That night, Alma sleeps next to Kit, who can't seem to sleep at all. He gets up and heads to the living room, where Grace is sitting on the floor, drawing more aliens. They talk in scriptwriter talk about how she never sleeps, but she thinks she's slept for most of her life and she doesn't want to waste another minute, and also love means never having to say you're sorry. She turns to face Kit and tells him she loves him and Alma and their miracle babies. She's not rueful, but rather openly hopeful and optimistic, happy in the way that people who honestly think they are blessed are happy. Still, she says, she won't live in fear, not like Alma. "The future is coming," she says, "we cannot hide from it. We have to engage with it. We have to embrace it." That embrace comes in the form of an axe to the back of Grace's head, courtesy of Alma. She throws another hack in, just in case. Kit throws her to the ground, screaming, "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE?" Alma yelps that Grace was going to call the aliens back for their children. She couldn't let that happen. Then she just starts repeating, "We have to hide, we have to hide," over and over like a crazy person. Again, this show gets crazier and crazier, but its central message -- simple (or simplistic) as it is -- remains the same: institutional repression leads to madness and violence and carnage. Every time. Kit, splattered with blood, goes to be with Grace as she bleeds out. Alma retreats into a corner. He kisses her head and then, with a familiar sickening crack, he pulls out the axe. We're then treated to a repeat of the cold open, this time with Alma visible off in the corner. Kit doesn't know what to do. He calls to the babies (Thomas, I think) that he'll be right there. The tear falls down his cheek. His world has come apart. He still looks good in the underpants, though.

After the break, we're at Briarcliff. It's 1968 and despite the fact that it's Briarcliff and Judy and Pepper are unjustifiably stuck there among the drooling masses, things are actually going pretty well. Or maybe I just put more stock into board games than most people. Jude and Pepper and some of the loons are playing some bastardized version of Candy Land that involves dice and playing cards in addition to the familiar color-block cards that are traditional to the game. "Gumdrop Mountain is mine, chickens," Judy declares, in a line that instantly makes the shortlist for best of the season honors. Across the room, the poor reception on the TV is making it hard to follow President Johnson as he announces the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Judy and the card sharks are more interested in the goings-on in the Peppermint Forest. I guess social justice takes a back seat when you've been effectively removed from society. One of the crazies, Percy, starts pounding on the TV and Jude hollers at him to knock it off. She observes to Pepper that his lithium levels are too high and "Dr. Miller" should be informed. Pepper nods like she's making a note of it for later. So I guess Judy and Pepper are, quite literally, the inmates running the asylum. Monsignor Howard stops by to ruin everyone's good time, and despite Judy's best efforts to ignore him (including passive-aggressively expositing that she was re-named "Betty Drake" after the Monsignor faked her death), he asks to speak to her privately. He's got news: he's leaving Briarcliff. He's off to become Cardinal of New York, which pretty much fits with the Church's position of letting employees ascend through scandal. Jude offers her dark congratulations and lights up a cigarette. He also informs her that the Church has donated Briarcliff to the state, which will now use it as an overflow facility. Nothing ominous about that! Finally, the Monsignor has decided to leave Briarcliff with a clear conscience, which means he's arranging to have Judy released. "The cruelty ends here," he says, both going farther than I ever expected in acknowledging his own role in perpetuating cruelty and yet angering my all the more by having the nerve to look beatific about it. "The cruelest thing of all, Timothy," Jude says with a shaky voice, "is false hope." But he promises her, pledges to "make a believer" out of her.