It’s fitting that 1984's season finale begins with a flashforward fakeout. Though Flock of Seagulls is blaring from the car that pulls up by Camp Redwood, it’s being driven by a rideshare employe, meaning even before the blood-spattered card pointed out the show has rocketed to present day, it was clear the ’80s had been left behind. Likewise, Montana and Trevor sitting down to tell their tale to Mr. Jingles Junior was a nice final nod to the camp horror genre, one final campfire story told by a couple of ghosts. Beyond those particular structural flourishes, though, this week’s episode felt a little too neat to end a season full of so many messy murders.
It seems like the comically bloody murder (and re-murder, and extra murder) of Ramirez and Margaret were so cartoonish to balance out the otherwise, if not outright pleasant, then at least hopeful vibes from the finale. This is AHS’ shortest season yet, and the effort to tie up loose ends sometimes left things a little too clean. Donna has remained working at the asylum right by the site of a few of the worst nights of her life, for some reason. Character-wise, it’s pretty inexplicable, but it does make storytelling convenient for when a long lost son shows up at Camp Redwood looking for answers. Brooke is pretty easy to track down using the banking info from the checks she’s been sending Jingles Junior, because of course she’s alive and living the life of an Instagram influencer in Oregon (sidenote, while living an anonymous, post-death life in 1989 seems possible, how does she go through the forever tagged, uploaded and shared world of 2019 as a person that can’t be found?) That should be enough reason to let her husband put down the fillers and allow her face to reach its actual maturity, just to get the true-crime junkies off her case (because Camp Redwood would have at least three podcasts by now).
Even Margaret’s murder came off as both sudden and inevitable. It’s almost strange that it took Montana’s epiphany and subsequent organization to get the ghost mob to go after Margaret. After all, she had murdered most of them. or at the very least set their murders into motion. And as a self-serving, but not stupid psychopath, shouldn’t she have felt a little trepidation going into a place she knew was full of the ghosts of those who she had wronged?
The episode’s ending, complete with the ’80s emotional family ballad “In the Living Years” (all the pathos of “Cats in the Cradle,” but much more danceable) was so sweet, there was almost an undercurrent of panic running just beneath the surface. Was Bobby’s grandma going to kill him in a murderous rage, because as handsome as he was her Bobby never got to grow up? Were the ghosts going to learn that even though they can’t cross the property lines, if a certain vengeful spirit chucks a knife through the camp’s gate, it could lodge in the head of Jingles Junior, who was only trying to catch his breath? But it turns out Jingles and company really are at peace (so Mr. Jingles being snatched below the lake by the slimy hobbit wasn’t actually sinister, somehow? And after thirty years chilling in that peaceful afterlife, they can now come and go on the campgrounds as they please?) and the band of intergenerational campers are more or less content hooking up and finding new, creative ways to kill Ramirez and Margaret over and over again (although it isn’t clear if the unfortunate souls Montana killed before her spiritual awakening are so happy to be spending eternity with her and a bunch of other people willing to overlook her murder). All she asked of Bobby was he tell his children their ghost stories, so they aren’t forgotten. Which…is what the dead, or the about to die often say onscreen, but those are going to be some bleak, bleak camping trips.
That’s it for this year’s season of American Horror Story! And if you need any Ryan Murphy content before another season next fall, you’re in luck—he has four new projects to drop by next year.
Stray Observations
- Would anyone living in Uber driving distance really have never have heard of Camp Redwood, the sight of three mass murders?
- Even if Donna and Brooke were only in their mid-20s by ‘89, they’d be in their mid-50s by 2019. Brooke isn’t the only one who should be spilling her skincare secrets.
- Little Bobby Ritcher is not the sharpest tool for a number of reasons (why, why go back to the camp?) but up there is not realizing that going into an asylum bloody and ranting is more likely to nab you a room than a chat with management.
- Get it, Chef Bertie. Ideally get it when you’re not on Satanist watch duty, but still, get it.
- Yes, quartering Margaret and throwing her through the wood chipper must have been very cathartic for the ghosts. But when you’re dealing with some kind of unseen but very regulated magic of resurrection you should be really, really sure someone’s not going to come back from the dead on a technicality.
- Maybe all good parents are willing to sacrifice themselves for their child, but certainly, they don’t all do it. Then you end up with a lot of orphans with guilt complexes. Much like the cast of This is Us.
