Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Grotesquerie episode 7

Although Grotesquerie’s cast of characters was rounded out by Lois’s family.

There was her husband, Marshall, a Philosophy professor who fell into a coma before the show began. Then there was her daughter Merritt and Nurse Redd, the overly involved nurse who revealed in Grotesquerie episode 6 that she had an affair with Marshall before his coma. Lois herself almost embarked on an affair with a kind orderly she dubbed “Fast Eddie,” although he was more concerned with helping her worsening alcoholism than he was in her romantic advances. Meanwhile, Sister Megan was in the middle of a torrid affair of her own with Father Charlie, her seemingly devout, but ambitious and unhinged, editor.

6 Fast Eddie And Merritt Got Together In Grotesquerie Episode 7

Grotesquerie Episode 7 Opened With Lois’s Nightmare Coming True

Grotesquerie episode 7, “Unplugged,” started out strange. Instead of addressing the cliffhanger ending of episode 6, “Good Caesarean Work,” the show cut to Lois, Fast Eddie, and Merritt eating at a restaurant. The atmosphere was tense as Lois learned that her daughter had fallen for the orderly after she asked Fast Eddie to take care of her while she investigated Grotesquerie’s coordinates with Sister Megan. The pair seemed truly happy together, but Lois wasn't thrilled for them. First, she claimed that she had already slept with Travis Kelce’s character, and then she warned both of them that they were making a mistake.

After viciously mocking Merritt, Lois left the restaurant to visit the hospital. There, she found her husband Marshall and said a bitter, brutal goodbye to her flawed partner. Continuing on her warpath, Lois marched to the head of the hospital’s office and demanded that her husband be taken off life . The medical authority seemed dumbfounded, but he couldn’t argue with her demands. As if this weren’t dramatic enough, Lesley Manville’s Nurse Redd entered and had her fears confirmed. A viciously angry Lois was taking her lover off life and there was nothing she could do about it.

5 Lois Decided To Take Marshall Off Life

Grotesquerie Episode 7 Became Nurse Redd’s Worst Nightmare

After both Nurse Redd and her boss made some thwarted attempts to discern Lois’s motives, they eventually complied with her wishes. Marshall’s life was turned off, and he died with little fanfare, a twist that hinted something was very wrong in the reality of Grotesquerie. Marshall had been a pivotal part of Lois’s story until this point and her troubled relationship with him humanized the show’s heroine, so it was bizarre to see her suddenly give up on any hope of his return to her. Things only got stranger as 2024’s American Horror Story replacement continued.

4 Father Charlie Was Revealed To Be Grotesquerie

Sister Megan Became The Catholic Guardian’s Editor And Publisher

Lois went straight from the hospital to work, where her colleagues were throwing her a congratulations party for successfully unmaking and killing Grotesquerie. Grotesquerie was revealed to be Father Charlie and, judging by the snippets of context viewers could glean in the episode, he was motivated by a desire to scare the public back under the church’s control. Lois questioned the optics of celebrating something as macabre as shooting a serial killer, but it wasn’t long before her boss took her aside and revealed the reason for the party. Lois was retired due to her drinking and a lack of funds.

Sister Megan was promoted to the editor and publisher of The Catholic Guardian thanks to her coverage of the Grotesquerie case.

As her boss ranted about police departments replacing officers with machinery and algorithms, she urged Lois to “Wake up” to the reality around her. Meanwhile, decoding Grotesquerie’s many Biblical references paid off for another character. Lois’s former partner, Sister Megan, was promoted to the editor and publisher of The Catholic Guardian thanks to her coverage of the Grotesquerie case’s popularity. This didn’t sit well with an understandably suspicious Lois, who invited her over for dinner. There, Lois accused Sister Megan of working with Father Charlie as his secret accomplice in the killings, and the nun was initially silent.

3 Sister Megan Attacked Lois In Grotesquerie Episode 7

Grotesquerie’s Heroines Endured A Brutal Fight Over Dinner

In a sudden twist, Sister Megan itted that she was Father Charlie’s accomplice in the Grotesquerie killings and that was how she always had the inside scoop on the killer’s plans and messages. Sister Megan didn’t plan on letting Lois live after giving up her secret, and she savagely attacked her in her kitchen. This resulted in a full-blown brawl where the pair stabbed each other, Lois dumped a boiling pot of soup on the nun, and Sister Megan appeared to beat Lois to death. Incredibly, the nod to Grotesquerie episode 1’s pot plot was not the scene's strangest twist.

Grotesquerie revealed that Lois was really the one in a coma.

The next scene switched to a new reality altogether. Here, Marshall was no longer in a coma but instead in an unhappy relationship with Nurse Redd, who was a camgirl and revealed she was now cheating on Marshall. Marshall visited Lois in hospital and Grotesquerie revealed that now Lois was the one in a coma, and she had also been cheating on Marshall. Marshall decided that it was time to pull the plug on Lois, going through much the same conversation that Lois had with the hospital chief of staff earlier in the episode. In this new version of Grotesquerie’s reality, everyone had new roles.

2 Grotesquerie Episode 7 Put Lois Is In A Coma

Marshall Nursed His Wife In The Show’s New Reality

The doctor assisting in Lois’s death was none other than Father Charlie, while Sister Megan was a police officer who worked under Lois before her coma. Merrit was a cancer researcher with two PhDs who was married to Fast Eddie, although he was revealed to be an adulterer and their union was seemingly coming to an end. Grotesquerie's twist was worthy of Ryan Murphy’s earlier American Horror Story as the show pulled the rug out from under viewers and revealed that none of its reality had been real all along. This explains all the characters cryptically telling Lois to wake up.

At first, it seemed as though Lois must have been left in a coma after the events of “Good Caesarean Work,” and that she may have been knocked out by the killer when confronted by them. However, series creator Ryan Murphy told Variety that this interpretation is not quite right. Instead, the entirety of Grotesquerie’s first six episodes was Lois’s coma dream all along and the show proper begins with Lois waking up from her coma. All of Grotesquerie, from the serial killer to the elaborate murders, to the bond between Sister Megan and Lois, was all imagined by Lois.

This, of course, has massive implications for the rest of the series. Now that viewers know the show’s reality is actually the one depicted in the final twenty minutes of “Unplugged,” expectations for the final episodes of the season are completely rewritten. Father Charlie and Sister Megan’s affair never happened, since they appear to be a doctor and one of Lois’s colleagues and have likely never even met. Grotesquerie themselves and all of their murders are presumably entirely imagined, and Merritt is actually a highly successful scientist who has a much healthier relationship with her comatose mother than Lois’s dream envisioned.

1 Grotesquerie Episode 7 Revealed That Lois Was In A Coma All Along

Grotesquerie’s Heroine Was The One In A Coma, Not Marshall

It isn’t clear when Marshall started his affair with Nurse Redd, and whether she was always an online sex worker in this new reality. Merritt and Fast Eddie’s marriage is crumbling, but it is hard to tell how happy they ever were, or why Lois envisioned Fast Eddie as an idealized savior within her coma. Marshall’s decision to pull the plug on his wife was met with resistance from Merritt, and he became angry and unstable when Fast Eddie and Sister Megan attempted to attend the event, but this didn’t matter in the end. Instead of dying, Lois woke up.

There are three more episodes of Grotesquerie set to air on FX Wednesdays at 10pm.

In the aforementioned interview with Variety, Murphy stated that the remaining episodes of Grotesquerie held a new challenge for Lois. Namely, per Murphy, “She has to explain to all of these people why they were doing these horrible things to her in her dream.” Effectively, Lois has lived through an extremely TV-MA-rated version of The Wizard of Oz, and she needs to unpack the behaviors she projected onto the many familiar faces from her real life. Some, like the dramatic and amoral Nurse Redd, seem fairly familiar in both incarnations and don't appear to have been changed substantially.

However, it will be interesting to see why Sister Megan became a quirky nun instead of Lois’s colleagues in her mind, and why one of her doctors became a deranged Catholic priest turned serial killer. Similarly, Lois’s views of her son-in-law are interesting to say the least, and she will likely have a complicated relationship with Fast Eddie and Merritt now that she is awake. All told, it is almost impossible to guess where Grotesquerie will go next. Grotesquerie episode 7 fundamentally changed what sort of show the series is, and there is no way of knowing how its plot will pan out.

Source: Variety