American Horror Story: Freak Show: “Edward Mordrake (Part 1)”
(Episode 4.03)

Halloween is obviously an ideal time for American Horror Story to let the freaks fly. Every season, AHS throws in some strange character to test the limits of the audience, to see how strange they can make things. Usually they go way too overboard. Most of the time, these characters are introduced at Halloween—with the exception of Asylum, introducing Ian McShane’s psychopathic Santa Claus near the more appropriate holiday. Murder House gave us far more of the Rubber Man than we probably ever needed, and last year in Coven we had the unfortunate Minotaur rape that is one of the dumbest stories to go down on this already-crazy show/
So now that it’s Halloween time once again, this seems like the moment when American Horror Story: Freak Show loses all of its good focus, introducing some weirdo that’ll make the show obnoxiously stupid. Yet, here we are at “Edward Mordrake, Part 1,” the first half of Freak Show’s two-part Halloween episode, and this still stands as the best season so far! But with the introduction of Edward Mordrake, there are far more question marks in the air about the future of this season.
Every season the show will also introduce a supernatural element to each story. Monster House had ghosts, Asylum had aliens, and Coven had whatever the hell weird thing they could think of that week. With the first two episodes of Freak Show, all the horrors we had seen were purely natural ones—at least I think it’s safe to assume that Twisty the Clown isn’t a werewolf or anything.
With the introduction of Edward Mordrake—first the myth, then the “man”—we enter into the world of the supernatural that Freak Show has otherwise avoided so far. And yet, as with many things that haven’t worked in past seasons, this season it isn’t half bad.
Mordrake, played by Wes Bentley, is known in the freak show circuit as a legend—a talented noble Englishman who just so happened to have another face that talked to him on the back of his head. After trying to silence the voices and going into a mental institution, Mordrake joined a freak show, where one Halloween night, he killed his entire troupe, then hung himself. For that reason, freak shows never perform on October 31, due to fear that Mordrake will again show up to add to his undead group of freak ghosts.