87 Comments
I’ve never gotten why AHS tries to make so many of its finales poignant: reconciliations, reunions, forgiveness. The finales often sideline the horror for character beats that don’t always land. (Sometimes they do. I find the final episode of Asylum incredibly moving.) I just wasn’t invested in the daddy issue stuff from what’s essentially a brand new character, though the two big group murder scenes were gory and funny.
As is so often the case, yes, it did somehow work in Asylum. But I’m with you. This reminded me of Hotel with a group of suddenly happy/nice ghosts.
I also have no idea why suddenly it seems the idea is that nobody’s murders or crimes mattered at all except for Margaret’s (OK and Bruce and Ramirez, but…) I mean, obviously, she was the worst, but does that just give everyone else redemption? I’m always happy to see Finn Whitrock, but man, this finale had zero impact. An hour after watching it, I can barely remember watching it.
An A-? Even the actual review doesn’t seem to justify an A-
My favourite is still Murder House, which did all the kumbaya family stuff but also ended on an unsettling note that left you wondering. I mostly liked this finale – everyone we cared about seemed to get what they deserved and we had fun along the way. It just could have done with just a little twist
AHS, and horror in general, is never really about the horror – not if done properly. Horror films, at their best, are always about a larger theme or social critique. AHS is definately a mixed batch, and this season was primarily about the nature of memory and the hold that the past can have on us. Granted, this season careened between craft and catastrophe more than most, but I think it landed in the right spot. Freaks and Cult, imho fwiw, got the mix right in its larger commentary (yes, I am probably in the minority here). Roanoake did a pretty good job with issues of reality and performance. When Murphy and Falchuck get it right, AHS is among the better social commentary on TV. Even in their best season’s. though, they just can’t help themselves with excesses of camp and gore.
Yea, Jingles Jr, doesn’t work for me, but I think the strongest emotional beat in the episode is when Ray saved Brooke, and couldn’t go with her.
With this season being dropped from 10 to 9 episodes, I feel like the finale was rushed. It breezed through the plot. Ramirez and Bruce were treated as an afterthought. Brooke’s big revenge promptly failed. The choice to tell the episode in flashback removed a lot of tension from the story. It also was odd that the massive concert was completely sidestepped. Not even Kajagoogoo appeared in the end, playing a ghost concert for the Camp Redwood spirits. Perhaps the budget got slashed?
I think the concert was always meant to be a deliberate fakeout.
That was how it felt. While it didn’t work plot or pacing wise, it did work for the aesthetic. A LOT of low-budget 80s slasher pics (we are talking C and D grade movies here,) had this same problem and either just…ended when the money ran out or rushed though faux resolutions like the ones we saw here. So on the one hand it absolutely worked, but on every other hand, it failed to be satisfying at all.
Right? The only thing the ending was missing was probably a freeze frame
I think you might be right, because the “abandoned” concert set looks a lot more like a “post-recent-catastrophe” set
Or perhaps Kajagoogoo were just to shy
I wish I could triple-star this comment. 😀
Or the lead just got sick of this never ending story.
Hush, hush.
This season was absolutely the best season of AHS in YEARS. Thank goodness.An emotional resonant and sappy ending. And Emma Roberts finally survived an entire season!
This was very anticlimactic.
Do the ghosts not realize they can leave on Halloween? Is Ramirez a ghost (as supported by Hotel) or a quasi-zombie perpetually resurrected by Satan? Why would Satan even bother with him in the first place?We were robbed of Billy Idol.
We were never gonna get Billy Idol.My guess is that somehow Apocalypse changed Ramirez’ death in some unknown way so that he can be a quasi-zombie since Bobby didn’t go “Uh, no Richard Ramirez died in 2013.”He
I was hoping we’d get a scene featuring Sun Kil Moon singing “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes” shoehorned in somewhere.
Really! If we could have Stevie Nicks why the hell not Billy Idol?The ghosts should also be able to leave on Easter Saturday – when Jesus “harrowed hell”.
This is an interesting point. How can Murphy et. al. borrow deeply and heavily from precisely one-half of Christianity and completely ignore the corresponding half? Did he only watch oddly edited versions of every Omen and Exorcist film?
It makes sense that the ghosts of Redwood would be mostly oblivious to the calendar year, so even if someone eventually happened to try to leave on Halloween for some reason and succeeded, it’d seem like a fluke or a lie and the rest wouldn’t be able to figure out how to replicate it. The Murder House residents could at least see Halloween going on in the neighbourhood
I like to think that Billy Idol was what ever the hell jumped out of the lake and grabbed Mr Jingles.
