Tonight’s episode begins with Maggie, the fake fortune teller, smoking and giving a fake reading to Dandy, the very real serial killer.

“Your voice sounds so familiar I can almost place it,” Maggie says. She has heard Dandy before, of course, when he tried to saw her in half as part of a “magic act” that wasn’t very magical. He was wearing an evil clown mask at the time, though.

Dandy wants to talk about murdering women including mother, but he phrases it in such a way that Maggie misunderstands and thinks he’s talking about relationship issues.

She looks into her crystal ball, which serves as a framing device for a scene in which Dandy invites an Avon lady in. She looks a bit like his mom, which must be why decapitates her. He sews the Avon lady’s head onto his mother’s body, next to her head, and ties ribbons to her corpse. Now she and the Avon lady a weird mockery of Siamese twins that Dandy puppeteers with the ribbons, with his mom as Dot and the Avon lady as Bette.

Maggie is not a real fortune teller, of course, so she tells Dandy the crystal ball is clear, his indiscretion will be forgotten and that his dark clouds will pass. He gives her a hundred bucks, but, Dandy being Dandy, he’s creepy and says it would be a shame to waste the powers inside her before he leaves.

Jimmy is drunk and feeding his new squeeze, Barbara the Fat Lady. It’s sexual. It’s disturbing. The other freaks are disturbed by it, and also the fact that Jimmy isn’t helping them look for Bette and Dot, who have gone missing.

Jimmy sees Dandy leaving Maggie’s tent and flies into a rage, chasing Dandy down and accusing him of taking the twins. This time it’s not Dandy’s fault, though.

Jimmy accuses Dandy, accurately, of being the other clown and a murderer. No one believes him. Jimmy takes a swing at Dandy but is so drunk he falls over.

After everyone walks away, Dandy leans over where Jimmy lies in the dirt. He tell Jimmy he will have revenge for losing Bette and Dot and his one shot at happiness, and he’ll destroy Jimmy and everyone he loves.

“It will be so much fun,” Dandy says.

Bette and Dot are hiding in a hotel room, where Bearded Lady Ethel put them to safeguard them from Elsa before her failed attempt knock the diva off. Unfortunately, Stanley and Elsa find them.

They give the twins a line about a mob hunting freaks and killing Ethel. We get a flashback to what really happened to Ethel, which was that Elsa killed her and Stanley gruesomely covered it up.

We also see a flashback that shows they got the location of the twins from Ethel’s suicide note and instructions for Jimmy to find them, which Stanley tears up.

The twins don’t believe Elsa, but she tells them she’s lined up the surgeon Dot wanted to separate them and he’s on his way. Dot smiles. Bette’s face fills with fear.

At the tent a handsomely dressed man, Angus T. Jefferson comes to see Desiree, the woman with unusual genitalia. Maggie and Desiree try to intimidate him, but the man says he couldn’t stay away. Desiree rebuffs him and they duck into a tent, where Desiree tells Maggie Angus is her “beau” and to be quite about it.

In the tent Jimmy happens to be screwing Barbara. He doesn’t stop right away, even while Maggie and Desiree watch. Maggie is jealous and disgusted and this starts a big fight between Jimmy and Maggie, with a lot of insults thrown Barbara’s way by Maggie. Jimmy makes some drunken attempts to defend Barbara, but the fight ends when he pukes all over the floor.

At a lady’s Tupperware party, one of the women is talking about blowing her husband and how it got her a new stove. This is one of those parties where the real attraction isn’t Tupperware, but that Jimmy makes some extra money by manually stimulating sexually repressed ladies with his lobster claws. But he’s so drunk he can’t do it right.

He comes out to where the ladies are to get something to eat and sees a hallucination of his mother, who says she’s rolling over in her grave. He apologizes and cries and asks her why she killed herself.

Ethel uses the Tupperware to make a metaphor about how Jimmy is wasting his life grieving over her, saying “When you protect the past you lose the future.” She says she wasted all of her hopes and dreams on another no good drunk, like his father.

Jimmy snaps out of the hallucination while apologizing and hugging the hem of one of the thoroughly freaked out ladies’ skirts. They kick him out.

