The American Horror Stories finale drags us back to the Murder House without offering anything new
The season-one finale, "Game Over," is obnoxiously self-aware, hollow, and outright boring
TV Reviews American Horror Story
“I think I’ve spent enough time in the Murder House,” Nicholas Bechtel’s character says near the end of the latest American Horror Stories, and it’s a sentiment I think we can all agree with at this point. If the point of the series, as a spin-off from American Horror Story, was to feature self-contained episodes rather than ongoing arcs, why have 3 of its 7 episodes been contained to the existing universe of the show? Even if we ignore the fact that they only exist because of external material, tying together practically half a season rather than actually exploring self-contained tales flat out contradicts the thesis of the series.
Alas, “Game Over” forces us back into Murder House, and I’m tired. I’m tired of how empty the self-awareness of the series is. I’m tired of sitting through some of the laziest horror filmmaking and uninspired kills around. I’m tired of the creators of the show not even being able to commit to their own internal logistics. I’m tired of the series just adding more and more unnecessary cast members to this stupid house for no reason other than empty psychobabble, ineffective jump scares, and bullshit musings. At this point, I was half expecting DJ Khaled to start yelling “AND ANOTHER ONE!” as soon as someone gets stabbed in Murder House. As Kaia Gerber’s Ruby notes, “The repetition is the point. The endless nothing filled with pain is the purpose. The only thing that we need is more souls to feed the suffering.” And, boy, am I suffering.
The episode’s cold open is an onslaught of winking jokes at the audience. They aren’t funny, but Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy (taking the reins back from Manny Coto) certainly think they are, even though all they’re doing is making fun of fans of the show. Yes, I too think fans who want to fuck serial rapists and killers are weird and kind of suck. And yes, I think there could have been an interesting way to explore how fiction and reality intersect. But American Horror Stories doesn’t care about that. Instead, it just makes the whole thing into a video game, a logistical nightmare that I have not stopped being angry about since the episode ended.
For everyone who ever complained about the logistics of any relatively clear sci-fi movie, here’s the journey “Game Over” takes us on: There’s the American Horror Story reality, there’s the AHS video game reality, there’s whatever reality exists in which people watch American Horror Story, and then there’s also the American Horror Stories reality. The way these things overlap makes no sense, and I know it’s stupid to get hung up on something like this, but it really emphasizes how little interest the creative team behind the show has in its characters.
One can create a sandbox that solely exists for death and goofiness, but Falchuk and Murphy clearly want us to be invested in these characters. The first set of episodes of the series had somewhat fooled me into buying into the relationship between Ruby and Scarlett, but here, it feels empty and shallow. It asks us to care about these two figures whose story had already come to its natural open-ended closing in “Rubber(wo)Man” without building on their relationship. It brings back Dylan McDermott for the most pointless cameo of all time (he references crying and masturbating! Wow! Groundbreaking! Please insert an eye roll here) and posits “closure” for him and the other ghosts from the past. Worse than that, there is nothing compelling about the relationship they try to write between Mercedes Mason’s video-game-creator mother and her son. So much of the episode keeps harping on this concept of there being “a point” to Murder House but what we’re given here proves there is none.
Every callback to the past feels like someone kicking a dead horse. One could make an argument that that’s exactly the point of framing it around a video game that is ultimately exploiting the thing it’s supposed to be a tribute to, but nothing in the episode itself implies that kind of criticism of the gaming industry. It becomes something of an unintentional auto-critique; American Horror Stories as the hollow result of someone desperate to mine a creative property (American Horror Story, and more specifically Murder House) for all it’s worth, without understanding what makes it work.
“Game Over” even promises an ending to Murder House, burning it down via fire and giving two characters we just met this season a “happy ending” as condos have been rebuilt. The other ghosts have “ascended” according to the episode, but also, it might all just be a joke because it took place inside of a video game. Or did it? Who knows. Who cares. Falchuk and Murphy can’t even commit to their conclusion of Murder House through this episode because everything is a fake-out and nothing matters. Instead the episode ends by reassuring the audience that these things are never really over and that the spirits of Murder House could be out there in the world.
There is no escaping the Murder House. Not for the spirits. Not for me. Not for you. Not for anyone. And I truly, madly, deeply wish it was.