I believe Ramirez is an immortal zombie person, constantly brought back by Satan himself. My question? Why? Did Satan not notice him getting murdered over and over for 30 years? Why bother keeping the magic in him going if he’s just going to get murdered as soon as he’s brought back?And yeah, the lack of Idol was quite disturbing, after all that talk and build up, we got nothing :(.
I thought for sure either Donna or Brooke was gonna stab the other at Brooke’s house when they mentioned them both being the final girl when shaking hands. Also glad to see Finn in the series again, even if only for an episode. I always enjoy his parts in the show.
I don’t get why every season winds up sidelining a significant portion of the credited series regulars (Cody Fern and Gus Kenworthy) in favor of spending screen time on extra characters who only stick around for an episode or two. I get and respect that Dylan McDermott and Lily Rabe are part of the show’s history, but I don’t understand why the show felt the need to stray so far from the original story it was telling. I was moved by the tragedy of Mr. Jingles and the catharsis with his son, but the tongue-in-cheek 80’s slasher homage that we were promised fell by the wayside to another season where everyone is a killer, but it’s okay because they’re mostly just flawed and human in the end. Or they go in the wood chipper. I know, I’m taking it all too seriously, but I feel like the writing on this show has no consistency. It’s like they make it all up as they go along, adding and subtracting characters all willy-nilly, and then slap a tearjerker ending on for some last-ditch profundity. And the worst part is, no matter what, I’m compelled to watch because Ryan Murphy owns my soul. Sigh. See y’all next season.
1. Asylum2. Roanoke(tie) 3. 1984 3. Murder House5. Hotel6. Cult7. Coven8. Apocalypse9. Freak Show
How can you prefer Cult to Apocalypse?
How can you prefer Cult to any of them? I could not even finish that season.
I kinda hated Apocalypse. But at least Cult gave me the serious creeps and was a tour de force for Evan Peters, like Hotel.
Because Cult’s better, Apocalypse is just another Coven with a terrible final role for Peters.
Hotel is my least favorite. I think I like Asylum the best as it largely delivered on the promise of the setting (even if it was a bit over-stuffed). Coven had a chance to be the best but it just kept jumping all over the place
I really need to watch Asylum – it’s the only season I haven’t seen, and everyone seems to think it’s the best. Apocalypse and Freak Show are definitely the worst ones. I love Hotel – even though it’s a mess plotwise (most AHS seasons are) it’s just so stylish that it wins out. Roanoke is great, and I have a soft spot for Cult – although I can understand why not everyone likes it. I watched Murder House so long ago I’d have to go back to figure out where it ranks.
Sometime in the future, I think Cult will be seen as the best TV (and possibly film) metaphor for our current political moment.
I thought Asylum, in my opinion, jumped all over the most of all the series. Nazis, serial killers, monsters, insane asylum, AND ALIENS? Coven was much tighter, as everything was pretty clearly tied to witchcraft folklore.
I felt that Coven never had a tight focus on the main conflict. It moved from battles between clans of witches, to battle with-in clans, to battles vs. the Witch hunters to battles vs. the outside world to battles for who would be supreme. Probably not the most unfocused of seasons but if they’d have settled on one it would have been better. It always bugged me that they were in conflict with the Witch hunters for 100’s of years but managed to take them all out in 5 minutes at the start of one episode.
Hotel was weak but it had my favorite character from this series Liz Taylor and the costumes were good.
^^ This!
Ew, Roanoke is too high up there :).
Roanoke really surprised me at times and got extra points for the mid-season switcheroo.
I will admit that was a cool twist, a fairly inventive way to keep the second half of the season fresh.
Freak Show is easily in my top 3. The themes of alienation and discrimination (in the 50s for good measure) worked well for me.
There was just something so…constantly wrong about that season for me.
How so?
I’ll go to bat for Freak Show being better than at least 2 or 3 of some of the others.
Freak Show had the twins and Finn. But otherwise super meh for me.
What? 1984 as 3rd for you? This was so bad it shouldn’t even be considered a season of AHS.
Must disagree. It wasn’t a superlative season of TV, but it was better than most AHS seasons, which always go off the rails and just become annoying in that Ryan Murphy way.
Weird. I actually agree with this ranking 100%
1. Murder House2. Asylum3. Coven4. Freakshow5. Roanoke6. 19847. Apocalypse8. Cult9. Hotel
I see where you’re comin from. But Coven was such a disappointment, despite highlights like knotty pine! and Balenciaga!
