(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wednesday’s “American Horror Story: Double Feature,” which was the premiere of Part 2, “Death Valley.”)
“American Horror Story: Double Feature” kicked off the “double” part of its feature story this week with the shift to Part 2, “Death Valley,” following last week’s finale of “Red Tide.” With this change brought a new cast of characters and a different horrifying problem to be dealt with in the desert after that whole black-pill-vampire-thing in Cape Cod: alien abductions that lead to mysterious pregnancies.
“When we got the first script and that was the ending, I was very confused as to how,” Kaia Gerber, who plays college student Kendall on “Death Valley,” a young woman who goes with her three friends, Cal (Nico Greetham), Troy (Isaac Cole Powell) and Jamie (Rachel Hilson), on a camping trip which ends in a close encounter with what she believes to be aliens — and then the next day they are all somehow pregnant, a fact they all naturally believe to be totally impossible.
Gerber continued: “And I remember going to some people on set and just asking the logistics and also how it happened. And everyone was kind of like, ‘Just don’t ask’ (laughs). Because I was very curious, and also my scientific brain and Kendall’s scientific brain were, like, well, how did this happen?? And everyone said, ‘Don’t ask.’ So I actually don’t know how. But I will say it was very hard to say, all four of us are pregnant, with a straight face, just knowing the boys. It was a very fun scene to film.”
While Kendall’s story takes place in the technicolor present day and the second half of this “AHS: Double Feature” episode, the first portion of the “Death Valley” hour is set in the black-and-white 1950s, where President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Neal McDonough) is dealing with an alien problem of his own.
“It’s definitely all connected,” Gerber said of the two-timeline story. “And I really like how they deal with time. I love that they did the first half in black and white. We got the whole script. So I would read the first half, and the whole time I was trying to figure out how they connected. And I think it ties together in a really cool way. But that’s all I can say.”
“American Horror Story: Double Feature” airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on FX.