There’s a knock at the door. It’s not Jimmy returning, it’s Dandy. He pretends his car broke down and lays on the charm. The ladies let him in.

We see a car driving out in the wilderness, toward Stanley’s barn of horrors where he takes the freaks he intends to kill so he can sell their remains to the American Morbidity Museum.

When they get inside Dot is a bit suspicious of being operated on in a barn, of course, and Bette is freaking out.

We see a flashback of Elsa objecting to murdering the girls, but Stanley uses flattery to get her on his side. He convinces her he really does have the number of the famous doctor, Dr. Sugar, that separated the Brodie twins and can successfully get Bette and Dot separated.

Back to the present and Stanley’s line is that the initial examination will take place in the barn, for reasons, but the surgery will be in the hospital. As he explains, Bette reminds everyone that one of the Brodie twins died, but Stanley blows it off as due to a rare infection.

Stanley tells them they can be split down the middle and live. Dot really wants the operation and gets angry when Bette objects, especially after she’s told Bette can survive. Bette says she won’t do it, it’s barbaric, but Stanley doesn’t listen. He and Elsa leave and shut the twins up in the darkness of the barn.

The husband of the lady that was holding the Tupperware party returns home. As he walks in he reflexively complains about the party in a sexist Don Draper kind of way until he sees all the blood.

Dandy has filled a swimming pool with the dead women. Blood is everywhere, and the women float in the red water like ice cubes in a Bloody Mary.

Dora’s daughter, Regina, still hasn’t given up on finding the mother that Dandy killed. We see her walking up Dandy’s stairs. At that moment Dandy is in his play room. He’s collected some of his victims’ blood in their own Tupperware and is getting ready to bathe in it.

Regina confronts Dandy about Dora, tells him she’s been to the cops.

“Regina, I killed your mother,” Dandy admits matter-of-factly.

Regina then notices there’s blood all around Dandy’s playroom.

He reassures her it’s not Dora’s blood because he and Gloria buried Dora. Then admits he killed Gloria too and discovered the power of bathing in blood.

Regina tries to run but Dandy locks her in, and confides in her how killing has finally made him happy.

“Take a bath with me, Regina. Like when we were little,” Dandy says and takes his robe off, revealing his nude body.

He says “I am a God,” and says he doesn’t want to kill her, but he won’t let her leave. But when he notices she’s scared he calls her a bore kicks her out.

“I am above the law. Beyond the law. I am the law,” Dandy yells.

In the dark barn, Bette tells Dot she’s not dim.

“One of us can survive that surgery, not both,” Bette says.

Dot says she’s tired of this “infinite, intolerable arranged marriage.” She says she doesn’t want Bette dead, but she wants one of them to live a normal life.

Bette talks about how they worked through their challenges growing up by putting their heads together, she thinks of their condition as a gift, a chance to love another person as oneself.

She put out her hand and Dot takes it. She says she has the same dreams of a normal life, but Dot says she could never survive “without me.”

Bette starts to cry and says “I know.” That’s the crux of it.

“I don’t think I could actually stand being alone,” Bette says, but that’s a prelude for her accepting Dot’s wishes. She says she wants one of them to have a chance and that if only one can live, she wants it to be Dot.

“I wanna give my life to you, sister,” Bette says, and this brings both to tears and professions of love.

Dell is in his trailer. He’s crying and writing a note. First to Desiree. Then to Jimmy. Then to “My Son.”

Next we see him drinking and walking down the road in a flashback. A car pulls up behind him and Stanley gets out.

Stanley asks Dell if he’s going back to the gay bar, the High Noon, and mentions Dell’s lover Andy, whom neither know that Dandy decapitated.

Dell grabs Stanley and desperately asks if he knows what happened to Andy, but Stanley tells him to forget him, because Andy has forgotten Dell.

Stanley wants Dell to pull himself together and stop acting like he’s “guilty of something,” even though he is in fact guilty of horribly murdering innocent little Ma Petite and a few other people.