I admit that I enjoyed the finale. Finn Witrock always delivers. And I know one has to suspend rationale with AHS but…How did Bobby recover so fast from that big knife that Ramirez threw into his back? I mean, that would’ve punctured a lung? And he’s talking to Donna at the asylum in the same bloody jacket.Aalso why was he so amazed when Donna told him that Margaret was the serial killer when Montana and Trevor told him at the camp?Anyway, gripe away. I thought it was a fun, campy, different take on the usual AHS. I wonder if we’ll see anybody in future shows. Lastly, Gus was fine. Give my bf a break.
No Billy Idol ! ! ! Come ON! Adam Sandler can get him but Ryan Murphy can’t? Not even someone from Gen X?
I agree that the lack of old age makeup was a travesty.
I feel like Bob took the giant stab wound pretty well.I got the true happy ending I wanted, Trevor + Montana forever! Good guy Trevor in action comes through yet. again.
I expected “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds to play over the ending on the episode.
Let me preface this by saying I feel like such a lame buzzkill. But after mostly enjoying this season, I’m still really uncomfortable with the fictionalisation of Ramirez. There are living survivors who were raped and beaten to near death by that man, and people who lost parents or siblings or partners. And so many more who just lived in terror. It doesn’t feel right to exploit his infamy and make this caricature that alternates between a sexy bad boy lover and a joke. It would have been so easy for them to just use a different name.
It’s the Tarantino mindset that we’re supposed to find it cathartic when these real life monsters are killed in hilarious ways by fictional characters. Ava Duvernay should have ended Now They See Us with the exonerated Central Park 5 chasing after Donald Trump with a flamethrower.
Except not really, because I can’t see much catharsis imagining an immortal Ramirez who can and will escape as soon as his captors make a mistake
I did like the reinastment of him getting caught which mirrored real life. I do feel bad about the families that suffered at his hands and how he is made for our entertainment now. True he is dead but others are not.
Well, if you are going to go there, I don’t want chasing; I want a full on torching and BBQ and full-feeding all of the stray rats of NYC.
Revisionist history. It’s like Tarantino did with the Manson family.
I wasn’t as bothered by the fictionalization so much as how it bought whole hog into his powered-by-Satan mythology without really subverting it. It’d be like making a Dahmer story where he successfully made lobotomized sex zombies and just lived the sex-zombie dream.
I was hoping that the secret to Brooke’s ageless beauty was going to be the last minute pact with Satan she made while dying. Oh well!
I assumed the same!
Me, too.
Maybe it was!
Big fan if AHS. Watched every single episode live, since the pilot. I enjoyed this season a lot, but it felt like they had 22 episodes worth of plot and rushed through it all (same problem with Game of Thrones final season). Thus a whole lot of time jumps and exposition of things that happened of screen.However, it feels like the show runners are losing interest and inspiration. The first few seasons had so much gravitas and creativity. Now, It feels like it is turning into the “Glee” type campy comedy of Glee’s final seasons. Ryan Murphy has too many other and newer projects going on. I think the next season could be AHS’s last.
The shorter season definitely gave us a rushed, condensed finale. Most of the episode was characters explaining what happened and how everything got resolved. It was an hour of shoelace tying. An enjoyable, if totally forgettable, season. “Coven” still reigns supreme (pun intended).
That was a rather crappy ending. Bobby waiving to his ghost family? What was the point of Satan keeping a hold on Ramirez if all they do is kill him over and over? No one knows of Brooke being alive? As stated in the review, in this day and age of podcasts and other related media, someone would recognize her walking around. Also, if you’re going to make sure someone doesn’t die at Redwood, just drag the machine to the border, push it and when it crosses the border, then throw Margaret in. Someone would need good aim though. Or just toss her head over the border as soon as it’s chopped off.
I don’t think they would recognise her. Plenty of white women look like Emma Roberts. And unless you’re a true crime junkie, you don’t know the face of every 80’s killer in enough detail to actually know them irl decades later. Particularly if you think they’re dead
they need to stop this garbage already four good seasons and three bad time to STOP
I kept waiting for 2019 Brooke to be a ghost that was able to leave Camp Redwood but it just turned out they were too lazy to try and age her 30 years.
I did not hear the Instagram line. I thought she was a housewife, which makes sense since she would want to hide out. Where was her husband though? Or kids? The way society is now, I am sure one kid would not find a job and have to live at home.
Yeah, i thought there would be some wrinkle (no pun intended) to that. My theory was that she ended up selling her soul to Satan like Ramirez invited her to.
That’s what I thought too! It could have explained how she survived and the lack of aging.
