Photo: Skip Bolen/AMC
Everyone is still trying to figure out what Lasher’s big-picture plan is, but, at the moment, he’s driven entirely by an insatiable lust for two things: milk and sex. I know this episode is trying to tell me something, but I feel like a Swiftie hunting for album release date clues in her anklets as I try to figure it out. Because these choices have to mean something, they must symbolize something. Like, vampires drink blood because blood can symbolize both life and death. Cortland sawing off his own arm and serving it to his tyrannical father — that’s pretty straightforward. But the milk thing. What is with the milk thing? It can’t be arbitrary that Lasher survives entirely off of gallons of whole milk instead of, say, orange juice or pulverized bananas. So here I am, losing track of the plot, trying to figure out the milk symbolism. Babies drink milk, so does that mean Lasher is really a kind of giant baby? In which case, Lasher’s other driving motivation this episode, the sex thing, becomes even more problematic.
The main conflict of “Ten of Swords” is that Lasher keeps seducing Mayfair women and killing them in the process. Remember the girl Rowan buried in the episode before? It turns out she was a Mayfair, and she died because she and Lasher had sex. However, knowing this does not stop Lasher from hunting down Cousin Gifford (side note: Thora Birch!) and sleeping with her, after which she promptly hemorrhages and dies. R.I.P., Gifford. We barely knew ya.
It would be one thing if Lasher were a straightforward villain, but the whole thing is framed as if, like his milk lust, Lasher’s lust-lust is simply out of his control. “They smelled so good,” Lasher whines by way of explanation after Rowan tracks him down in the woods. “I thought Mayfairs would be strong.” He can’t help himself. He’s just a grown-up baby. He insists he never meant to hurt anyone, and I think the show wants me to believe him, which I just find icky. Rowan offers to help him get a handle on his, eh, habit, but now that she knows he’s killing people, he can no longer trust her, so he takes off.
Perhaps he’s right about that because Rowan has finally realized that Lasher was never her child and makes a couple of half-hearted attempts to blast him dead as he runs away. He escapes, but I think Rowan is the real winner of this interaction because she finally has an actual sense of purpose.
For once, Rowan is the only character making active choices instead of just being propelled along by the plot with little to no respect for her own will. This time, it’s everyone else operating under some duress — internal, external, or a magical combination of both. Lasher is driven by manslaughterous instinct, but there’s even something a little non-consensual-seeming about the seductions themselves. Either Lasher is just that hot, or he has a mystical power over his victims, making them want to immediately jump his bones.
If you want a less ambiguous example, Moira was going to blow off the strange man accosting her in a bar and demanding to talk (Sip) until he hits her with whatever a “trust tab” is, and she is magically compelled to have a conversation with him.
Sip was cautioned by his friend Arjuna, the keeper of the memory bible, that when you use a trust tab on someone, you can only count on them once. Because after that, they’ll never trust you for real again. But Sip ignores the warning because he’s strapped for time, as he himself is being strong-armed by the Talamasca. Anyway, I don’t know what the half-life of a magic trust roofie is, but it’s not strong enough to make Moira immediately agree to become a double agent for the Talamasca. However, she does trust Sip enough that when she discovers her mother dead, the latest victim of Lasher’s uncontrollable horniness, he’s her first call.
While all of this is going on, Cortland’s consciousness is still being chased down by nightgown-wearing women, who are revealed also to be wearing Mardi Gras masks. He evades them by running into another room where his dad is posted up like the ghost of Christmas Present, waiting to be served from a disgusting buffet of ribs and meat jellies. The Dutch angles go crazy in these sequences, which are meant to convey that Cortland’s worst nightmare is basically his own childhood. Cortland has to fix his father plate after plate, and then we all have to suffer watching the man chew loudly with his mouth open and berate his son in highly homophobic terms. Finally, when there is no more food, Cortland saws off his arm for his dad to eat. (Proof that visual metaphors do not have to be opaque.) It’s an effective bit of body horror, and I am overwhelmed with relief every time a Cortland scene ends.
Luckily for Cortland, Rowan has decided that freeing him is her best shot at figuring out what Lasher is up to. And she’s especially motivated after Lasher’s third victim is found.
Now, I am glad that Rowan has finally made an active choice of some kind. However, I am also baffled and a little pissed that the first choice she makes is to wake Cortland, who deserves every minute of the customized hellscape he was living. In case you’d forgotten, in his effort to bring Lasher into being, Cortland did the following fucked up things: He raped his teen niece, Dierdre, and impregnated her, resulting in Rowan; he then murdered Dierdre in a hotel elevator; and manipulated Rowan into calling on Lasher and giving birth. Rowan certainly hasn’t forgotten, but in her mind, all that is trumped by the off-hand possibility that Cortland’s close association with past-life Lasher gives him insight into present-day Lasher’s motivations. She does this even though she promised Jojo, the one likeable character we have, that she definitely would not do this. Did Rowan never even consider going to someone else — Dolly Jean perhaps — first? No, I guess, so we should all start preparing ourselves for the Cortland redemption arc.
I lied before when I said that Rowan was the only character in this episode acting of their own volition. There is also Lark, Rowan’s old geneticist friend. Instead of simply emailing Rowan the weirdo results of Lasher’s blood tests, he hops on a plane and shows up at her doorstep, which is certainly a bold choice. It’s also problematic in its own right, but I’ve decided to let it slide amidst everything else. From what I can gather, Lark plans to woo Rowan over inhuman chromosomal data, but it will have to wait. She has some bad decisions to make first.
• They really brought in Thora Birch just to kill her off in the first 10 minutes?
• What kind of netherworld portal did Rowan open by waking up Cortland? Because we are absolutely not done with Cortland’s evil dad.
• Sip and Jojo are both at the crime scene where Alicia Mayfair was found dead. Is there a possibility we’ll see them work together?
• No seriously, I need the milk thing explained.
