'American Horror Story: Roanoke' Is a Deadly Reality Show

American Horror Story tends to have problems staying focused as each season goes on, but for Roanoke, it seems to have figured a foolproof way to keep things going: turn it into a reality show.

Thanks to the big twist, we know that only one of the housemates is going to survive the season, so now it’s just a matter of seeing who gets eliminated in each remaining episode … and how bloody their demise is.

In the last episode, Shelby pulled a Negan and bashed Matt’s head to a bloody pulp. Well, turns out she felt pretty bad about it. Bad enough, in fact, to slice her own throat. It’s shocking and bloody, but doesn’t seem like that bad an option compared to what the other survivors are going through.

Lee was being held hostage by the Polks, who were slicing her up for jerky and cold cuts. It was really brutal, nasty stuff, as were Audrey and Monet’s tooth extractions, because teeth are the scariest thing on TV right now. Luckily, all three are able to escape and take deadly vengeance on their captors, though we don’t know where Monet ran off to.

Audrey and Lee are able to make it back to the house, where in classic reality TV housemates fashion, they turn on one of their own. Lee elects to cast Dominic away from the island, so to speak, leaving him to get sliced up by the scary pig-man.

Two housemates down in one episode. Tune in next week to find out which of the three remaining survivors is going to “win.”

Thematically, it’s kind of perfect that this season of AHS, which has explicitly played with reality TV tropes, is using spectators of the competition format to keep their endgame going. However, it’s still a tonally wackadoodle mess of dully upsetting torture porn. In other words, it’s classic American Horror Story.