Ryan Murphy promises the big Grotesquerie reveal is just the first of many twists: 'We're not done'

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Grotesquerie episode 7.

Who is the Grotesquerie killer? This is the question that has plagued Det. Lois Tryon (Niecy Nash-Betts) and her unlikely partner, nun-journalist Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), on the FX series of the same name. The presence of Travis Kelce — playing Eddie Laclan, a nurse at the hospital housing Lois' comatose husband Marshall (Courtney B. Vance) — quickly rose to the top of the fan theories. Others thought it was Nurse Redd (Lesley Manville), who attends to Marshall's needs in often very inappropriate ways. "I like also that some people think it's Niecy," co-creator and writer Ryan Murphy remarks to Entertainment Weekly.

The answer, as is the case in most of Murphy's work, isn't so straightforward.

At the end of episode 6, Lois is accosted by a masked man wielding a knife. She's able to subdue and identify him, though the audience doesn't get to see his face. We still don't see his face when episode 7 picks the story back up, but we hear from others that Father Charlie Mayhew (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), the hot priest who flagellates himself and moonlights as a Catholic spinning instructor, is the disturbed individual. As the hour progresses, Lois then finds more evidence that leads her to Father Charlie's secret accomplice, Sister Megan herself, who attacks Lois and nearly kills her in a close-cornered knife fight in the kitchen. And there may be even more to all of that than perceived. (More on that later.)

When it seemed like we were done with the twists, Grotesquerie throws viewers another curveball. All of this isn't real. It's all playing out inside Lois' head. She's actually the one lying on a hospital bed in a coma. Murphy points to the first shot we see on Grotesquerie episode 1, some kind of hanging fabric catching fire. "That is a burning hospital curtain. That's what all of that gauze is," he reveals. "That's [Lois] behind the hospital curtain. In each episode, I have between 10, 15, 20 Easter eggs that give you clues to the fact that she's in the coma. We did a whole sound pass. A lot of car noises were replaced with hospital noises, for example."

Lois subconsciously cast those in her own life as characters in this Grotesquerie reality. The real Lois, before entering a coma, cheated on her husband with her daughter Merritt's (Raven Goodwin) partner (Kelce), while Marshall had an affair of his own with a woman with an online OnlyFans-esque livestream under the handle "Cherry Redd" (Manville). Diamond plays the current police chief, who was Lois' old partner on the force, and Chavez plays Dr. Charlie Mayhew, whose advice led Marshall to pull his wife off life support. Once he does, Lois surprises everyone by waking from her coma in a very Wizard of Oz-esque moment of "you were there and you were there and you were there." Murphy says that 1939 classic was a particular pop culture touchstone that inspired him and his writing partners Jon Robin Baitz (Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans) and Joe Baken (Doctor Odyssey).

"I have a 4-year-old and his favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz," Murphy says. "Around a year-and-a-half ago when he was 2 and a half, he and I would always watch The Wizard of Oz. He always wanted two things: the witch melting and the scene when [Dorothy] wakes up. So that was always in my mind when Robbie, Joe, and I were writing. The other things that were in my mind were this [director] Nick Roeg movie called Don't Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, and also this Michael Douglas-Geneviève Bujold movie called Coma. Those were the three things that I was always looking at."

This reveal changes the show moving forward and it's only just the beginning. Murphy declines to speak too much about the Father Charlie and Sister Megan development because, as he says, "We're not done with Grotesquerie," now using the word to refer to this dark reality inside Lois' mind.

"There's a thing that's coming back. [Episode] 7 has a twist, 8 has a twist, 9 has a twist, and 10 has a twist. They're all this sort of cool world building," Murphy continues. "I don't want to give too much away. I actually will tell you, I'm just really shocked that this has not gotten out. I had some people sign the NDAs and then at a certain point I was like, 'You know what? Go with God.' Every day I would wake up, I would be filled with dread because I thought, Is this the day somebody is going to reveal the secret?"

The coma twist, he does note, was always "baked in the cake" of the original concept that started the whole show. He wanted to write something for himself, particularly about how he was feeling in the world given all the political and cultural anxieties. He wanted to capture that feeling of being trapped in a grotesque reality you couldn't wake from. "I was very adamant that it all come out before the election," Murphy says, referring to November's big vote between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. "The last episode airs on Oct. 30. That's ultimately what I've been feeling and that's what I wanted to write about."

Murphy, Baitz, and Baken never conceived Grotesquerie as a season of American Horror Story, either, though press and fans of the Murphy-verse commented how this series fills the Horror Story void left open this fall season.

"I'm developing right now several versions of American Horror Story, as I always have," Murphy comments. "This was never that. This ultimately becomes a whodunnit, and Horror Story is not a whodunnit. We never pitched it as that. Grotesquerie is a drama series with that cast returning, playing those parts very different. But I understand why people were confused because until you see this twist, you would not have understood that."

Grotesquerie continues to air weekly on FX every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET/PT, with a streaming debut the next day on Hulu.