Episode 7 of Grotesquerie came with a mind-boggling twist ending that shook the very foundation of the show.
The new FX horror-tinged crime drama follows grizzled detective Lois Tryon (played by Niecy Nash-Betts) as she engages in a legal cat-and-mouse game with a religion-obsessed serial killer.
From Grotesquerie's boiling pot in the premiere to the bigger theological mystery at hand, Nash-Betts' law enforcement officer has had plenty to deal with across its first seven episodes.
The Grotesquerie Episode 7 Ending Explained
Grotesquerie Episode 7's ending has some scratching their heads after its debut.
After setting up the series and its central criminal manhunt for a serial killer with a love of the theological for the last six episodes, the Ryan Murphy-developed drama flipped everything on its head to end its seventh episode.
Episode 7 (subtitled "Unplugged") centers on Detective Lois Tryon as she grapples with her complicated interpersonal relationships and tries to make headway on the case to catch the show's titular killer.
Detective Tryon learns that her daughter, Merritt, has sparked a romantic relationship with Travis Kelce's Fast Eddie. She also pulls her ailing husband off of life support, discovers that Father Eddie is Grotesquerie, and finds out her newly accepted partner, Sister Megan Duval, was working with the killer. Ultimately, the series' titular villain puts Lois into a coma.
That is when the big twist happens. Episode 7 ends with Lois waking up from her coma, and the events of the past six episodes are revealed to have been dreams.
This means there was never a murderer, no one had betrayed anyone else, and everything was in Lois' head.
On the Episode 7 twist ending, showrunner Ryan Murphy told Variety that fans will now have to follow Lois as she "explain[s] to all of these people why they were doing these horrible things to her in her dream."
He said that Lois waking up will see the character begin to realize that "the only thing that’s going to get her through this experience is love:"
"What it really is about is a person waking up from a state that was a living nightmare, which all of us are living in. So she wakes up and what she’s trying to do is fight for herself and fight for her family and fight for survival. And she realizes that the only thing that’s going to get her through this experience is love, and that’s what I feel. That’s my world view. It’s interesting in my work. If you look at my characters throughout the times, they do outrageous things, they say outrageous things, they wear outrageous things. But what they’re really all fighting for is either to love or to be loved. That’s what I’m trying to put out into the world."
Murhpy has also said this was meant to represent him and the creative team seeing the "world we’re living in really is a horror show" (via Deadline):
"The thing I think that we were really interested in talking about was how the world we’re living in really is a horror show. We were very interested in writing about existential dread and calamitous things that are going around that I think everybody feels helpless about right now. So that’s really what it started off as. I’ve never done anything like this, where we wrote these episodes just to see what it was like."
While the Episode 7 twist might hint that Grotesquerie is winding down, that does not seem to be the case.
According to Detective Lois Tryon actress Niecy Nash, "There’s still more to come" (per TVLine):
"I’m obsessed with Ryan Murphy. He will always have me at hello. I love to be a part of anything he’s doing, because his creativity is out of this world. So I knew we were in for an interesting ride, and I did know about the plot twist — but there’s still more to come."
As the series rolls on, it will be interesting to see what pieces of this new reality seeped into Lois' dream world and what was a figment of her imagination.
Grotesquerie is streaming on Hulu, with new episodes debuting on FX at 10 p.m. ET ever Wednesday.
