This transcendent moment from last night's American Horror Story: Asylum features Jessica Lange's defrocked nun character Judy launching into a musical hallucination in which she performs Shirley Ellis' "The Name Game" after undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. This is the height of absurdity for a show that is positively obsessed with the concept of identity and the terrors of unknowing.

Last night's American Horror Story went where even 1984's notorious, depraved and once-protested Santa slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night wouldn't: It featured a man in a Santa costume assaulting a nun, punching and whipping her in the ultimate S&M roleplay of secular and religious reasons for the season. The full scene, in which Deadwood's Ian McShane plays a maniac exacting his revenge to Jessica Lange's Sister Jude for keeping him in solitary confinement, is above. Usually American Horror Story, which is so fucking great and trashy this season, merely goes over the top: here it goes over the top and through the chimney.