After years of trying to make it as an actor and become a mother, Anna finds all her dreams are coming true simultaneously, which is actually a nightmare.
The Hollywood awards circuit can be infamously taxing on women’s minds and bodies. Actors bounce from late-night sofa to minor red carpet, trying to hit the sweet spot between projecting ambition and arrogance. They have to want that little gold man enough to seem grateful, but wanting it too much is a turnoff. They have to contort themselves into high heels and tight dresses, answer interview questions that are no one’s business, and keep smiles plastered on their faces for the duration of the monthslong campaign. Anna needs to heed the advice of her PR team even when what’s good for her career, like posting to social media, could compromise her safety. Awards aren’t won; they’re gestated.
And to get and stay pregnant? Anna’s told she needs to relax and take care of herself. She needs to limit her stress and late nights. She needs to put her feet into stirrups and say “yes” to injections. She needs to use progesterone suppositories and do prenatal yoga. Exercise, but moderately. Eat well, but not too much. She needs to listen to her doctors even when what’s good for her nascent pregnancy seems like it may be driving her mad.
At least that’s what the police think, and maybe Dex does as well. When episode two opens, the cops are at the Alcott-Harding residence to investigate last week’s midnight intruder. The building is bedecked with security cameras, they assure us, and there’s no trace of a woman coming or going from the apartment. Is there a chance someone tore the photo of Anna’s embryo scan in half as a fun prank? One officer would like to know. Or maybe Anna’s suffering from IVF-induced psychosis brought on by those suppositories? The police would really rather blame the break-in on supplements of a naturally occurring hormone than investigate the possibility that someone took the back stairwell.
Still, for the first half of the episode at least, Anna’s luck improves. For her role in the indie horror flick The Auteur, she is nominated for a Gotham Award, which Siobhan declares a stepping-stone on the path to Oscar glory. But Academy Awards don’t happen spontaneously, Siobhan warns her. They happen because good little starlets show their appreciation on Instagram and because PR hacks trade sexual favors. From now on, Siobhan tells Anna, she’s not an actor but an athlete. Her fuel is unlabeled B12, which Siobhan just happens to have on hand. Her role model is Jamie Lee Curtis, who bravely faced down every “nepo baby” dig the red carpet had to offer on the way to her 2023 win for Best Supporting Actress.
Siobhan’s deliriously vulgar, but her threats, delivered in Kim Kardashian’s easy SoCal drawl, don’t pack much menace. I like her placid stare, her little nods when Anna does exactly as told. True, yes, Siobhan-Kim’s face doesn’t really move, but there’s something alluring about that too. I guess what I’m trying to say is, occasionally, stunt casting really works. Siobhan just stares at Anna a little vacantly, daring her to believe the bullshit she’s spewing.
Now, I’m not convinced those little amber vials really contain B12, but Anna can’t keep liquids down anyway. Morning sickness makes her hopeful. She calls Dr. Hill to report her latest symptom, and he tells her what reproductive endocrinologists tell women all the time, constantly, no matter the question: Maybe! So Anna waits. In 11 excruciating days, enough time will have passed since the embryo transfer for a pregnancy to be detectable on a home test. She wastes that time doomscrolling. In the comments under the photo Siobhan forced her to post, it turns out her online stalker, “Annihilate Anna,” is threatening to “legit kill her.” Ms. Preecher, the “IVF is murder” wackjob that Hill’s staff tells Anna to ignore, is posting photos of the now-famous actor at the fertility clinic. By the time Dex sneaks into the kitchen to give his wife a hug as she stirs tomato soup, she’s so worked up she attacks him with a knife.
Except it’s not tomato soup anymore; it’s a saucepan of bubbling porridge. And the test isn’t happening 11 days from now; Anna glances at her calendar to see most of September has been X-ed off. And these aren’t the first peculiar little gaps in Anna’s perceptions, her memory, or even her consciousness. Earlier in the episode, she thinks she sees the mysterious woman with the dark bob, but on second look it’s a child in her parent’s arms. Anna is surprised when Hill’s nurse, Cora, knows about her stalker, but apparently the two talked on the phone about it the day before.
So Anna takes the test, which looks nothing like an actual pregnancy test. When it’s ready, it emits an electronic ping and lights up with a lime-green plus sign. Hooray! You’re having an alien! There’s something very intentional and disturbing regarding the aesthetics of medical care on this season of American Horror Story. IVF and B12 shots are the stuff of modern life, but on TV they’ve been rendered futuristic and hard to trust. Yet I’m happy for these newlyweds! They’re having a baby! Let’s totally ignore the fact that Dex immediately runs to take a phone call from his dead wife’s doppelgänger!
