Ryan Murphy in ‘Grotesquerie’ Twist, Teases Travis Kelce Sex Scene

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from the seventh episode of FX’s “Grotesquerie.”

Ryan Murphy recently shared that “Grotesquerie” is a personal project about finding your way through a bleak time through hope and love. It’s safe to say the FX horror drama doesn’t have much hope so far or Love.

However, everything changed on the October 16 episode – and it will. It was revealed early on that Father Charlie Mayhew (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) was in fact the killer and that Lois (Niecy Nash) had slit his throat to save herself. Then, over dinner, her daughter (Raven Goodwin) revealed that she had made it onto the reality show “Half-Ton Trauma” and was moving in with her new boyfriend, Ed (Travis Kelce). Lois gets drunk, says a lot of horrible things to both Merritt and Ed, and then sees Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), who she realized was working with Father Charlie as the killer. The two faced off in a bloody fight that included multiple stabbings and burns, and eventually Lois blew Megan’s head off.

So, what’s the twist? Well, it’s actually Marshall (Courtney B. Vance) who was having dinner with Merritt and Ed. Yes, Lois’ husband is alive and well, not on life support, and finds out his wife was having an affair with her daughter’s husband. Lois is the one who has been in a coma. In an angry response, he demands that she be taken off life support. Meanwhile, no one else has appeared as they once did: Nicholas Alexander Chavez is not a priest, but actually the person who administered the medicine to end Lois’ life; Merritt is not a reality TV wannabe, but a brilliant doctor looking for a cure for cancer. Micaela Diamond is not a nun; she is Lois’s colleague who fought for her job at the police.

The episode ends with Lois waking up while being taken off life support, somehow surviving, and realizing that all the murder and mayhem was actually a dream.

“Now she has to explain to all these people why they did these terrible things to her in her dream,” Murphy says Variety about the hope and love that arise from ‘Grotesquerie’, which he describes as ‘the most optimistic thing I have ever made.’

“What it’s really about is a person waking up from a state that was a living nightmare that we’re all living in,” he says. “So she wakes up and what she’s trying to do is fight for herself and fight for her family and fight to survive. And she realizes that the only thing that will get her through this experience is love, and that’s what I feel. That’s my worldview. It’s interesting in my work. If you look at my characters over time, they do outrageous things, they say outrageous things, they wear outrageous things. But what they are really all fighting for is to love or be loved. That’s what I’m trying to bring to the world.”

When Murphy first came up with the idea for the show, he went to FX chairman John Landgraf with an idea. “I told him, ‘I’ve never done this before, but I want to write something for myself.’ He says, ‘Well, you should.’ So I was working with my old collaborators, Joe Baken and Jon Robin Baitz, and we were just talking about what the world was like, and we just wrote the entire first season. I never thought I would show it to anyone.”

He then sent nine of the ten episodes to Landgraf, who narrates Variety that he “remained surprised by it” until the finale, noting that even now, very few people know “what the show is fundamentally about.”

“My work is based on many interests and curiosities, and I want to learn something about myself or the world when I create something,” says Murphy. “For me this felt like a real meditation on the world we live in. I wanted to write about what I’m living in right now, which is global warming, women’s reproductive freedoms, the elections, war, identity, politics, all that stuff… Once you understand this twist, if you go back and watching episode one, you’ll see that the opening shot is her hospital curtain on fire. The cherries Leslie Manville eats our blood clots. I have a list of about 100 Easter eggs. In each episode there are about 10 to 20. A car reversing will be a medical sound. It’s not a car, it’s a medical sound.”

The executive producer notes that the show will be “something different in the future” as it was a murder mystery in the first half, but still doesn’t fit into one genre.

As Lois dissects her relationships in the future, “of course there’s also a possibility of seeing a love scene between Nash and Kelce,” says Murphy.

“Niecy and Travis had a great relationship on set, because he was great and a little nervous, and she was immediately like, ‘We got you. You’re good. Come here. So she sat with him between takes, and they are such good friends, and remain good friends,” he says. “And they kind of – I don’t want to say anything to piss off the Swifties. I have to be careful!”

Murphy added, “They have great chemistry, and I think you probably notice that. You never know!”

New episodes of “Grotesquerie” air on FX Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET and will be available to stream on Hulu the next day.