tek's rating: pending

American Horror Story: Coven (season three; 13 episodes)
A.V. Club; FX; IMDb; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; Hulu; Vudu

This aired in 2013-14, and is set mostly in 2013. I started watching the season on Amazon in 2019, but didn't get through more than a few episodes. Now I'm watching the whole season on Hulu in 2023, and I'll update this page as I go along.

In 1834, Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), a fictionalized version of a real historical figure, tortures her slaves and uses their blood as a beauty treatment. She punishes one slave named Bastien for having sex with one of her daughters, putting a bull's head over his head so he resembles the Minotaur. In 2013, Zoe Benson (Taissa Farmiga) has sex with her boyfriend, and he dies. Thereafter she is informed by her mother that she's a witch, and sent to a boarding school for girls like her in New Orleans, called Miss Robichaux's Academy, which is run by a witch named Cordelia Foxx (Sarah Paulson). She meets three other girls there named Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts), Nan (Jamie Brewer), and Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe). Madison is a movie star, and Nan is a telepath. At the academy, Zoe learns that in each generation there is one witch called the Supreme, who has many magical talents. She also learns of a witch named Misty Day (Lily Rabe), who was recently burned at the stake. One night, Madison takes Zoe to a party where there is a group of frat boys who end up drugging and gang raping Madison. They are eventually stopped by a fellow frat guy named Kyle Spencer (Evan Peters), with whom Zoe had been talking earlier. When the frat guys leave the party, Madison uses telekinesis to flip their bus, killing most of them, including Kyle. Zoe later kills another one of them in the hospital. And the current Supreme, Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange), comes to the academy to "help" her daughter, Cordelia, teach the girls, though Cordelia is far from happy about this. In the past, a fictionalized version of historical figure Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) drugs and buries Madame LaLaurie for having tortured her lover, Bastien. In the present, Fiona digs her up, finding her still alive after all these years. And all that is just the first episode.

In the second episode, Madison takes Zoe to the morgue, to stitch together some body parts including Kyle's head. (Who all the other parts belonged to was of little importance.) They try to resurrect Kyle, but the spell seems to fail, and Madison leaves. Kyle comes back to life, of a sort (he doesn't seem to have his mind intact), and Zoe... well, she meets Misty, who had come back to life herself, and forms a bond with Zoe. She promises to look after Kyle while Zoe returns to the academy. Meanwhile, Fiona tracks down Marie, wanting to learn the secret of immortality (with which she had cursed LaLaurie). Cordelia and her husband, Hank, try to conceive a child, at first relying on a doctor's help. But when that turns out to be a bust, they try magic.


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