WARNING: The following contains spoilers for American Horror Story: Double Feature Episode 4, "Blood Buffet," which aired Wednesday on FX.
American Horror Story usually encompasses morality plays in its season-long arcs, where good and evil are seemingly well-defined. Yet it invariably turns the tables on at least a few audience expectations as its narratives progress, showing villains in a suddenly sympathetic light while revealing new weaknesses and cruelties in its supposedly pure figures. Double Feature's “Red Tide” strongly plays this with its ostensible antagonists, Belle Noir and Austin Sommers. However, they are both more and less wicked than they seem, as "Blood Buffet" reveals.
The pair have gone from anonymity to fame and fortune through the use of the sinister black pill that turns the talented into geniuses and the untalented into animalistic ghouls. Before this week’s episode, their monstrosity was rampant. They happily kill not just to continue creating award-winning smash hits but also because their thirst for blood drives them. Belle even eats babies, and both of them currently plan to murder Harry and his family in the name of protecting their secret. Yet the new episode -- Season 10, Episode 4, “Blood Buffet” -- not only paints them in a more sympathetic light but also reveals the pain that led to their later monstrosities. Neither of them wanted success so much as validation, and their inability to get it from people who should have been more caring to them brought them to the black pills.
Belle Noir’s Origins as a Struggling Novelist
Belle Noir’s life before taking the pill is one of open pathos. The episode shows her as a self-published romance novelist whose racy text hides barely disguised realities about her faithless husband. Though she believes in her writing and has genuine talent, her endeavor looks more like a sad vanity project than an honest attempt at a writing career. She takes the pill after meeting Mickey at the bar (he gives her crystal meth before sending her to the Chemist), but her eagerness to do so in spite of the side effects speaks to her desperation.
It’s a logical step when faced with the sham of her marriage and the perceived emptiness of her life. Her husband is her first victim -- and, as is typical for American Horror Story, he richly deserves it. After she finds herself embracing what amounts to a vampire’s lifestyle quite happily. Her work becomes a phenomenon simply by eliminating an objectively awful person in her life. The struggling novelist she used to be clearly doesn’t miss her old lifestyle and even hates being reminded of it. Her cruelty to Mickey in Season 10, Episode 3, “Thirst,” suggests that she doesn’t like the fact that he set her up on the pill in the first place.
Austin Sommer’s Backstory as an Outcast Drag Queen
Sommers may be in even worse shape than Belle. He’s at the bottom of the pecking order in a low-rent drag revue surrounded by cruel competitors who delight in his pain. Like Belle, he has a passion project -- a play that will be performed on a local stage -- but the casting director has gone missing, and it might fall apart. As it turns out, he’s just working as a drag queen to pay for living expenses. He takes the pill without thinking, and Belle guides him straight to the other drag queens, who he’s more than happy to tear apart. When he appears to Harry Gardner a few years later, he’s a wildly successful playwright bursting with awards and accolades.
It’s worth noting that Sommer’s origin story here appears to contrast the origin story he gave Harry, which involved a male TV producer and not Belle. It also appears to confirm that Austin is Belle’s slight subordinate. Her introduction of the pill and its costs to him bear the hallmarks of a vampire turning a human into a creature of the night, which would be in keeping with “Blood Tide’s” de facto vampirism so far. It also matches the fact that Belle killed his casting director, most likely inadvertently, and turned him on to the pill as a way of apology. Either way, he has embraced the lifestyle just as eagerly and enjoyed the rewards accordingly.
American Horror Story: Double Feature details Belle and Austin's backstories. New episodes air each Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FX.