Ratched tries to convince him she’s on his side, that she wants to cleanse the world of evil like Edmund Tolleson and she’ll need to hear Father Andrews’s story to make that happen.īack at Lucia, Ratched has a fight with Nurse Bucket over a stolen peach. The young man who hid under the bed during the attack is in seclusion in a wheelchair, wearing sunglasses. She goes to meet with the only survivor of the attack of the Clergy Killer, a young priest named Father Andrews (Hunter Parrish). The first patient struggles as Hanover drills into his brain, and the audience in the medical theater is generally disgusted. Four patients come to Lucia to undergo the procedure for four different reasons, and Hanover is confident enough in the technique that he invites Briggs and the press to witness the lobotomies. Hanover’s breakthrough treatment is actually a very old one, the frontal lobotomy. So, as fun as they are to watch, they add to the sense that this episode isn’t quite as accomplished as the premiere. While these scenes are great, they almost feel like they come from another show altogether, one about a lifelong politician finding love with an icy nurse who can’t even admit her sexuality to herself. With that in mind, the best scenes in “Ice Pick” are actually the ones that drift from the obvious plot, particularly the ones between Cynthia Nixon and Sarah Paulson that form the center of the episode.
The episode introduces the concept of the lobotomy via ice pick and brings back the only survivor of the Clergy Killer Massacre, someone who could get Edmund Tolleson in trouble. What’s frustrating about the second episode of Ratched is how much it takes its time getting there. Much like Chekhov and his gun, if you see an ice pick early in an episode from the creator of American Horror Story, it will probably be driven into somebody’s eye by the end of it.