The good nurse drives an ice pick into the eye of Father Andrews, leaving him a drooling shell. But he wasn’t born a monster someone turned him into one. Ratched admits what we guessed at the end of the last episode - the Clergy Killer is her brother. He passes out, waking up strapped to the bed. Andrews doesn’t realize that Ratched is drugging his tea. They go to a hotel room, and he sits with a rosary in front of a recorder to tell the story of what happened that night, not offering much new in the way of detail beyond that Edmund saw him as he fled the scene. Good luck with that.įinally, Nurse Ratched gets to Father Andrews, convincing him to tell his story. He doesn’t want to kill Edmund he wants to save him. Hanover sees through it but admits he doesn’t believe in capital punishment. At first, it feels like inconsistent writing until it’s clear that Edmund is playing up his mental illness to convince Hanover that he shouldn’t be subjected to the death penalty. Again, these are great emotional beats for Paulson and Nixon to play, but they almost feel like part of another show.īack at Lucia, Hanover wants to talk to Edmund, who rambles on and on about the antennas in his head and other things designed to convince the good doctor that his most famous patient is schizophrenic. Whatever she sees, Ratched rebuffs Briggs’s flirtation after the politician takes the nurse to a hidden “women’s club” and Ratched finally realizes one of them considers this a date. Does Briggs sense that Ratched is closeted? Does anyone know why she would? As great as both actresses are here, it’s hard to see exactly what Briggs would see in Ratched, other than maybe her extreme confidence. She just needs an ice pick.īefore that happens, “Ice Pick” takes an interlude for Briggs and Ratched to drive down the coast to Monterey and for the nurse to try oysters for the first time. As Bucket pukes at the sight of an ice pick going into the eye socket of a cadaver, Ratched realizes she doesn’t need Hanover to take care of Andrews. Ratched likes this idea even more than the first. Since the first lobotomy procedure didn’t go so well, Hanover has a new idea: the transorbital lobotomy. Maybe with a peach or the felt-tip pen that Bucket claims she should have used to put her name on it? Ratched is totally going to kill Bucket, right? Probably brutally. Ratched tries to convince him she’s on his side, that she wants to cleanse the world of evil like Edmund Tolleson and she’ll need to hear Father Andrews’s story to make that happen.īack at Lucia, Ratched has a fight with Nurse Bucket over a stolen peach. The young man who hid under the bed during the attack is in seclusion in a wheelchair, wearing sunglasses. She goes to meet with the only survivor of the attack of the Clergy Killer, a young priest named Father Andrews (Hunter Parrish). The first patient struggles as Hanover drills into his brain, and the audience in the medical theater is generally disgusted. Four patients come to Lucia to undergo the procedure for four different reasons, and Hanover is confident enough in the technique that he invites Briggs and the press to witness the lobotomies.
Hanover’s breakthrough treatment is actually a very old one, the frontal lobotomy. So, as fun as they are to watch, they add to the sense that this episode isn’t quite as accomplished as the premiere. While these scenes are great, they almost feel like they come from another show altogether, one about a lifelong politician finding love with an icy nurse who can’t even admit her sexuality to herself. With that in mind, the best scenes in “Ice Pick” are actually the ones that drift from the obvious plot, particularly the ones between Cynthia Nixon and Sarah Paulson that form the center of the episode. The episode introduces the concept of the lobotomy via ice pick and brings back the only survivor of the Clergy Killer Massacre, someone who could get Edmund Tolleson in trouble. What’s frustrating about the second episode of Ratched is how much it takes its time getting there. Much like Chekhov and his gun, if you see an ice pick early in an episode from the creator of American Horror Story, it will probably be driven into somebody’s eye by the end of it.