WARNING: The following contains spoilers for American Horror Story: Double Feature Episode 6, “Winter Kills,” which aired Wednesday on FX.
The magic black pill of American Horror Story: Double Feature‘s first-half ultimately drove everyone but its creator to damnation and death. Above and beyond the bloodsucking and murder, the eagerness by which most of the characters embraced the pill was the true monstrosity. The wicked were ultimately punished in Season 10, Episode 6, “Winter Kills,” but that’s of small comfort to their victims, of whom there were shockingly few among the central cast. The black pill spread its evil far.
Chief among their ranks is Doris, transformed into a Pale Person after being leveraged into taking the pill and proving insufficiently creative to meet its terrible cost. Her husband and daughter turn her out into the Provincetown streets to join the other creative wannabes undone by their own ambition. The cruel irony is, she never possessed that ambition herself. She was forced into it by systemic emotional abuse.
Doris has aspirations for interior design and won a contest that let her set up a minor side business. The family’s sojourn in Provincetown supposedly includes her redecorating their house as a model to help promote her work. The show’s standard ghoulish incursions put a stop to that, but even if there were no supernatural monsters, it’s a big project for someone going through a pregnancy.
And that’s kind of the point. Doris doesn’t need the validation she’s pursuing. She has her life as a mother and the means to express her talents in a fruitful way. She just won’t get rich or famous at it, nor will she be praised as truly brilliant.
It’s the ambitions of her daughter and husband who end up undoing her. They carry more innate talent than her, though both have their own creative struggles as well. They opt to take the pill — signaling that their artistic greatness outranks their collective commitments to each other as a family — and leave Doris lagging far behind. Even then, she wasn’t willing to take the pill. It took Alma’s utter rejection of her as a mother, coupled with postpartum depression and active gaslighting, to finally convince her.
The results are as brutal as any character’s fate in Double Feature. TB Karen died too, but she possessed the requisite talent to avoid becoming a Pale Person and created her masterpiece before wading into the surf. She died in triumph, with her principles unvarnished and her great work created. She didn’t care if anyone saw it. Doris wasn’t as strong. She lacked ambition but required validation from others, and when that didn’t happen, she succumbed.
Her ultimate fate is unknown. She didn’t appear to be involved in the Pale Person attack that killed Belle and Austin, which suggests she still lives. However, that means her suffering won’t end either. Even if the Chemist and her black pills are gone, the Provincetown citizens will push her and any other Pale survivors back into the woods in the summer and let them skulk around the streets in the winter. Karen has been released, and the other characters have gone to their fitting demises. Yet Doris is left in a hell of someone else’s making.
To see how American Horror Story: Double Feature delivers the second half of its bill, new episodes air each Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX.
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