Warning: This recap of the “Chapter 6” episode of American Horror Story: Roanoke contains spoilers.

Surprise parties are great, even when you know they’re coming. For example, maybe Doug let slip something about balloons while he was mopping the hallway, or perhaps you saw Kathy stealing a roll of streamers from the nurse’s station, or maybe you overheard Skinny Carl blabbering about an ice cream cake during morning meds. Even if your surprise party was thoroughly spoiled, you know you’ll still be touched and elated when you enter the community rec room to all your friends’ shouts and yammerings. Today is YOUR day, and not even the State can take that away. In other words, surprises don’t have to be surprising as long as they get the job done.

This week Roanoke FINALLY let the other shoe drop. (Why do shoes drop, who is dropping shoes?) And, yes, as we more or less assumed from the start, this entire season was leading toward the actors and their “real-life” counterparts sharing screen space. That’s because it turned out those first five episodes were a standalone “TV series,” and it was such a hit that the public demanded a second, Big Brother-style season in which everyone returned to the haunted house during the blood moon. Yes, that means Evan Peters’s character is now a hot ginger, and, yes, Sarah Paulson’s character now sports a wild accent. And you’ll just have to see Angela Bassett’s wig to believe it.

But that’s why “Chapter 6” was so incredible: It gave us all the fun, meta goodness of a behind-the-scenes Hollywood tale while also remaining a totally effective, frightening found-footage exercise. Let’s talk about it!

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First of all, hey, new title card! Because this is the sequel season, it has a colon in the name … RETURN TO ROANOKE: THREE DAYS IN HELL. Except, as we’ll later learn via titles, this season never aired because EVERYONE DIED. Except one person. So there is one survivor. Who will it be? Anyway, this was a hell of a spoiler to say the least. Also, for an unproduced season of TV it sure was expertly edited and had professional-looking title cards. Some poor intern must’ve put it together in his spare time?

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We began with confirmation that the disembodied voice we’d heard leading the interviews during the first five episodes did indeed belong to Cheyenne Jackson. He’s Sidney, the Svengali behind this entire operation, and we first saw him riding high through the FX offices (I’m guessing) very stoked about his idea for how to follow up the biggest hit series of 2015. (I guess Empire doesn’t exist in this world; this is more the kind of world where a ghost reenactment show is the No. 1 series.)

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Anyway, his idea was to gather together all the “real” people from the original haunting as well as the actors who’d played them and force them to have their lives taped so they can see what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. But this was going to be complicated by the fact that fame had CHANGED THEM. For example, the “real” Shelby had f***ed Cuba Gooding Jr. and it made TMZ!