Yeah that would have made more sense especially with her being sneaky about Donna. Donna didn’t notice/hear the ambulance?!?! Nobody but Ray bothered to even try to stop Brooke’s bleeding while they all gathered around to kill one lady?
There was very subtle aging CGI but they certainly didn’t overdo it. Then again I don’t think realism is a main concern for the showrunners.
What I didn’t understand is why Brooke would even know that Mr. Jingles moved to Alaska and had a kid, let alone feel responsible for helping him. Heck, would she even know about all the ghosts? The only one she encountered was Leon, I think. Maybe she found out later? Did the murdered National Enquirer reporter manage to publish her book posthumously?Also, I can’t believe that Halloween and ghosts being allowed to leave the camp didn’t come into play – especially since one of the episodes *took place the night before Halloween*. I was absolutely certain that Mr. Jingles would kill Ramirez by tracking him down on Halloween night.That said, plot holes like that are as much a part of AHS as everything else. For me, enjoying AHS means embracing all that nonsense. Every finale is a mess, really.
Brooke helped Trevor cross back into the camp to die with Montana. She knew about the ghosts.
Did I miss something, or does nothing about Ramirez line up with anything? Was he a doppleganger, in prison AND wake-die-repeating at Redwood? Did he slip away in between deaths to pop up at the Cortez every Halloween since 2013 (when he died in prison irl of cancer. b/c you can’t kill Satan’s homey with a knife, but carcinoma will do the trick?)? And finally, didn’t he escape Redwood? So, Bobby will need to be looking over his shoulder? Stuff like this makes me really appreciate writers of shows like The Good Place, who take continuity more seriously. I know, AHS and horror and all, but they make such a big deal about ghost boundary rules and then just drop the ball on this?
I’m closer to a B- on this one, for a lot of what this review talks about. Maaaybe one more episode before ending could have smoothed or rounded this all out. I must have gone, “Wait, what?” about a half dozen times, lol. That said, this season has been overall enjoyable, and without Sarah Paulson or Evan Peters, I think Billie Lourd really came into her own this time. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed basically everything Montana. She’s my MVP of the ensemble this year.
yeeee, Paulson is amazing(aside from her scream fest in cult), but it was nice giving old and new cast members some shine time.
That was the best season of AHS in years. It was total fluff and there was nothing to it, but at least it was fun the whole way through.Ghosts in the AHS universe are so mundane they should be a standard branch of science… I mean, they’d be easier to study than ocean life!
Why is everyone always surprised this show has a happy ending? It does this every season, except maybe for Cult.
That was sloppy as hell, even by AHS standards. I think I’d go C+. It’s not worth typing it all out but literally almost nothing made sense, everything felts rushed, and the conclusion really didn’t address much anything at all. I’m also not one to complain about copious violence, but damn, they were really pushing it with Marg’s death.Still, overall, the season was surprisingly pretty good. One of their better efforts. Not among the best, but solidly enjoyable (minus the finale). Much needed bounce back after the dreadful Apocalypse
I can’t believe the consistent good grades the series got this year from the critic! This had to be one of the weakest seasons of AHS yet. It had one idea – redo the slasher films of the 1980s – and like all those films and their sequels, the show got repetitive and dull with each subsequent week. The acting throughout was fairly atrocious, too, and I actually like most of the actors in this ensemble. Big disappointment.
American Horrible Story
Only watched the finale, after giving up on this, because I crush on Finn whittrock. It was watchable. Found little bobby’s wave at the end very funny.
This finale was hella dumb.That said, I kinda loved the first half and liked where it looked to be going for its second half – “graduating” from basic Friday The 13th homage (just with sordid backstories for everybody) into more late-80’s rubber-reality supernatural Freddy Krueger homage. It didn’t really work out that way, but the ghosts were okay. But Jingles Jr. was mostly used to deliver and ask for exposition; there might’ve been a story with this guy but the lovey-dovey ending was a little eye-rolling for me. The non-swerve swerves of there being no Billy Idol and no 80’s musician massacre were disappointing. The whole Ramirez thing was a little distasteful, I guess I don’t come to this show for good taste, but it bought into his own mythology real hard without much subverting it beyond the Stuntman Mike pleasures of seeing him panic when he sees a horrible fate coming. Our Final Girl showing up in her *late 50’s* looking like current Emma Roberts has gotta be a cropped subplot. Went way too easy on angry psycho mom.
I never really got the whole Halloween thing either. They can leave on Halloween? When did somebody leave? Do they have to come back? I didn’t get it.