole thing, honestly.) Liv even manages to get a recording of what sounds like Ba’al saying “I want him” over the baby monitor, but Matt is unfazed. (Husbands named Matt are famously stupidly skeptic in the AHS universe, if we can all take a moment to remember Matt Miller.)
Things culminate one night when Matt has a bunch of friends, all also interested in breaking into the entertainment industry in some way or another, over for dinner and one of them spots a Ouija board tucked away in a corner. The friends want to play, but Matt, showing actual concern for the first time since the episode started, doesn’t think it would be a good idea. Liv swears she’ll be okay, so they do it, and after one of the guys jokingly uses the board to spell out “Jack Mehoff”, the board starts moving again and this time spells out “HESMINE”.
This is the final straw for Liv and she finally goes to confront Bernadette about Ba’al. It turns out Bernadette is hardcore into magick and occult phenomenon (she swears it got her off drugs when she was younger) so she has a banishing spell for Ba’al, complete with a special dagger that she’s going to need back because it cost her three weeks’ salary at a Wiccan convention. The “basic bitch trying to be goth” vibes are strong.
Liv decides to go home and do the spell that night, because Matt is (once again) away on a shoot. She does the ritual and seems to be doing it right because fog forms around her and shit, and right as it seems Ba’al will appear, Liv turns around and plunges the knife right into...Matt, who’s come home unexpectedly.
Liv ends up in the psych ward after this, and we get a glimpse of Matt coming to visit her. Liv doesn’t feel right coming home until she knows she’s not a danger to anyone, so Matt heads out...getting into the car with none other than Bernadette herself, who he’s apparently been cheating with for a decent amount of time, and who is not actually into the occult at all, but was just a co-conspirator in a mission to drive Liv insane.
We later see them back at Liv and Matt’s home, with that same group of friends from the Ouija board dinner party, discussing exactly how they carried out this insane gaslighting mission to make Liv believe that Ba’al was real and that he was after her baby. Each person had a role in the scheme, from dressing up as Ba’al, to the fog effects, etc, even the creation of the statue. The whole thing was a setup orchestrated by Matt because a) he never wanted kids and b) he was falling out of love with Liv even prior to the fertility issues, but he was still madly in love with her money. I’d ask what kind of fucked up friends these people are to go along with this, but then I remember the Bro House boys existed.
Suddenly, though, the group starts getting picked off one by one by what appears to be Ba’al. Only Matt, and baby Aaron, who I hope has a genius IQ because he was just about to become the youngest boarding school applicant in US history, are left alive.
The next time we see Matt and Liv, Matt is in jail, having confessed everything that he and his friends did to Liv, and hoping to get off on insanity. (Ironic considering the fact that he sure did get off on driving his wife insane.) He begs Liv to get him a good lawyer and she, more than understandably, refuses. It turns out that the spell that Bernadette gave Liv was real, only it summons Ba’al, as opposed to banishing him. (Don’t ever get your demon-related spells off Google, kids!) Liv tried it again while institutionalized in a fit of desperation and the next thing she knew, she had a demon willing to do her bidding.
The episode ends with Ba’al trying to get Liv to release him from her service and she promises she will...if he gives her another baby. And apparently she wants a baby with horns and wings, because she’s literally having sex with this demon in the hopes of another pregnancy. I’m not really sure why she’d want a baby with man or beast, after all the regret she felt with Aaron even before she thought a demon was trying to steal him, but I guess she’s just one of those women who enjoys being pregnant, because she seems like she’d be that type. End episode.
Honestly, putting aside my bias toward the Rubber (Wo)Man episodes thanks to the comforting familiarity of the Murder House setting, Ba’al is probably the best that American Horror Stories has offered us so far. It played out like a true horror story, dark, mysterious, full of pretty genuine jump-scares, and it just generally seems like it’s existing in the same universe as the more established AHS seasons and characters somehow. And if I’m perfectly honest, I really wasn’t expecting the gaslighting twist. I did, at one point, have the thought that Matt was most likely cheating, (There’s a scene where Liv tries to send him off with a travel mug of coffee and his reaction just was a red flag for me, somehow, that he was actually going off to meet another woman.) but I really didn’t suspect him of being behind Ba’al’s presence. It seemed perfectly logical to me that Ba’al would come back and try to take the baby that he had a hand in making. As much as parts of the episode make me want to joke about Labyrinth, the scenes with Ba’al in the baby’s room reminded me very much of the Insidious franchise, so I thought maybe we were looking at a similar story.
I even had the thought, shortly after finishing the episode, that with some more fleshing out, this episode could actually be turned into a season. But, that’s when I remembered, we actually have had a season with a central storyline incredibly similar to this one, only Matt was named Ivy Mayfair-Richards and Liv was Ally Mayfair-Richards. Though the circumstances were different, Ba’al clearly borrowed the basis of its plot from the gaslighting that Ally endured throughout the entire season of Cult, at the hands of her wife, Ivy.
My other big question regarding this episode is, how, exactly, would they have gone about this if Liv didn’t get pregnant? I mean, there was no guarantee she would, and the Ba’al idol was made specifically by one of Matt’s friends, so it was all part of the plan. Matt clearly didn’t want kids and admitted to doing things to help curb the possibility of a pregnancy, so why did it suddenly work when the Ba’al idol appeared? And was Ba’al going to just start appearing around the house if she hadn’t gotten pregnant? I mean...it’s said that a year went by in between the night that Bernadette gave the idol to Liv and the actual events that took place. That is a long time to wait to put a plan into action. I mean, I guess it gave them time to perfect everything, but still. It just seemed to all specifically revolve around Liv getting pregnant exactly at that point in time, which no one could have known for sure was going to happen, unless Bernadette knew somehow after the fifth IVF attempt, and changed the results? I know I over analyze this show when it’s just supposed to be quick little one-off stories, but still. This series has left me with more questions than answers, more often than not.
Regardless, I still think this is the most solid episode so far and I hope it can keep this momentum going until the end. There are only two episodes left, and it’s definitely going to be interesting to see what’s in store as we get ready for the actual AHS series to return on the 25th,
Stay spooky, my friends.
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