'They're friends in the end of Coven': the new American Horror Story clip put Fiona and Marie back in Hell together

It runs under a minute and does almost nothing, which is why people are watching it on a loop. Fiona opens with a bonjour and a joke: she would have said welcome back, except Marie did not stay away long enough for it to count. Marie says she has never seen such a sight down here, and that Fiona's hair still looks lifeless. Fiona offers to burn the weaves and the turban off her head with a flick of the wrist. That is the whole scene.

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Within an hour the comments had split into two camps that are both, technically, right. One half remembers the end of Coven, where Fiona and Marie stop trying to kill each other long enough to take down a mutual enemy, and reads the clip as two old colleagues picking up a habit. The other half points at the eighty-odd years of mutual sabotage that came first.

"They're friends in the end of Coven." — "They're FRENEMIES 4 life. A hundred years of hatred doesn't just go away overnight."

The detail that settles at least the geography: both of them really are in Hell, and Coven said so on the way out. Fiona's eternity is a fishing shack with the Axeman, a plate of catfish and a man who will never let her leave the table. Marie's is a room where Papa Legba hands her a baby once a year and makes her do the thing she used to pay him with. Two custom-built afterlives — and the new scene has them running into each other in the corridor.

Lange named four of her characters and refused to name the fifth

She was on Good Morning America on Tuesday and spent most of the segment being pleasantly unhelpful. She confirmed four returning roles and then dangled a fifth without a hint attached.

"There is a fifth character, but I won't say who that is, and I'd be curious if anybody can figure it out."

The four she did confirm are the ones you would guess, and one of them gets far more screen time than the rest. Constance Langdon was Ryan Murphy's favourite from the first season on, so she is threaded through most of the thirteen episodes. Lange's own favourite is Elsa Mars, which she has never been shy about.

• Constance Langdon — Murder House, and the one carrying the most weight this season
• Sister Jude Martin — Asylum
• Fiona Goode — Coven, and the face of the clip everyone is arguing about
• Elsa Mars — Freak Show, her personal pick

She agreed to come back on one condition, and it involves a microphone

Lange sings this season. She will not say as whom. "I have to beg, borrow and plead to get anybody to let me sing," she told GMA — which is a slightly generous account of the negotiation, because Murphy told Vogue that her terms were simpler than that: she was in as long as she got a musical number.

There is precedent, and it is one of the strangest things the show has ever done. Freak Show put Elsa Mars in a 1952 carnival tent performing David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" to an audience that could not possibly have heard it yet, and later handed her Lana Del Rey's "Gods & Monsters". Nobody explained it. Nobody needed to.

The prize math is worth a look while she is holding a microphone. Two Oscars for Tootsie and Blue Sky, three Emmys including two for this exact show, a Tony in 2016 for Long Day's Journey into Night — and a conspicuous gap where a Grammy would go. She has said she will have to find that one a different way.

What the season actually looks like

Thirteen episodes, half an hour each, which is a format this franchise has never used. FX drops the premiere on Thursday 24 September at 9 p.m. ET with the next day on Hulu, then runs three a week for two weeks before settling into two, and the finale lands on 29 October. Sarah Paulson is credited with six or seven roles depending on which count you trust, Evan Peters with five.

Which makes the Fiona and Marie scene a fairly small piece of a very crowded season — and the one that the fandom has chosen to litigate first. Eighty years of grudge, one shared afterlife, and a conversation that opens with an insult about hair.

Previously we wrote: Elizabeth Holmes invited the cameras in 34 days before prison — Nathan Fielder's A24 film is at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes