Grotesquerie Season 1 Episodes 8 and 9 Review

After the shocking revelation on Grotesquerie Season 1 Episode 7 that everything before is a coma dream Lois Tryon experienced, Grotesquerie Season 1 Episodes 8 and 9 decides to focus on the fallout of Tryon’s waking up.

With the central murder mystery not being real, Grotesquerie is revealing itself as a character piece. The show is more concerned with how Tryon deals with being in a coma and the mess of her life. It turns out everyone in the waking world is just as mean and cruel as they are in Tryon’s dream. Even Tryon herself is exceptionally savage in the real world. 

Without a specific goal or mystery to solve, the audience doesn’t understand where or what the series is leading to now. Grotesquerie never wanted to be a horror-procedure show with a central murder case. Instead, it intends to prioritize Tryon as a character study.

Even though Grotesquerie deserves admiration for dropping the “everything’s a dream” twist in the middle of the season rather than the end, it still feels cheap. Everything we thought and knew in the first six episodes did not happen, making them useless.

Tryon is the only one who experiences the dream, so she’s the only one who has character growth through them. However, her experience in a coma didn’t make her a better person. She’s more reflective, yet she is still willing to scorch Earth her life and leave everyone behind.

Fortunately for her, everyone else in her life is also horrible, so it is not as if Tryon is missing much. Marshall, Tryon’s husband, really unveils himself as the scumbag that he has always been. His horribleness stands out because he’s an ethics professor.

What lessens the tragedy of the cruelty is that Tryon deserves it. Her daughter has the right to slap her for sleeping with her husband. It’s one thing for Tryon to endure the abuse as penance, yet she snaps back and quickly returns in the next episode to slap her daughter back.

These actions make Tryon an interesting but also difficult character to sympathize with. In fairness, that’s probably the point of Grotesquerie. It centers on the actions and consequences of one police detective, and it is up to us, the viewing audience, to judge her character.

The only time Tryon feels the most empathetic is in her relationship with Maisie, the gravely voiced woman who was holding a newborn in the newspaper in her dreams on Grotesquerie Season 1 Episode 6. Tryon also encourages Marshall’s mistress, Redd, to leave him because he’s the worst.

It becomes hard to stomach through two 40-minute episodes of people being unnecessarily cruel. The talking scenes are also slow and tedious. There’s one moment where Marshall talks about the royal tea set, which is an obvious metaphor for his life, and it just drags.

The dialogue is very heavy-handed, dealing with current topics that didn’t feel necessary. Tryon and Megan have a specific conversation about the generational divide between millennials and the older generations. Like any discussion where an older person blames a millennial, it is cringy.

The scene tries to “both sides” the conversation, but it just feels ridiculous. The series doesn’t need that commentary about millennials, and it just makes that whole dialogue exchange feel uncomfortable.

In the end, Grotesquerie drops one more bombshell on viewers during Episode 9. It turns out Tryon’s dream murder case is coming true in real life. There’s a long, drawn-out scene where two specialists discuss the scientific reasoning why they believe she’s having visions of the future.

It’s a ridiculous twist that only producer Ryan Murphy is willing to pull off after having another earth-shattering twist. Rather than finding a supernatural reason for Tryon’s dreams, the series decides to focus on a pseudo-science reasoning for her dreams becoming real.

Because the show decides to go with a more “grounded” explanation, the whole justification becomes more vulnerable to scrutiny. The supernatural does not exist in real life, so any writer can come up with anything without care because hardly anyone will poke the logic of something that does not exist.

But science exists in real life, we understand how that works. While pseudo-science works great in sci-fi settings, Grotesquerie is not sci-fi. You can’t just bring up this major plot beat during Episode 9, especially since Grotesquerie has painted itself as a grounded yet surreal take on the detective genre.

It feels like such a swerve, particularly due to the show advertising itself as a horror series starring a detective and a nun. Now, the series isn’t about that at all, which makes the audience feel like they’ve been lied to.

Grotesquerie continues to take big swings with its plot twists. Unfortunately, the twists lessen the show’s impact and require too much suspension of disbelief. Episodes 8 and 9 are also excessively cruel and difficult to watch, making them some of the weakest episodes in the season.

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Grotesquerie airs on Wednesdays at 10/9c on FX.

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