Spooky season officially kicked off on Thursday with the three-part premiere of the most highly anticipated installment of “American Horror Story” in nearly a decade.
More than merely a continuation of the “Coven” and “Apocalypse” storyline, the FX anthology series is finally going full multiverse in “AHS: 13,” merging fan-favorite characters from seemingly every season of “AHS” thus far. Ghosts, witches, drug addicts, and Satanists from every corner of Ryan Murphy’s twisted universe will be accounted for — and those are just the characters Sarah Paulson is playing.
Episode 1 introduces us to Ben (Joey Pollari), a well-mannered hospice worker who’s cursed with triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13. This puts him at considerable odds with his Swiftie girlfriend Kira (Madelaine Petsch), whose love of the number 13 is pretty much her entire personality. Against his better judgment, Ben agrees to accompany Kira and her 13 besties on a birthday excursion themed to that very number — a decision he immediately regrets when their plane starts to go down.
Meanwhile, at Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies in New Orleans, a young witch named Ophelia (Avantika) is practicing her craft under the watchful eye of Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson), the world’s most powerful living witch — or “the f**king Supreme,” for anyone who doesn’t already know her from “Coven.” Ophelia also gets some semi-helpful input from Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts), who enters spouting her much-meme’d catchphrase, “Surprise, b***h!”
But the surprises are only just beginning. A cold wind sweeps through the manor, and Cordelia receives a terrible premonition about a harbinger. And not just any harbinger, a harbinger… of doom! As far as harbingers go, that one’s pretty much the worst. Cordelia also sees flashes of “death… so much terrifying, vengeful death,” but Madison just chalks that up to her being overdramatic.
“Something wicked this way comes,” Cordelia fears, and right on cue, the episode takes us to Constance Langdon (Jessica Lange’s character from “Murder House”). We don’t know exactly where she is, but she’s now the apparent caretaker of a mysterious old man. And by mysterious, we mean clearly sinister. Gross skin, claw-like hands, and is that… is that a tail we see dragging back there? Anyway, he’s bad news, which is hammered home further when he starts vomiting black liquid at the same moment the aforementioned plane crashes. The timing is suspect, almost as if he’s feeding off their deaths.
