Apologies for the lateness of the review. I was in a place with no DVR and had to catch a later showing.

Well, Return to Roanoke certainly didn't waste any time on the carnage front as the rest of the cast, following Rory's murder, immediately began to fall thanks to crazy Agnes and her split personality.My concern last week was that the show would have to come up with hinkey, forced ways to keep these characters in the house when they clearly should leave. To a certain extent, that held true, but not in outright terrible ways. No one really panicked over Rory vanishing because Audrey remembered that he'd wanted to leave to go to an audition back home. Following this, certain characters remained in the house because Shelby got chopped by Agnes and had to stay put. With no one knowing Sidney and his team had been killed, confusion over rescue efforts ran rampant.Then, just on the walk to get help, three of our characters got nabbed by the (real) Polks, featuring Freak Show's Finn Wittrock, and entered their own slice of torture porn horror (anyone notice the place had its own cameras?). Back at the homestead, Shelby killed Matt and the house got surrounded by the (real) Butcher and her colony. Sure, there's a certain amount of fun in watching the gimmick unfold fully, seeing the real versions of the monsters and murderers who had portrayed by actors previously (Gaga's witch was certainly more decrepit), but there's still a shallow, trashy element to this tale that doesn't allow the story to offer up much more than surface-level shocks.There's really nothing underneath any of this. Naturally, the season is doing meta commentary on reality shows and these characters are meant to represent certain archetypes of people you'd see on these shows, but even the real people here don't have much to offer. Matt and Shelby's failed marriage, and hopeful reconciliation, was pretty much the only thing Roanoke had to offer on an emotional level and this week that crumbled when Matt admitted that he only returned for the witch. So even that element of the story wasn't allowed to remain as an emotional core.Now we really don't care about anyone. All of the actors are jerks. Dom's an ass, Monet's an ass (who drinks), and Audrey's an ass (who's self-conscious about her age). It makes sense that all these characters, including Lee, who didn't encounter the Polks the first go round, should be the ones to suffer their wrath this time, but this is still fundamentally empty viewing. It's f***ed up, but it's empty.As far as we know, there are still two more episodes to this part of the seasonal story (with the 10th episode apparently being its own, third, story). Like I felt with "Chapter 3," I can't really figure how this one can last two more. Once those colonists surround the house, it seems like there's only a finale left in the tank. We'll have to see how it plays out.