Stray observations
- “I never want to see or hear one more thing about Murder House again” is the biggest mood of all time.
- Of course McDermott was solely brought back to make a joke about crying and masturbating. Of course he was. Why did I expect anything better?
- Okay, I have to rant for a second: Have Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy ever played a video game? Do they know what video games are like? Do they know what kind of video game they were trying to parody? What few glimpses at actual “video game” concepts we get are such a mish-mash of horror game subgenres that I truly don’t understand what it is going for.
- Adding onto that, even the opening credits (still the best part of the series) don’t really make much sense to me as a game, which kind of sucks because there really is a worthwhile stand-alone episode to be made playing off the concept of gays who are hooked on Dead By Daylight and the way that game just shoves popular horror imagery into pointless (but fun!) multiplayer gaming. Then again, that would have to involve semi-creative kills and this show clearly doesn’t know how to do that. Just trap someone in the game and make jokes about pay-to-play content and skin packs that add new characters to the mix. There’s so much potential in this! And they did NOTHING!
- Also, jeez, everything here is going to be video game-related and I feel like I’m starting to sound like I’m nitpicking, but did this woman just randomly decide to make an American Horror Story game because her son likes the show? Like, and then she later jokes, “I’m just gonna make a video game about True Blood or something normal.” Ma’am, you don’t have the rights to any of these things. You clearly have no idea what you’re making!
- I was going to compliment the joke that Noah Cyrus makes about Sarah Paulson shit-talking AHS’s Roanoke season, but the more I think about it, the more annoyed I am that Falchuk and Murphy threw their actress under the bus to defend their own product, even if it’s supposed to be a “joke.”
- American Horror Story was once a charming kind of bad. Where did that go and why is it so boring now? And will it ever find its way back to being fun? I don’t know, and maybe I should stop caring.
65 Comments
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…outright boringThis was my take on the entire series. There were a couple of the episodes that I started but never finished watching.
Yes, I too think fans who want to fuck serial rapists and killers are weird and kind of suck.
Wait the show tried to editorialize about that within it’s narrative? Because the premier of this season was all about setting up a serial killer who’s fetishized in a full body rubber suit, then spending the following episode asking us to sympathize with her while also making a point of repeatedly showing her making out with her lesbian girlfriend while in said suit….all while her character was supposed to be underage. I think they suggested 14?
I watched this series because AHS seasons always start good then go off the rails. So I thought, they only ha e to make it work for 40 mins, perhaps that will help. But no, they decided to set almost half the episodes in the world of a series from ten years ago (which I haven’t even personally seen) and hung it all on references. I don’t want to feel like I need to do 100+ episodes of homework to watch a bad anthology horror vehicle for celebrity children. I just wanted pure camp starring recognisable actors. The Naughty List episode was the only one that delivered that and even that one was terribly paced and lacked payoff. Ryan Murphy needs saved from himself.
Every Ryan Murphy shows starts off good then goes off the rails.
“Every Ryan Murphy shows starts off good then goes off the rails.”I’d edit that as: many Ryan Murphy shows starts off good then goes off the rails. Some are terrible out of the gate (The Politician; Hollywood; many more!) and some are boring right out of the gate (the DOA Halston and, of course, others).
I actually loved Halston and I love Pose, but American Horror Story is weird that my assumption going in is that I know it’ll go off the rails.
I find it incredible that of all the Ryan Murphy shows, the one about the OJ trial was the best.
I wanted to protest with both seasons of American Crime Story, but I remembered that Murphy just bankrolls it and the showrunners are different.
Yeah, but is that true for the upcoming season of ACS? OJ was a film script he took and basically got the writers to turn into a series. Versace was his and Brad Falchuk (who probably deserves more of the blame than he gets for most of these things, but unlike Murphy, he doesn’t love the limelight despite being Mr Gwenyth Paltrow) concept I understand but they got British crime writer Tom Rob Smith to write it all (and since he wrote the gonzo—but much better than most Murphy/Falchuk series—London Spy, it was a good fit). While Murphy was more involved in the writing of Feud, it also was an outside script he bought and hired the writers to be the showrunners.
