American Horror Story season 7, episode 4 review: The monstrous birth of a cult

'We are going to wipe out everything you know and building something bigger and better than you could possibly imagine'

*WARNING: SPOILERS FOR AMERICAN HORROR STORY SEASON 7, EPISODE 3*

For Ryan Murphy, Emma Roberts is a weapon. That smile - sickly sweet, but venomous all at once - is a masterful creation in her hands; with one flutter of the eyelash, she instantly transforms into the gaudy monster of peak white privilege, be it Scream Queens or AHS: Coven's Madison Montgomery.

In American Horror Story: Cult, Roberts returns with a vengeance. Here, she's paired against Adina Porter, who proved with Roanoke that she's a natural heart and soul to the show; her downtrodden TV reporter Beverly is consistently sidelined for Roberts' Serena, a woman not only happy to sleep her way to the top, but to exploit as much of her own privilege as possible.

If Beverly dares to bring this up, Serena inevitably bites back with: "How about you stop being one of those women that needs to drag down successful women in order to feel good about herself?" A line that many a woman of colour has received in return for trying to point out where white women benefit from a certain level of privilege in their lives.

Serena's ultra-white feminism reaches its inevitable crux when she enters the voting booth on election night: despite being a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton in public, she votes for Donald Trump in private. In the end, 52% white women did - so it's no great shock.

Is Cult still really about the election, though? That’s where American Horror Story continues its strange divide: wanting both to be broad and specific at the same time, in a way that’s both dissonant and strangely effective, if not open-ended.

Instead of answering the many pressing questions left behind by episode 3 - is Meadow dead? Are Ivy and Ally donesies? – things instead flash back to election night. We discover who everyone voted for: Beverly for Clinton, Meadow for Oprah, Harrison for Gary Johnson.

We see Ally's moment of great betrayal to her wife, voting for Jill Stein when she expressly promised not to; the show has little new or insightful to say about the idea of "protest votes" here, simply blaming Ally's actions on a misplaced confidence that Trump would never win.

Then there’s Gary (Chaz Bono), who would literally saw his own hand off to vote for Trump. Within this mire of muddled political beliefs, it's actually quite hard to pinpoint exactly what the focus of AHS' political commentary is meant to be, especially when its connection to the main narrative isn't entirely clear-cut.

Specifically, when it comes to the titular cult's leader, Kai Anderson. Though Kai is an avid Trump supporter, his ambitions seem to stretch far beyond party allegiance. He desires power only, and his demagogic approach shows both an astuteness in the show's political allusions and a detachment - simply, colluding Kai and Trump assumes far too much Machiavellian intelligence in the later.

As a pure metaphor for the power of fear, however, it all works perfectly. Kai has an incredible sense of self-manipulation, an ability to present himself as the only salvation to his targets. To Harrison, he's a "mirror". He coos, "Anything you seem in me is in you": an identity of strength and self-assurance Harrison can consume for himself to overcome years of degrading homophobia.

To Beverly, he is the righteousness in her rage: against Serena; against the Trump supporters crashing her news reports to scream, "grab her by the pussy"; against the entire weight of society which bears down her shoulders like a boulder. Serena, of course, ends up dead at the hands of the clown gang. The cherry on top to convince Beverly of Kai's sincerity.

To Harrison, he's a MENSA-level child genius; to Beverly, he paints himself as an honourable veteran and major in Political Science and Feminist Studies. To Gary, he's the alpha male there to fuel his beliefs in the oppression of the straight white male. He can be all these things at once, because all he wants is the loyalty of souls, enraptured to him by their fear.

"We are going to wipe out everything you know and building something bigger and better than you could possibly imagine," Kai tells Harrison. To become what, though? An entity beyond identity, and to become something of pure action.

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