The AHS: Apocalypse finale ended with a band and a disturbing preview of the future, but was the series overall was a disaster?
The opening sequence of the AHS: Apocalypse finale plays out exactly how I imagine meeting notes go for the show. Billy Eichner’s character throws an order from the boss out to Evan Peters’ third, or maybe it’s fourth, character who starts to question the motives, but decides it’s not worth thinking about. Just get it in there and we’ll see how it all plays out.
AHS plays out like this every single season. Throw everything at the audience and see what sticks. This year, however, the highly-anticipated crossover event played even looser with some elements than in past seasons.
It felt very much like a 24-hour play. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, writers come together with actors to create a play in 24 hours. They must write, direct, rehearse, and get the production ready for an audience within that time frame. The resulting showcases are entertaining and plot holes are over-looked, as actors do what they can with what they are given.
I’d argue that this season, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck gave us their AHS: Apocalypse 24-hour play with an FX budget. They had an established group of characters and actors willing to reprise roles and step into sketches of other characters. Every episode felt like something dreamed up on a whim, with the finale trying to desperately pull all the loose ends back together.
Sarah Paulson’s characters never felt any different from Cordelia. Madison delivered so many F-bombs that it made her fleeting moments of sincerity fell flat. All the character work done in the original run of Coven was reduced to a caricature in Apocalypse. Peters was fun to watch, Frances Conroy carried Myrtle Snow seamlessly from season to season, and there are no words to describe what Kathy Bates was hired to do this season.
So many of the episodes pre-finale are a blur of bad wigs, Satan worship, the Illuminati, and a less than competent Antichrist working under the guidance of two people who just want to watch the world burn.
That left the finale with the task to get viewers back to real-time in the year after the apocalypse as Michael reaches the height of his power and the witches take their final stand against him.
In short, Angela Bassett appears, Cordelia sacrifices herself to give Mallory the amount of power necessary to travel back in time to stop the Antichrist, and yet the audience discovers that the end of the world is inevitable.
’AHS: Apocalypse’ Finale Best Moments
- One final Jessica Lange performance. Hail the queen of the up-do yelling at an ungrateful child and then leaving him to die in the street instead of on the property. It beautifully contrasted her holding Addie who died by a similar fate, unable to get her to the house alive. Her whispering, “Go to hell,” was one hell of a send off. You are a gem, dearest Jessica.
- Billy Eichner and Evan Peters doing whatever they were doing in those wigs. Michael must pay everyone who works under him to have bad hair. It’s only fair that the Antichrist not be upstaged should a scene require a dramatic hair toss.
- I feel as though Cody Fern was sent to save this season from drowning in familiarity. And after watching his hilarious floundering early Antichrist moments in the penultimate episode, Michael achieves the most disturbing moment of his time on television. Who else could go toe-to-toe with Angela Bassett (besides Lange) and walk away eating her heart? Incredible. And absolutely disturbing.
- If Cody Fern is the villain this show needed, then Billie Lourde is the hero it deserves. The duo provided the perfect balance of good and evil against the rest of the set piece. While the buzz surrounded the return of beloved characters from past seasons, the surprise of the season came from these two.
- Where the show found ways to benefit from reversing the timeline, I at first felt as if it shot itself in the foot for opting to flash forward. But revealing the new Antichrist arises from the two people who were originally hand-selected by Michael — Timothy and Emily. Honestly, this ended up being a nice touch even if it created more questions than answers about why they were chosen in the first place. There was even a callback to Timothy’s DNA test. Everything is cyclical on this show.
I gave up on AHS delivering a satisfying full season years ago. And as the apple poisoning scene took place this season, I almost quit again. It crossed a line for me as shock for shock-value’s sake. But that is the brand that AHS has built for itself — build to a point where the viewer is so turned off then give them what they want.
In this case it was the series of episodes that set up a ton of questions about Outposts, computers that work in the nuclear winter, and never fully unpacking why Michael cared at all about the particular group of people he gathered there.
But before we could ask too many questions, the return of three witches set the show off in a new direction.
In the end, it wasn’t a complete wash of a season, but a fun experiment that never needs to happen again.
What did you think of the AHS: Apocalypse season finale?