I Am Anne Frank, Part 1

American Horror Story

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Joe R: A- | 3 USERS: A+

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I Am Anne Frank, Part 1

By Joe R | Season 2 | Episode 4 | Aired on 11.07.2012

In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description!

So I guess this is how the show decided to do the Arden's Backstory episode, huh? By introducing Franka "Run Lola Run" Potente as a new inmate who claims to be the 20-years-dead Anne Frank. Not only that, but at the first sight of Dr. Arden, she begins screaming, recognizing him as a Nazi from Auschwitz named Hans Gruper. She tells Sister Jude her story and even though Jude starts out thinking her crazy, the idea that Arden could truly be a monster intrigues her. And it's exacerbated by two homicide detectives who come by to ask Arden about the accusations of a certain prostitute. They later ask Sister Jude questions about Arden that make it clear they're investigating him as a possible Bloody Face culprit.

As for our currently incarcerated Bloody Face, Kit is having a rough go of it this week. Dr. Thredson is really pressuring him to admit he killed those women and in exchange he'll say he's crazy and spare him the electric chair. Thredson presents a whole scenario wherein the poor guy did kill Alma and those other women, and Kit begins to doubt his own sanity and innocence. He turns to Grace for comfort. She tells him her story -- she was framed for the axe murder of her father and stepmother -- and they get caught having sex in the kitchen. Later, Devil Eunice hands Kit Grace's file and it turns out she DID kill her father and stepmother, but only because he'd been raping her.

Dr. Thredson is also helping ("helping") Lana, as she's determined to get the hell out of Briarcliff any way she can. So she agrees to aversion/conversion therapy, which just looks awful. It involves her staring at sex-charged images of women while an IV drug makes her sick to her stomach; then later Thredson brings in some sad twink of a boy for Lana to put her hands on. It's all so awful and uncomfortable and Thredson feels bad enough about it later that he promises Lana he's taking her with him when he leaves in a week.

All this while, Arden's been experimenting on poor legless Shelley, injecting her with all manner of experimental serums, many of which are causing her skin to bubble and her hair to fall out -- it's harrowing. When Arden corners "Anne Frank" about her accusations, he locks her in his operating room, but she turns the tables when she pulls out a gun she swiped from the cops earlier. She shoots Arden in the leg and demands the key to his locked room. She opens the door to find Shelley, crawling, barely human anymore, begging for Anne to kill her.

Featuring Sophie's Choice, as performed by Anne Frank and Dr. Arden/Hans Gruper, and the Lizzie Borden murders, as performed by Grace.

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Want more? The full recap starts right below!

We begin our show this week by introducing some fresh meat. Frank is explaining to Sister Jude that the cops dropped off a woman for an "involuntary psychiatric hold." Basically, this woman was disturbing the peace in some way, had no ID on her and wouldn't talk to the cops, so they dropped her at Briarcliff. Frank says when he was on the force they used to do it all the time. He lets Sister Jude in to see the woman and she's being played by Franka Potente, of Run Lola Run and The Bourne Identity fame. Sister Jude exposits the circumstances of Franka's arrest for her/us: she was at a bar and some yahoos made an anti-Semitic remark, so she broke a glass and stabbed one of them with it. "He'll live," Franka says, "but he will never forget." Sister Jude gives some lip service to the atrocities that Franka's "people" endured. She asks if she lost anyone in the war and in response, Franka just starts whistling. Stymied and probably annoyed at her insolence, Sister Jude says they'll start treatment tomorrow morning.

Elsewhere in the hospital, one of the patients isn't having it so good. Poor Shelley, you guys. She's still strapped to the bed in Dr. Arden's secret lab. Her legs are, regrettably, still amputated at the knee. And now, it looks like Arden has been injecting her with all sorts of experimental serums. As a result, she's got blisters and pustules on her face, her vision is cloudy and I think her hair is falling out. He's using her like an animal testing lab at a cosmetics company, and probably far worse than that. "Am I gonna die?" she frantically asks (begs?) him. "Not exactly," Arden says, as he preps her next injection. "As a matter of fact, after this, you'll probably live forever." Oh my GOD WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??? Shelley screams us into the credits.

Credits. Commercials. Then we're in the award-winning Briarcliff bakery (today's special: lithium scones), where Kit is stealing some time with Grace. She notices the bloody cut on his upper lip, which he says is nothing, but we have the benefit of flashbacks where we can see that the source of the wound was another trip to Arden's lab. This time, Arden got him naked (aw, yeah), where he seems to be demanding to know where Kit put the spider-chip. He can't see a new incision to mark where it might have been re-implanted. "What'd it do, crawl up inside you? Through which orifice?" That is a grim harbinger of what Arden's going to do with Kit next, but all we see is that Arden X-rays the shit out of him. Grace asks him if this is the chip the aliens put in him to track him. He says yes, and knowing how strange that sounds, he asks if she still believes him. She says she does, though it doesn't matter what she believes. He says it does -- your story is all you have in here. He asks once again for Grace's story and this time she finally agrees. So Grace's story goes as such:

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