The main thing, he says, is that Dell can’t go around like he’s half-cocked. This sets up a segue straight out of a porno, as Stanley says that personally, he’s “never half-cocked,” and pulls out his penis to prove it.

Whatever Dell sees, he’s scared/impressed. He calls Stanley a freak. Stanley tries to talk Dell into touching it and it’s implied that he does.

Back to the present and we see the note Dell is writing is a suicide note. He’s got the noose ready.

When he finishes writing he sees a quick hallucination/ghost of Ma Petite standing on his table and telling him to “Sign it!,” then dutifully signs the note. He drags a chair over to the noose as an hallucination/ghost of Ethel watches from a chair and berates him. He says she can’t talk him out of it.

“Talk you out of it. Hell, I’m here to watch,” She says.

Dell says he just can’t take the shame of it anymore, that he doesn’t understand how she managed it.

Ethel says that the freaks carry it on the outside, but Dell keeps it on the inside, and it rots him away.

“You’ve always been weak,” Ethel tells Dell, no matter how many steel bars he can bend, and encourages him to step up and get it done.

Dell gets on the chair and puts his head in the noose. He kicks the chair away and quickly but horribly chokes to near unconsciousness. We see some flashes of light and hear voices and can see that Desiree cut him down before he died. She comforts Dell as he apologizes.

At Stanley’s creepy hotel room a gay hustler enters wearing a sexy doctor’s outfit. The hustler tries to do what he’s paid for, but Stanley makes him wait and practice. Yes, this young hustler is whom Stanley will attempt to pass off as the eminent Dr. Sugar, the surgeon who separated the Brodie twins.

He can barely remember his one line, which is to reassure the girls that they’ve learned a lot since the Brodie case and both will live. He gets it close enough for Stanley and then moves on to oral sex.

Regina shows up at above the law Dandy’s door with a police detective. Dandy shows them around in his charming but creepy way.

The cop says all he needs to disprove Regina’s story is see Dandy’s mother.

Dandy makes some snide comments about the difference between he and Regina’s stations, but admits she’s not a liar.

“If she says I killed them, then they must be dead,” Dandy says.

But Dandy says he has absolute conviction he’s going to get away with it, because he’s so damn rich. And because he’s seen the face of God, looking at him from the mirror.

The cop starts to draw his gun and tells Dandy he’s digging himself a hole.

Dandy says he has a better offer, that the cop dig a hole for Regina. He offers a million bucks for the cop to work for him.

The cop casually pulls his gun and shoots Regina in the head, killing her.

“You got a shovel?” the cop asks.

Back at the freak show, Jimmy is drunk to the point of a stupor. The other freaks are taking down Ethel and Ma Petite’s banners from the path that leads up to the show. Jimmy chases them off, embraces his mother’s banner for a moment then stumbles to his trailer.

Dot and Bette are inside. They’ve decided they love each other too much to separate.

Dot admits she was wrong.

“I thought Bette was the problem. But she wasn’t. It was me. My sweet, sweet sister is the purest part of my soul. We’re family. We belong together and I know that now,” Dot says.

Jimmy gloomily responds by saying “even family leaves,” and Dot comforts him, puts his claw on her face and says she was sorry to hear about Ethel.

“You’re not alone. And you never have to be alone again,” Dot says. She admits she has loved him since she first saw him.

The twins take their dress off.

“Let me take your pain away. Replace it with love,” Dot says.

Jimmy asks what Bette feels about it, she says she supports Dot and can close her eyes and give them privacy.

Dot kisses Jimmy, and Bette kind of joins in. Jimmy draws away, but Dot says they’re two souls devoted to pleasing Jimmy.

Jimmy says he cares about them, but he can’t. He put the dress back on and admits he’s in love with someone else.

“She’s a very lucky girl,” Dot says, her voice breaking as they go. The sisters hold hands to comfort each other. Jimmy starts to crawl into a bottle and then angrily throws it.

And suddenly Dandy’s pet cop shows up to arrest Jimmy for Dandy’s Tupperware party massacre. They’ve got his glove found at the crime scene and he’s quite thoroughly framed. End of episode.

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