Once I stopped being so confused about what “Scream Queens” wanted to be, I was able to accept it more as a comedy, with a few really razor-sharp satire on the Greek System as well as law enforcement, parenting, homosexuality and cliques.
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It’s not just the unfathomably mean one-liners, which are obviously manifold…
When Chad and his crew of dumb bros went out looking for the killer (smart), the show knew the only way to up the tension: Soundtrack the whole drawn-out street fight with a little “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)”.
While last week left me feeling a tad jipped, I feel as if “Scream Queens” is starting to find where it wants to be as a series, as well as finding a way into my heart. Probably the biggest beneficiary of this is Niecy Nash’s third-person loving Denise Henfield, who’s fast developing from a cringeworthy sass generator into an outsider who’s somehow both incompetent and the series’ resident voice of reason. But those were just the beginning of this episode’s many delights. But before they do, the DDS needlessly take out their aggression on a parked vehicle. I’ve met a lot of people in this industry where you have an impression of who they are, and then behind the scenes it’s completely different. Denise also reminds the girls that Chanel #2 live-tweeted her death, so duh, she’s dead. At this point we were treated to a demonstration of luminol, a glowing chemical that revealed a blood stain on Chanel No. 2′ carpet.
No one in the cast knows the killers identity, but Roberts feels certain her amoral Queen Bee is at the heart of Wallace U’s Kappa Kappa Tau mystery. Where are all her Emmys??? Do you think Abigail Breslin is being grossly underused as well? Also, as I mentioned before, “Tha Crossroads” was playing.
Dean Munsch is a lecherous hornball. Chainsaw opened with a rather teasing subduing of the “Red Devil” and closed with a terrifying near-fatal encounter with the university’s former mascot-turned-serial killer.
Grace and Pete are also hot on the case in this episode, where they will pay a visit to a mysterious woman that has ties Kappa’s past. The mother was basically Cordelia from Buffy, Real Housewife edition.
Suffice it to say that Chanel has never had a selfless thought that would be a redeeming quality and her new plot is sure to cause incredible grief in the form of hurt feelings and murdered friends, all in the name of sorority fun. (As it turned out, she’d been secretly hooking up with him, as had most of the other sorority sisters.) Anyway, yeah, buried the lede: Charisma Carpenter played Ariana Grande’s mom! OK, maybe I’m still enjoying the show. In the first kill of the episode, Coney is sawed in two with a chainsaw in his dorm room. She’s saved by Grace’s helicopter dad, who promptly accuses Dean Munsch of being the Red Devil-or one of them, at least. In a delightful montage we watched him march across campus high-fiving students, groping female co-eds, and straight-up taking money out of cash registers! Just then, a red devil approaches them. Goodbye, Coney. You were very vanilla but sometimes that’s the freshest flavor. It’s this very screwy love triangle.
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Speaking of Grace’s astute thinking, she attends her first college class, a Film Analysis seminar taught by her father, Wes. Yes, that Charles Manson. But there were plenty of bright spots-and the episode eventually pulled out of the dive by reinforcing that Piggy is at her best when she’s a solo act who doesn’t need to share the spotlight with anyone else. The bit, which I won’t ruin here, involves the new mascot for the school as the red devil is now deemed inappropriate due to all the recent collage carnage.
