"Tonight, we start over."
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
As we creep closer toward the end of this Cult season we must ask ourselves, almost constantly: How much is Kai in control?
When Kai was trying to have a "messiah baby" last week with his sister using that weird made-up sex ritual, it felt like it was a test for Winter. And while Kai, most of the time, has a clear-headed nature and acute self-awareness, there are also times when he seems to be going totally mad. His tears at the end of "Drink the Kool-Aid," when he was confronted with the lie that he was Oz's dad, felt genuine - as if he really did believe in the "messiah baby" (that he'd seemingly made up in last week's episode). So is Kai just full of s*** at all times or is he actually succumbing to his own madness and starting to buy into the lies he's spreading?
Remember, we still haven't reached the payoff point for his collusion with Bebe back in the Valerie Solanas episode. That was the moment when it seemed like he wanted to the women to feel marginalized and betrayed because there was a larger plan brewing. Nothing's come of that so far - he just keeps terrorizing them. The actual Kool-Aid scene this week (the Jim Jones/People's Temple flashback notwithstanding) felt off simply because we're still in the dark with regards to Kai's plan for the women.
Kai invited everyone to a meeting, guys and gals, to see who'd chicken out with a fake suicide test. But the women all drank the "poison" down under protest - and while crying. How did that prove them worthy when everyone else did it with gusto? They only did it because they knew they'd die if they didn't. Kai had just shot someone dead. So the whole thing not only felt made up, but also fake. As in, it wasn't even a real test. He wasn't testing them, just scaring them.
Plus, it looked like Beverly whispered something to the rest of them when she turned her head right before drinking. She probably knew there was no poison in it. As did we. "Drink the Kool-Aid" faltered for the most part because A: everything was bogged and dragged down under the shadow of us knowing that we're not seeing Kai's full plan, and B: things played out a bit too predictably (another possible indicator that everything was going to Kai's plan). It was easy for us, and the women, to know that Kai would never poison himself. It was also easy to spot Ally's poisoning of Ivy head of time. Then that, in turn, made it easy to know that Ally wouldn't poison Kai.
On top of this, the last three episodes have all featured, like clockwork, a main cast member getting betrayed and killed - first Harrison, then Dr. Vincent, and now Ivy. This trend has worked to create a bland blueprint for the back half of the season that I hope gets flipped a bit for the upcoming final two episodes.
Watching Evan Peters playing more flashback roles (this time actual cult leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite) was fun, though again it's all still very muddled as to whether or not Kai believes the crazy stuff he preaches or if he's just playing the role of a cult leader - complete with random acts of lunacy.
The most straightforward thing about this chapter was Ally, who's done a total 180 and taken the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" credo to the next level. You can't really blame her, given all she's been through. Will Kai be wise to her manipulations or will she turn out to be the ultimate cult leader by the end of this? I'm all for a revenge plot, but there's almost too much time before the end for Ally's plan to work, if that makes sense. With two full episodes left, and the possibility of Kai's cult have an extra unseen layer, there's plenty of room for her to fail.
The Verdict
Ally tried to take control and get revenge this week in "Drink the Kool-Aid," though the curse of Cult is that you watch everything through narrowed eyes, always expecting twists upon the story to be revealed in the next episode. Can Kai ever be taken at face value or will we always have to wait for a one of those "Here's what's really going on" episodes? Also, how is Kai able to convince people to follow him by telling them about actual real-life crazy people tricking vulnerable people?
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