Episode 2 of American Horror Story Delicate clears out the strange and mysterious ending of the previous episode 1, where actress Anna Alcott was haunted by a stranger in her room. Although it had seemed like Anna had lost her baby during this, now it is clear that the accident only led to her bleeding, and the embryo is still safe. The new episode now deals with a gala awards ceremony for which Anna has been selected, following which she and Dexter spend some time at Talia’s luxurious house in the Hamptons.
Spoiler Alert
Can the police find Anna’s stalker?
Episode 2 of American Horror Story Delicate begins with the police investigating Anna’s apartment for any clues, while two detectives talk to her to find out more about her situation. Both the actress and the police seem to have taken the intruder to be the stalker woman who Anna had seen twice on the streets the previous day. But when the security camera footage of the building is checked, nothing suspicious is found by the police. Dexter had left the apartment and the building late at night in order to fetch dog food for their pet, and returned seventeen minutes later. It was inside this timeframe that the attack on Anna took place, but there is simply no record of anyone walking in or out of the building during this time. The only ones to enter the building other than Dexter are the police, responding to the woman’s 911 call.
The police detectives wonder whether any of the couple’s friends staged this entire attack as a sort of crude joke, and there is one solid reason for them to feel so. The pet dog had not made any noise or any sort of reaction to someone breaking into the apartment, which suggests that someone known and friendly to the dog must have come in. But Anna is sure that none of their friends could do such a thing, and the detectives move on to a different theory. They ask the couple whether the incident could have been a hallucination on Anna’s part, as she was taking progesterone suppositories, which have a strong effect on one’s mind and body. The reason the detectives ask this question is also because Anna’s hands were red with lipstick rubbed all over them, and not because of blood like it had seemed at the end of episode 1. But the woman is, once again, very certain that what she had experienced was very real.
Later that morning, Anna steps out of the apartment for work and sees the same stalker woman once again. However, when she looks again to check, the woman is not there, but instead a man holding his baby. This baby is very weirdly dressed in the same manner as the stalker, and Anna now decides to walk away without getting too involved in the matter. Although she initially decided to stay off social media for the time being, Anna does have to post pictures in order to help her professional career. Here she sees an account with the name of Preecher, clearly run by the mysterious elderly woman seen earlier, and the account only has one uploaded picture—that of Anna at the fertility clinic. After searching the account some more, the protagonist finds that Ms. Preecher is rather interested in rituals, witchcraft, and that sort of indulgence.
Apart from these issues, Anna also suffers from the usual problems that have been occurring with her for some time now. She is more jumpy and nervous than usual and is clearly very stressed about the whole situation. When Dexter walks up to her in the kitchen, Anna is so spooked by his sudden movement that she nicks his face with a kitchen knife. The woman is also regularly missing out on time and events, which is first evident when the fertility clinic receptionist tells her how they had talked only a day earlier, but Anna has no memory of it. After talking to Dr. Hill, Anna is told that the embryo will take two weeks’ time to develop into a baby, if it does, and the woman misses out on how these two weeks pass. While she believes it has only been a few days, Dexter reveals that two weeks have passed, and Anna takes a pregnancy test. The result is positive, and the young couple is relieved and excited that they will finally be parents.
What happens during the award show event?
Anna Alcott had been nominated for the best actress prize at the Gotham Awards for her recently starred film, The Auteur. This news was of great excitement to her publicist, Siobhan, who wanted Anna to push on from here to make herself nominated for the Oscars as well. According to Siobhan, Anna needed to put herself out there on social media and at every possible event in order to catch the eyes of the audiences and the selectors. When the protagonist wanted to step away from social media for some time, Siobhan almost raged against her for quitting on everyone’s dreams of seeing her on the Oscar stage. Convinced by the publicist, Anna starts to present herself to the people in a particular way, and she wears the iconic 1991 Madonna dress to the Gotham Awards show.