So basically the less involved Murphy (and Falchuk!) are with the writing, the better. They’re obviously fine producers. Murphy is way too busy a director (see The Normal Heart and The Prom–well maybe don’t see the latter) but not terrible. And they’re great at concepts. But not writing. That said, all the non murder house episodes of this series were the work of Manny Coto who I don’t think ever worked with them before, and seems to have mostly worked in genre tv in the 80s and 90s so…
Very true. Once you get past the spectacle, it gets redundant and lacks horror, so self contained episodes should help improve that.I watched the first episode and thought “well, it has to get better, doesn’t it?”. No, it doesn’t.
Naughty List was basically a lesser version of Asylums killer Santa episode so even its best couldn’t compare to the main series.
Well, they didn’t have Ian MacShane. Or Jessica Lange, for that matter.
Out of the entire season, Naughty List was the only one I really enjoyed because it was fully self-aware and embraced its cringiness. It also didn’t hurt that Kevin McHale looked unerringly like Lonely Island’s Guy #2.Anyways, no fucking chance would Ian McShane return for this bullshit. On the plus side, we get Machete Saves Christmas so I consider it breaking even.
Once again, video games are underserved in another medium which attempts to represent them. What a strange artistic conundrum that has been for creators, because as far as I know it has never really been done terribly well. The best example I can think of is Hardcore Henry and that movie is really pretty bad.But yes, what kind of video game is the in-universe game supposed to be exactly? Is it an amnesia style game (which the opening title sortof suggests, even though it looks like Bioshock?) Is it a narrative driven game? Like, what’s the gameplay when I’m fucking my girlfriend or boyfriend. Am I playing AS the girlfriend or the boyfriend?The answers are: nobody fucking cares, and nobody thought about it while it was being made, and Ryan Murphy is a hack and I keep watching his shows because I dont know, something missing inside of myself?
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Frankly, this episode really deserves that F grade, it just plain sucked. I especially agree with your first two paragraphs, cause your thoughts are exactly the ones I had. The looming question being: “WHY?! This is an anthology series, it makes absolutely no bloody sense to have THREE of them in the Murder House.” I don’t even think Murder House was that influential of a season, it was a cool ghost story with a handful of great performances.Like, Rubberwoman only needed one part anyway and it definitely didn’t need Kaia Gerber’s trash acting in Part 2. The same really goes for (almost, cause Sierra McCormick was pretty cool) every other “teen” actor here (looking at you Charles Melton). I don’t know why, but most of them just didn’t work for me. Hell, even Cody Fern’s weird Aussie accent was off.Every episode had something missing. I think I liked Drive-In the most, purely because it was a cool horror nostalgia trip with neato aesthetics and a suitably simple premise. Overall, this series is really lacking so far, I genuinely hope they get more creative in S2.
Cody Fern is Australian, that’s how he talks. Maybe he’s been in L.A. too long. Actually, his performance was the only thing I enjoyed in the episode. He brought some energy to the endless humorless slog. Drive-in had it’s moments, Adrienne Barbeau was awesome and I really enjoyed the opening credits.
Honestly, forget Dylan McDermott and his mastur-bawling. This entire episode was Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk jerking each other while patting themselves on the back for another terrible, underwhelming episode. I would be hard pressed to find an AHS fan of any season who didn’t feel bludgeoned to death by all the dizzying references and winks. And to Ryan and Brad: If you like your fans even a little bit, please PLEASE stop referring to this crap as horror. It doesn’t fit the genre by any definition.
Wow I feel completely vindicated in my love for Coven now. Because there is no goddamn way anyone will ever not see this as the worst season of AHS ever. I would have thought shorter stories for Murphy would be a good idea, somehow its the opposite? Its like the most boring monkeys paw outcome.
a) This doesn’t count as a season of AHS (imo).b) Coven isn’t the worst season, that would be Freak Show:1. Asylum2. Roanoke(tie) 3. 1984 3. Murder House5. Hotel6. Cult7. Coven8. Apocalypse9. Freak Show
I’m very glad that someone shares the love for Roanoke as much as I do. My ranking is the same for Asylum and Roanoke, except Coven would still be in third place, purely because of how much fun it was having. Then it becomes muddled after that for me.
Roanoke was kinda genius. A mess like everything else in the final analysis, but unexpected and weird and disturbing.
