- Ryan Murphy WAS NOT over-hyping the clown. While season 3 lacked any singular terrifying villain, Freak Show wastes no time letting us know how gruesome Twisty gets.
- One often-divisive-but-always-present Murphyism: a musical sequence (it works here). If you’ve ever wanted to hear Jessica Lange singing David Bowie, well, Freak Show has got that.
- The episode isn’t without comedy, either, but don’t expect the bitchiness or B-movie cheese of last year. Here the humor is either dark or used to emphasis how different the times were. Sarah Paulson has easily my favorite line of the episode as naïve, emotional Dot begs her mother to let the twins out of the house to see Singing in The Rain (“I wanna see the movie, I wanna see it now… in glorious technicolor!”)
- A last-minute twist reveals that Elsa fits in with her band of freaks more than she’s let on.
bitch is a hermaphrodite I'm calling it now