American Pie Episode 1

[Carlito Roby]

Theplot concerns Buffy, who during her first year at college, feels down about her mother being out of town for Thanksgiving and decides to have a Friendsgiving with the rest of the Scooby Gang, her partners in weekly monster sleuthing and slaying. During the episode, one of these friends, Xander, who is part of a construction crew building a new college cultural center, accidentally discovers a buried Spanish mission, where the warrior spirit of the Chumash tribe, Hus, is trapped. Said warrior spirit then escapes to, of course, rampage and murder.

Espenson has said she actually researched the hypothetical area of California where Sunnydale was located to figure out which tribe should do the avenging, lending some authenticity to the episode as well. The Chumash are still around in the form of the Santa Ynez Band of the Chumash Indians, who have been federally recognized since 1901. While they are a small tribe now, their territory historically ranged from Malibu to Santa Barbara and Montecito.

In the episode, Anna (Emma Roberts), an actress on the verge of her big break, is attempting to have a child with her husband, Dex (Matt Czuchry). The couple is having fertility issues and is about to undergo their third round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) administered by a very sketchy doctor. As her IVF treatment starts to work, Anna begins to suspect she is being stalked and struggles to balance her career and relationships with increasingly invasive visions of her stalker. Also, spiders start coming out of her hair, so things are rapidly devolving for her into the next episode.

Taken together, this episode begins to explore how, the more judgment women receive, even from other women, the more vulnerable they feel. As Anna grapples with her infertility, her relationships and interactions with others only exacerbate her fears of deficiency as a woman. The episode really calls into question whether we, as a society, know what it means to support women.

Our episode begins with an American student in London. Having tasted the aromatic, creamy flesh of an imported Alphonso mango at the luxury department store, Harrods, journalist Myles Karp resolved to never again settle for the insipid supermarket specimens of his American youth. But Indian mangoes, including the Alphonso, were simply not available in the U.S.: for years, it was forbidden to bring them into the country for quarantine reasons. To help us understand what we were missing, we called mango obsessives Sohail Hashmi and Rhitu Chatterjee, who thrilled us with tales of all-day mango orgies in the orchards outside Delhi and exquisite dishes that showcase each variety's unique charms.

Myles Karp is a journalist on the fruit beat. Earlier this year, he wrote about the Alphonso ban and its repeal for Munchies: "We Were Promised the World's Most Delicious Mangoes. They Never Came." The dentist Bhaskar Savani, who successfully lobbied to be able to import Indian mangoes to the U.S., sells Alphonsos and more online at SavaniFarms.com; other importers include Mangozz.

Sohail Hashmi is a documentary filmmaker and history buff who leads heritage walks in Delhi, as well as annual mango orgies in the orchards outside the city. (The mango orgy is a fundraiser for a school founded by Zahoor Siddiqui and Syeda Nishat, teachers from the mango mecca of Rataul.)

Noris Ledesma is curator of tropical fruit at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida. She collects mango species (and other fruits) from around the world for the Garden and is trying to create the perfect mango; she tweets about her mango adventures at @Floridamangos. Every July, Ledesma organizes a Mango Festival at the Fairchild, at which you can taste some of the hundreds of varieties grown at the garden, and much more besides. You can hear our entire episode on David Fairchild, for whom the garden is named, here.

David Kuhn is a molecular biologist and Barbara (Barbie) Freeman is a research technician at the USDA Subtropical Horticulture Research facility in Miami, Florida. Kuhn's paper, "Genetic map of mango: a tool for mango breeding," was published in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2017. The new and improved mango that they've bred will be called the Tondo.

On Oct. 11, "American Horror Story: Delicate" continued with Episode Four, "Vanishing Twin." The episode was a victim to the directionless feel of "Delicate," but it was the best installment in the series so far.

"Vanishing Twin" opens with a scene set in 1555 at the mansion where Mary, Queen of Scots, has just given birth. The staff there hears her screaming and crying behind a closed door, and Mary refuses to let anyone in. When her sister, Elizabeth I, arrives, she goes in to see what the problem is. Mary is lying in a blood-soaked bed, clutching her newborn and sobbing.

Now, viewers may wonder, "What does this have to do with Anna and her miscarriage and the other main plotlines?" The answer is somewhat explained later in the episode, but I still didn't like how they added a fantasy horror element to an already crowded plot. However, I did appreciate the change of setting and the fun historical tie-ins that connect to what really happened.