I know its not a traditional season, but its hard not to compare it to the previous seasons. Also hard disagree, Freak Show at least had Twisty. Hotel for me was a spiral into blah. Will agree on Asylum. Coven is my personal favorite for entertainment reasons, Asylum is actually good.
I love New Orleans, so I hate Coven (obviously not the only reason) despite knotty pine and Balenciaga. Hotel had “Liz Taylor,” Evan Peters at his best and all the eye candy clones (Wittrock, Bentley, Bomer, Greenfield, Jackson…). Freak Show did indeed have Twisty, one of the reasons it’s at the bottom of my ranking despite the twins.
Oh that make sense. Living in the city where a season takes place automatically will get on your nerves rightfully so.
I still think the best season of American Horror Story was Scream Queens.
I don’t know, I’d put Coven in Hotel’s spot (only thing keeping that out of last place is its visual sense) and knock both that and Cult down a space.
I might nitpick up or down a slot on a couple of those. But that’s a very accurate ranking.
No way.1. Asylum2. 19843. Hotel4. Coven5. Murder House6. Freak Show7. Apocalypse8. Roanoake9. Cult
I completely forgot cult existed it’s just blurred into apocalypse as one big load of nothing.
I’m a Coven fan. It’s a good concept done poorly. The first half is pretty strong but it falls apart when it decides to throw away its premise and just lets every witch get every power and then start killing each other. So basically its like every AHS where it totally falls apart halfway thru but still. Coven is better than the rep it gets.
I enjoyed the absolute trashy quality it fell into. Everyone dies and is suddenly back two minutes later. Entire plot lines end one episode later. Half the dialogue is quips. It was endlessly entertaining. Asylum is probably better on an objective level but Coven was definitely the most fun. Especially compared to later seasons which weren’t even enjoyably bad.
Asylum was the best imo, though I hated the tacked on alien subplot and the cringe-inducing “Name Game” scene (bah, humbug!). I’ve said it ad nauseam, but this series has a real quantity over quality problem. Style over substance too, though sometimes the style really works (particularly the opening credits. The dissonant, unsettling music and creepy imagery gives me chills even when the episode itself fails to).As for Coven, while I did find Queenie’s attempt to try and reform LaLaurie interesting, and Lance Reddick as Papa Legba was delightfully hammy, I didn’t care for the rest of it.The only thing Freak Show had going for it was Twisty, and his storyline ended halfway through.
Everybody’s wrong about Coven. We got KNOTTTY PINNNNNE, and I could watch an entire show that is literally just misty may watching stevie nicks. That’s it. That’s the show.
Murder House, Coven, and Hotel are my favorites, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that knowing how many people hated the latter two (especially Coven). Coven just clicked for me and was a lot of stupid fun.
Even if this isn’t a *typical* AHS season, I still consider it a season, and very little worked, the finale being the absolute worst. I hope the Double Feature series is better. I’m not going to hold my breathe, though the return of Lange/Conroy/Peters/etc has me feeling slightly optimistic.
Same. It was so bad, I loved it!
THIS: ‘Okay, I have to rant for a second: Have Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy ever played a video game? Do they know what video games are like? Do they know what kind of video game they were trying to parody? What few glimpses at actual “video game” concepts we get are such a mish-mash of horror game subgenres that I truly don’t understand what it is going for.’I literally didn’t sleep last night because I was trying to figure out how to get in front of these two people and ask them these questions face to face.
did you catch up on your sleep yet? long time to be awake
I’m just here for the F
This is what you all deserve after pretending Ryan Murphy’s OJ show was actually good and not just some absurd farce.
One would figure since these were self contained episodes that maybe the show could keep a solid narrative through each episode, but like the regular AHS arcs, it started strong in episode 1 and then got progressively worse as the season went on for no reason because nothing within the season was connected (as far as I could tell)But at some point we gotta stop being put off when a Ryan Murphy show Ryan Murphy’s itself and just lean in, right?
When are people going to realize Ryan Murphy is TERRIBLE as a show runner? He STINKS. For someone who had started out in journalism, he does not seem to grasp the idea of keeping a story tight and retaining focus. The only Murphy property that he did well was “Pose” (and as a side note, notice how terrible the seasons of AHS were in that same period…he did not give a fat rat’s *ss about anything other than “Pose”). AHS has been a 10 year car crash, “Feud” was camp porn for older gays (and wasted Lange & Sarandon), “Hollywood” was excrement, and this steaming turd is bottom of the barrel (notice how Paulson, Bassett, and Bates stayed away from this).I do give him credit, though…he’s managed to scam a LOT of money out of the Murdochs for products that are actually pretty bad…and for that, I salute him (although I use the middle finger).