By the time Anna goes to the clinic, she must be about six weeks pregnant because there’s a fetal heartbeat. As to how to stay pregnant, Dr. Hill tells Anna to “avoid any stress at all” — perhaps the most aggravating advice a person can get in any situation but especially in the context of a hard-won high-risk pregnancy. Every stomach cramp is a stressor. As bad as the morning sickness may be, any lapse in it is a stressor. On top of all that, Anna is campaigning for her first Academy Award and Siobhan is already thinking about March, rhapsodizing about draping that seven-month bump in couture à la CZJ.
As a little treat for her early success, though, Siobhan presents Anna with the white beaded dress Madonna wore to the 1991 Oscars, the one where she performed “Sooner or Later.” When the friends sing the song in Anna’s bedroom mirror — still marred with the “Don’t do it, Anna” warning that won’t rub off — it spontaneously shatters. It’s a little thing, really. An omen of bad luck. But it’s one of the first indications we have that whatever dark force is working on Anna is working on the world around her as well.
At the Gotham Awards, Anna stuns in the snow-white strapless gown, but she can’t hold the cameras’ attention for long. Babette Eno, a young actor nominated in the same category who wasn’t even alive when Madonna and Michael Jackson went on their buzzy Oscars date, is the next big thing. And even though Anna edges her out to win the award, there’s a sense that Babette has all the momentum. This isn’t helped by the fact that Anna, in lieu of an acceptance speech, climbs onstage and starts to hallucinate that Dex is macking on his client Sonia and his first wife, Adeline, in the audience. Then Anna vomits black tar onto the podium and passes out.
This being American Horror Story, Anna’s technicolor vomit — it has been red and yellow, too — is far from the strangest part. In the moments before the award is announced, the mom-to-be has a terrible interaction with a fan in the ladies’ room. When the fan tries to touch Anna’s stomach, Anna pushes her, inadvertently causing the woman to fall and hit her head. Anna callously leaves her bleeding out on the floor, obviously dead, so she can accept her stupid little trophy. But when the EMTs push Anna into the same bathroom after her disastrous nonacceptance, there’s no pool of blood, no body on the floor. Just Anna’s fractured memory and our own disbelief at the depths of her greedy narcissism. What gives?
For the media’s benefit, the whole fainting episode is blamed on that trusty Hollywood malady: dehydration. When Anna wakes up, she asks about the baby — all’s well — before switching gears to her very public humiliation. Siobhan assures her all this can be solved by playing “the Wilde card,” and I have to say, that character’s celeb references are the closest this show ever gets to jokes. Named for Olivia Wilde, the strategy is to completely ignore what happened, never answer questions about it, and insinuate that anyone with the gall to ask about it is motivated by sexism. It’s low-key kind of brilliant.
For that matter, Siobhan also seems to be right that there’s no such thing as bad press. The next morning outside Anna’s apartment, there’s a murder of paparazzi where previously there had been only Cara Delevingne staring at a bird fetus. To get Anna the relaxation she needs to incubate new life, she and Dex take off for Talia’s palatial beach house in Bridgehampton, which comes with a 24/7 security detail helmed by Kamal. We’re told not to hate Talia for being so rich because she made her money for herself … in start-ups and private equity. (I’m unpersuaded.) The house is modern and open and its walls are glass, which makes it hard for the couple to capture that cozy, secure, off-the-grid feeling.
Until the last few minutes, this episode was starting to drag for me. The eeriness wasn’t really progressing into something intelligible, though with a pregnancy on the line, the stakes were ratcheted up. Among all the low-grade body horror, the thing that preoccupied me for most of the episode was Anna’s persistent zit. Why is no one mentioning that she has been mid-breakout for almost three months? She cakes on the concealer at the Gothams, but there’s no hiding that honker. Shouldn’t Siobhan have a dermatologist on speed dial for just such an emergency? Get that woman some witch hazel. “If anything is wrong, your body will tell you,” Anna’s yogi reminds her in the Hamptons. But hasn’t her face been screaming at her for the entirety of the first trimester?
Eventually, though, a body can get too loud to ignore. As Kamal drives her home from yoga, Anna notices blood has seeped through her leggings. I’ve read all the pregnancy websites and understand what to expect when you’re expecting, so I know 25 percent of women will bleed in early pregnancy. Most will go on to have healthy babies. But I also know what a lot of blood looks like. Kamal rushes Anna to the ER, where Cara Delevingne — who says she’s an ultrasound tech called Ivy but turns out not to work at the hospital in any capacity — performs a violent vaginal ultrasound. Ivy is full-on grimacing as she forces the wand. When it emerges from Anna’s body covered in blood, Ivy runs off, she says, to find a doctor.
But there’s nothing for a doctor to do.
Anna falls to the hospital floor, bleeding onto the tiles as she daydreams about playing with her baby in a meadow. When she wakes up, she’s in bed and the dream is over. Anna knows instinctively what’s happened. Dex is crying by her side. It was a boy, the doctor tells them. And now that dream’s over too.