The present-day leaves off where the last episode ended. Anna is still enchantedly staring at the dead raccoon in the yard and begins inexplicably bleeding from her mouth. Dex calls her back inside, breaking her trance, but she takes an extra minute to wrap the raccoon in a blanket gingerly. Anna lovingly carries the rotting, bleeding animal into the house. Nicolette confronts her and subsequently snaps at her. Anna then walks calmly to the basement and places the raccoon in a blanket-covered bassinet in an attempt to act as its mother.

This scene was one of my favorites in the season so far. For the first time in the last four episodes, I finally felt scared and very creeped out. Until this point, every scene meant to scare the audience fell flat. This scene, with Anna so obviously on the way to insanity after her miscarriage, actually gave watchers the chills, and you both sympathize with her situation and feel very grossed out.

She eventually abandons her baby for a meeting with Siobhan back in the city. As Siobhan is talking about Anna's need to save her image after the vomit incident from Episode Two, she introduces Anna to her crisis PR experts, the Ashleys. The Ashleys have the great idea to make Anna star in a feminist "reel" that will save her dwindling award hopes. While Anna initially seems skeptical, she ultimately trusts Siobhan and the Ashleys.

The "reel" is phenomenal. It's meant to be very on-the-nose but incredibly funny. It feels like a women's empowerment speech written by a man, which is exactly the vibe the writers were going for. "It's my body. I'll vomit if I need to," Anna said, directly into the camera, referencing her vomiting at the Gotham Awards, and that might be one of the funniest lines in the season so far.

The meeting is where the audience sees why the scene at the beginning is important. The Ashleys are played by Lourd and Grossman, implying that they are the same woman who cursed Elizabeth and stole Mary's child. Since they are now in control of Anna that obviously adds some serious tension to the future of her character.

While Anna is still in the city, she convinces Dex to take her to one more visit with Dr. Hill because she believes she's still pregnant. Even though you might think she isn't, since she just had a miscarriage, Hill's ultrasound reveals she is miraculously still pregnant. Hill claims it is likely "Vanishing Twin Syndrome," a medical condition where one embryo dies while another one survives.

The now much happier couple returns to their apartment in New York, and there they find that the doorman has let Dex's mother, Virginia, in. Her visit is completely unannounced, and Dex seems rather unhappy with the intrusion. Additionally, Virginia is only there to sue her ex-husband, Dex's dad. According to her therapist, he abused her with Satanic rituals and she repressed the memories in her subconscious.

At this point in the episode, it lost me. Why would they add another plot line into the show when we are almost halfway through? How does this connect to the already-packed plot? "Delicate" was starting to make some sense, but the creators slapped on a half-baked idea into the last half of the episode, which feels unnecessary from a viewer's perspective. The creators might be trying to suggest that Dex is satanically abusing Anna, and that's why she's still hearing the whispers from the basement of Thalia's house, but it feels like a silly idea and a little bit too obvious.

Anna returns to the basement, following whispers and her cravings. She sees her raccoon that she picked up at the beginning of the episode, further into its state of decay. As she caresses its face, she tenderly picks it up from the bassinet and bites into it. The camera zooms in on her mouth as she continues to rip away at its flesh, and those are the last images left with the audience at the end of Episode Four.

This was a marker of significant improvement in this season. While there were some obvious setbacks, it is a step up from the previous episodes. I feel a lot less confused in a bad way and a lot more confused in a good way, which is how all "American Horror Story" seasons should be.

During the Cold War years, Asian Americans are simultaneously heralded as a Model Minority, and targeted as the perpetual foreigner. It is also a time of bold ambition, as Asian Americans aspire for the first time to national political office and a coming culture-quake simmers beneath the surface.

At the turn of the new millennium, the national conversation turns to immigration, race, and economic disparity. As the U.S becomes more diverse, yet more divided, a new generation of Asian Americans tackle the question, how do we as a nation move forward together?

ASIAN AMERICANS is a production of WETA Washington, DC and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) for PBS, in association with the Independent Television Service (ITVS), Flash Cuts and Tajima-Pea Productions. The series executive producers are Jeff Bieber for WETA; Stephen Gong and Donald Young for CAAM; Sally Jo Fifer for ITVS; and Jean Tsien. The series producer is Renee Tajima-Pea. The producer for Flash Cuts is Eurie Chung. The episode producers are S. Leo Chiang, Geeta Gandbhir and Grace Lee. The consulting producer is Mark Jonathan Harris.

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