Neither he nor Falchuk were showrunners for Pose (though you can definitely see their influence and contributions—including credits on certain episodes. Elektra’s “says offensive things but we are meant to laugh because we knowtheir offensive” is a Murphy trope, as was her complete character change). But I can’t really disagree with any of that…
ryan murphy is an incredible hack
Drive In and Feral were solid.Rest were highly forgettable. I almost want to skip this episode and just hope Double Feature is entertaining.
Damn.Other than the swill that Dinesh D’Souza excretes, this is the first “F” I’ve seen in a fair bit of time.
“there really is a worthwhile stand-alone episode to be made playing off the concept of gays who are hooked on Dead By Daylight and the way that game just shoves popular horror imagery into pointless (but fun!) multiplayer gaming.”
I very rarely play video games—but, hey, I am gay! Is gays playing Dead by Daylight some *thing* I should know about? That comment seems so specific.
Anyway, yeah this was simply dreadful. I admit, when I was watching it a part of me kinda gave them credit for just being so audaciously “fuck it, we don’t care, we’ll just do this too,” but after it finished I just found it terrible.
Ever since they joined the AHS seasons together, the internal logic has never made sense (if it ever did) but yes, here… It really doesn’t. So people in this reality made the AHS series that we watch and somehow actually got all the likenesses of the “real” AHS ghosts and, and, and… I just can’t.
I mentioned that I no longer really play video games, but was the video game we saw as the cold open really as absolutely terrible a game as the son insisted? WTF does his mom usually do? Even if she had programmers, as mentioned, in her garage, wouldn’t your mom making a game like that basically from her home be, well, kinda impressive? Was it really any different from the final game he liked? And at what point did that game start again—was all the stuff with the mom moving into Murder House part of her second version of the game? Does anyone involved know? Obviously no one cares. And obviously I’ve given this way too much thought.
Dead By Daylight has a large LGBT following on Twitch. Lots of drag performers stream the game regularly to fairly large audiences. I’d recommend Granny who’s an entertaining DBD streamer who dress up like a Scottish grandma.
Thanks!! I had zero idea–I’ll have to check some out.
Reminds me about how the most passionate fans of Resident Evil 8s Lady Dimitrescu are either lesbians or trans. Very intriguing.
Yeah! What everyone else said! I can’t even begin to list how many of my friends are hardcore DBD fans (and a couple of ‘em are streaming on Twitch as noted by others too)! But yes! Exactly! That’s what was so frustrating to me. There is absolutely zero internal logic to the episode about where reality or game ends or begins. And if she actually designed that much of the game and worked with a ton of programmers (who was paying these people???), she had to know something. And literally there was no difference in the game between the start and the end. I’m so lost by the episode, I hate it. We have all given it too much thought.
Also, the video game creator Mom goes to the Murder House, a popular AHS and cultural phenomenon in this reality… and the realtor immediately sells it to her for 1/6th of its price because nobody, not one person amongst all of the worldwide AHS watchers, is brave enough to buy it. IT MAKES NO SENSE.Oh well, at least this was closure. I’ll never watch another minute of this shit. Murphy, Falchuk, I cast thee OUT.
I agree that almost all Ryan Murphy shows seem to start of very well and then go off the rails two or three seasons in, but I can’t understand why people who clearly hate a show, whether it’s AHS or AHSs, would not only continue to watch them, but would also write about them. That makes no sense to me.
This was truly a terrible, terrible season of television. It was, as you said, boring. There were no surprises. It had way too many shit “children of famous people” trying and failing to act. It had three, THREE, THREE FUCKING EPISODES ABOUT THE MURDER HOUSE.
Ryan Murphy is lucky he saves his magic for American Crime Story because otherwise everything else he has pooped out has been middling to awful.
Holy crap the acting in this episode. The teen guy was god awful, the Cyrus sister was god awful, Cindy Crawford’s daughter somehow got worse since the last time we saw her. Just embarrassing. At least the mothership has a nice repertory of mostly excellent performers to make it fun to watch them be ridiculous when all else fails. This had nothing elevating it.
