"It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice"
Airdate: October 20, 2019
In 1921, a young boy watches a silent film on Bass Reeves just as the Tulsa riots are breaking out. He is rescued by his parents and sent away from the city. Later on, he wakes to find the couple who had taken him on dead, a crying infant in the rubble, and Tulsa in flames.
In 2019, the police force of Tulsa has started wearing masks to protect themselves from the Seventh Kavalry, a white supremacist terrorist organization, who broke into the homes of police officers and murdered them during an infamous event since called the "White Night". An officer is murdered by a man driving a lettuce truck and wearing a Rorschach mask, the first attack by the Kavalry on Tulsa since the White Night. Angela Abar, a baker who is secretly the cop codenamed Sister Night and a White Night survivor, investigates the murder alongside the Chief, Judd Crawford. Angela arrives at a predominantly white-occupied slum named Nixonville where she arrests a trailer occupant and brings him in for questioning. When that proves ineffective, she beats him up until he reveals the location of a Kavalry hideout. The police go to check it out but the Kavalry members escape.
After dinner with the Abars that night, Judd gets a call saying that the officer has woken up. However, he is ambushed by a Kavalry member. Later, Angela finds his body strung up by a tree, next to the boy from the prologue, now an elderly, wheelchair-bound man.
Elsewhere, a whimsical lord in a remote estate is greeted by his loyal maid and butler. He announces the completion of a new play which the two of them will perform.
Tropes:
- Action-Hogging Opening: This episode has a Cop Killer Manhunt plot with a climax involving a massive shootout and a prologue showing a massacre that blows up entire city blocks. While the rest of the series is not lacking in violence, it won't get to this level again for some time.
- Cyanide Pill: The suspect takes one when the police catch him.
- Distant Prologue: The episode opens during the 1921 Tulsa riots before jumping ahead to 2019.
- Shout-Out:
- An all-black production of Oklahoma! is seen; the episode itself is Titled After the Song "Pore Jud is Daid".
- The title of American Hero Story is a pretty clear homage to what it's spoofing. Even better, Ryan Murphy actually produces it In-Universe!
- Taught to Hate: After Angela gives a presentation to her adoptive son Topher's class about her bakery, one of them asks if she bought the place with her "Redfordations"—a derogatory nickname for "reparations" to American blacks for pogroms by white supremacists, combining the word with the surname of President Robert Redford who passed them into law—prompting Topher to tackle the other kid out of his chair. On the drive home, Topher calls the other kid a racist, and Angela replies, "He's not a racist. He's well on his way, though."
- Titled After the Song: Specifically, after a line from Oklahoma!'s "Pore Jud is Daid", which appropriately plays as the camera pans over Judd's dead body.