On the red carpet itself, some of Anna’s insecurities are revealed when a younger actress named Babette Eno gets much more attention and encouragement from the media than her. While Babette seems, or maybe pretends, to be a great fan and follower of the more experienced Anna Alcott, to Anna, the younger woman is surely a professional rival. Talking to the director of her film, Anna is more irritated by the fact that the man somehow knows about the stalker incident at her house. While only Dexter and Siobhan had known about it, more people somehow got to know of the incident, including the doctor and his receptionist, possibly from the police. It could also be, as suggested by the receptionist, that Anna herself had told people about the intruder but then had no recollection of it.
Frustrated by the situation, the actress visits the washroom to perfect her makeup and notices a small red spot on her face that has been growing for some time now. As she tries to hide the mark, a woman walks up to her and introduces herself as a big fan of hers. The fan keeps on talking to the actress while the two are the only ones in the washroom, and she then remarks about how Anna must be feeling very nervous. Around the same time, the actress picks on the spot on her face, and a small part of her skin peels off in an extremely unnatural manner. Anna has to throw up, possibly because of her pregnancy, but now the fan holds her belly from behind, as if trying to harm the baby in her womb. Anna immediately pushes the woman away, leading to the latter hitting her head very hard and dying. As the actress panics about what to do with the dead body, her name is called on stage, and she has to leave the washroom.
Anna wins the Gotham Prize for best actress, but when she is invited on stage to speak, all hell breaks loose. She spots the fan she had just murdered, now sitting and slow-clapping at her, and then she sees Ms. Preecher as well. Back at her table, Dexter is making out with his ex-wife Adeline and the artist he is working with at present, Sonia Shawcross. As a result, Anna throws up something pitch black, and she then faints. When she wakes up, a paramedic is checking on her inside the same washroom as earlier, but there is no dead woman here. In fact, nobody had seen the woman that Anna describes, either dead or alive. It is clear from the news articles online that Anna had actually gone up to the stage to collect her award and had then fainted, leading to a flurry of media articles being written about it to essentially ridicule her.
What happens at Talia’s country house in the Hamptons?
As a response to this media frenzy, in order to get away from the public image for some time, Anna and Dexter go away from the city to Talia’s luxurious country house in the Hamptons. Talia is happy to let the couple stay at the place, although Anna seems a bit skeptical about why the woman was so easily letting them take the house for some time. Suspiciously, Anna also finds an old photograph of Dexter, Adeline, Talia, and her partner hidden away in one of the drawers in the kitchen. She does not reveal this to her husband, though, and instead retires for the night.
Anna is woken up again late at night by some strange noises coming from the basement of the house, and she has to go check. The security officer guard at the house, Kamal, who always stays at the place, also joins her in searching the basement, but there is nothing to be found. The next morning, during her exercise session, Anna seems to be hurt and has to be driven to the nearest hospital by Kamal. Along with severe pain and abdominal cramps, the woman once again bleeds profusely. After reaching the hospital, Anna has to wait for a doctor to arrive when a young nurse walks in to check on her. This woman, named Ivy, looks quite like the same woman who had been stalking Anna in the city, and so she wonders where she had seen her before. But Anna cannot make the connection, and Ivy runs some tests on the woman, which include performing an ultrasound test on her abdomen.
Ivy leaves the room after the test, with the probe stick evidently very bloody, stating that she is going to fetch a doctor. During American Horror Story Delicate Episode 2’s ending, Anna goes to the washroom, still bleeding from her abdomen, and then passes out with visions of herself playing with her baby. When she is woken up next, the woman is back inside the hospital room, where the doctor states that the community-run hospital simply does not have any nurses named Ivy. Yet Anna has lost the baby due to some unexplainable abnormality. While the doctors cannot understand how this abortion has happened, Anna is very sure that it was Ivy who killed her baby.
What can we expect next in episode 3?
The spooky events around Anna have finally taken a very literal shape as she loses the baby because of the nurse named Ivy. This nurse is definitely the same woman who had been following the actress in the city, and how she is related to Ms. Preecher is not very clear yet. It might be that the elderly Ms. Preecher is only a hater of the successful actress, and there might not be much sinister about her, but this still needs to be seen. Now that the protagonist couple has lost their baby, how that might affect their relationship might also be given focus. Anna seems to be having doubts about her husband’s feelings for his friends, the latest artist working for him, and also his dead ex-wife. Whether there is any truth to this or whether Anna has been generally hallucinating things is still not very clear.
