Ryan Murphy has six shows on air right now, but only one of them features Kansas City Chiefs tight end and Mr. Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce. Grotesquerie, which is basically the second American Horror Story replacement for the year (American Horror Stories is still a thing!), is about Lois (Niecy Nash), a troubled detective solving a spree of particularly grotesque and biblically tinged murders, who partners with Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), a nun who’s also an investigative journalist and true-crime aficionado.
How does Travis Kelce factor into this? Great question! I’m still trying to figure that out myself.
[Ed. note: This post contains light spoilers for Grotesquerie through the sixth episode.]
Kelce appears in the third episode as Eddie, an orderly at the tiny town hospital. He’s dressed in all white and he sits next to Lois in a beautiful garden, all illuminated by warm sunlight. It’s a far cry from the dark and gritty murder scenes, and also from the eerie liminal space of the hospital. They share some flirty banter and Eddie urges her not to drink and drive.
She doesn’t listen to him, though, and ends up in a car accident. When she wakes up in the hospital, Eddie is there, and after a brief scolding by Lois’ superior, the two resume their flirty back-and-forth.
It’s funny because no one else seems to realize that Eddie is in the hospital or even in her room. I had a theory that he might be some sort of alcohol-induced hallucination, or maybe even a saint or guardian angel considering all of the religious motifs in this show and the fact he repeatedly tries to get her to stop drinking. No one else directly interacted with him! I thought I was onto something.
However, my theory got a little bit undermined when Lois introduced Eddie to her daughter, and asked that he stay at her house while she drove out to the middle of the desert with Megan.
…and that’s the last we see of him!
Since then, there have been two more episodes, in which Lois very clearly returns home at least once. But her daughter and Eddie are completely MIA. Where did he go? We simply do not know. And it seems like Lois doesn’t really care, which is a little bit understandable considering how much is on her plate. (Though it is a bit weird that we don’t get any confirmation that her daughter is OK when there’s a serial killer specifically targeting Lois, but OK!) With nary an establishing shot to reveal that her daughter and Eddie are still alive, I’m still left wondering… did Eddie even exist?
Is his mysterious absence indicative of the fact that he’s some sort of benevolent spirit, guiding Lois but ultimately called away to a higher power? Or is it just that Kelce’s training schedule allowed him limited time away so they had to basically shoot all the Eddie scenes in one go and wedge them in somewhere? There’s also the fact that Eddie has a very stilted, perhaps otherworldly demeanor about him. Which could indicate that he is not of this world. Or more likely, it’s probably because while Kelce is a good football player, he’s relatively new to the world of acting.
But wait, it gets weirder! There is a tiny little nod to Eddie at the end of the sixth episode. A mysterious figure comes up behind Lois with a knife to her throat, and she starts to think about what all the important people in her life are doing: There’s a shot of her comatose husband and the creepy nurse who’s in love with him; true-crime nun recovering from her gunshot wound; and then Eddie and Lois’ daughter watching videos on her laptop, apparently still seemingly at Lois’ house even though it’s been, like, two days in canon since Lois left him there.
Is the answer to my burning question simply that Lois never told him he could leave? Is he still sitting on her couch watching funny YouTube videos?
Lois ends up shooting the dark masked figure behind her and there’s a whole big Thing™ made out of her unmasking the stranger, where it cuts to the credits before we can see who it is — could it be Eddie under that mask?! I will note, the figure was pale-skinned and notably lacking Kelce’s stubble, so it could be another dude we’ve met (like the hot priest?), or someone else entirely!
Guess we’ll see if Eddie returns next week, or if that’s the extent of Kelce footage Murphy got for the show!
New episodes of Grotesquerie premiere on FX on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. EDT, and hit Hulu the next day.
