American Horror Story: Delicate – Season 12 Episode 4 Recap & Review

Vanishing Twin

American Horror Story: Delicate Season 12 Episode 4 starts in England, and the year is 1555. The queen is in the process of giving birth when her sister arrives and demands to be let in. Something is clearly wrong, as the queen states that the baby is a monster.

Dark figures make their presence known, and they tell Mary that it’s time. They take the baby boy, stating he’s waited over 6000 years to be born, and Mary promised them this child in exchange for a successful reign. Elizabeth makes it known she won’t make any promises, they inform her she will become barren, and she falls down in agony. The strange figures vanish, and Mary tells Elizabeth to leave. 

Cut to the present day, and Anna confronts Dex about Sonia. Dex makes excuses, and Anna tells him she saw Mrs. Preecher in town. Dex agrees to go to the doctor with her the next day. Anna enters the house with an animal’s corpse and faces a confrontation with Nicolette. Anna takes the dead animal to the basement, and puts it in a bassinetter as if it were a baby. She is startled by a black cat and then retreats upstairs. She hears something from the basement as she leaves. 

Anna visits Siobhan and meets the Ashleys, who are strangely the same women from 1555. They are there for a PR crisis meeting. They want to create a reel to improve her image. Back at her home, a new security system is installed and Dex’s mother is there for some reason. She asks Dex to testify for her in a lawsuit against his father. Anna notices her hair falling out and stomps on the mirror in a fit of rage. 

At the doctor’s, they find a heartbeat, and the baby is fine. The doctor explains the issues away as vanishing twin syndrome. Anna and Dex question this, but the doctor is dismissive. As they leave, Anna sees Nurse Ivy, but Dex can’t see her. 

Siobhan is having a secret affair with the director of Anna’s latest film and reminds him not to tell anyone how he got the idea for the film. Anna relents and does the reel about female bodily autonomy to improve her image. Dex has lunch with his mother, and they discuss kids and the prospect of abortion, with his mother disapproving of them having a family. 

At Talia’s house, Nicolette congratulates Anna on her pregnancy. Flowers get delivered with a creepy note that says, “You can’t trust any of them.” Anna can’t sleep at night and gets up to find a snack. She finds the photo of Dex with his dead wife, but imagines it’s Sonia. Then she eats a jar of pickles and ice cream, then ventures into the basement, but can’t open the door. She falls and hits her head, and when she wakes up, she approaches the bassinette and puts the dead animal in it. Her gums begin to bleed as she listens to the Golden Globe nomination announcement. It turns out she’s been nominated, and she starts eating the dead animal.

The Episode Review

This series just gets weirder with each episode, and this week sees it go a bit over the top with the weirdness, leading up to the mid-season finale next week.

There’s a bizarre opening to the episode that sees events take place in England in 1555, with the relevance of this yet to be explained. The audience is forced to go along with it, with a payoff teased for later in the series. It’s still an entertaining watch, but tough to see where everything is heading.