It becomes something of an unintentional auto-critiquesince gawker doesn’t employ any, I’ll offer my editing services compris:It becomes something of an intentional auto-critique
I’m tired of the creators of the show not even being able to commit to their own internal logistics.it just makes the whole thing into a video game, a logistical nightmare that I have not stopped being angry about since the episode ended.For everyone who ever complained about the logistics of any relatively clear sci-fi movie, here’s the journey “Game Over” takes us on
All your criticisms were spot on. For a split second at the beginning of the episode I was excited because the video game thing seemed like a cool concept, but the execution was terrible and made no sense.Murder House was my fave season of AHS for a long time so I always get excited when they go back, but it’s never any good, which is such a shame. There is so much potential to explore what it would be like to have people from so many different time periods and walks of life interacting and stepping all over each other. You have vicious murderers and doctors and kids and not one but TWO sets of gay house flippers. We’ve got entire blood families and found families and there is so much interesting stuff to explore with so much history, but instead we get this confounding mess. What is the reality of this world? The internal mechanics make no sense and completely rob the story of any meaning. The characters somehow exist on some plane of reality where they are both real ghosts and characters in a popular TV show and that is never addressed within the show except by people referencing that they know who these characters are. There could have been something interesting in even that concept, such as the characters becoming real due to the popularity of the show or some cool cosmic quirk, but it’s just glossed over which is the most boring choice imaginable.Doing a cool meta thing could have been interesting. Playing that the house was just a set for the show but there is still something dark lurking, or have an AHS superfan go on a murder spree, but nothing like that was explored. Instead we just got circuitous logic and a bunch of fake outs that render everything that came before it meaningless.AHS has this terrible habit of introducing amazingly cool concepts and then proceeding to not explore them at all or even worse drive them straight into the ground. The AHS universe is so frustrating, because on the one hand you have a load of creativity and style and every so often a character is treated with beauty and a sense of grace (wish fulfillment even) that feels genuinely heartfelt, but then other times Murphy and Falchuk seem like they are more interested in telling the audience how idiotic they are for caring about any of these characters. I look forward to AHS every year and I was very excited to see what they could do with more standalone storytelling in “Stories” but really it just represents the AHS universe at its most shallow and boring. Hope Double Feature is better!
I was surprised to see an F grade for something, but I just watched it, and: what the fuck? Seriously, what did I just watch? Sarah Paulson was referenced, and… what? WHAT? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE AWFULNESS.
When they made a reference to the greatest moment in AHS history (“Liiiiieess!”) and crapped all over it, I just wanted to reach through the screen and smack someone. Why was Dylan McDermott Ben Harmon when Sarah Paulson was Sarah Paulson? OK, so AHS is a TV show in the Stories universe, where Dylan McDermott is an actor. Nope, that would have actually made sense. They seem to have lost control of the plot. Meta-madness.
In the way this indulged in lazy fan service and meta textual gibberish reminded me of season 3 of Sherlock. I don’t like being reminded of season 3 of Sherlock.
Talk about “the vibe of the show” one more time, kid.
Did anyone else feel like this might be the hands-down worst episode of scripted television they’ve ever watched? I really am having a hard time thinking of other contenders.
I can find nice things to say about even bad or boring seasons of AHS but wow this whole anthology season was a dud. The slightly better ones (Santa vs. the social media bros, the drive-in, maybe the back half of the baby one) might have made OK Tales from the Crypt-style episodes at thirty minutes but they each dragged and suffered from some questionable acting (which isn’t normally a problem with AHS – even the worst seasons are pretty solidly acted for the most part). That gleefully campy/hateful AHS spirit only really worked a few times – the contractor’s sudden homicidal and blackmailing tendencies in the second episode, Cody Fern’s weirdo park ranger, Adrienne Barbeau’s “I’ve seen fucking everything” energy. Mostly these stories were just dull, predictable, and boringly shot (another thing that isn’t usually a problem with AHS – the current Cape-set season looks great). This episode was horrible. Other people have captured the major issues – this whole universe makes no damn sense (it simultaneously requires all of the ghost characters in the house to be real and to be characters on a fictional TV show at the same time), the video game makes no damn sense (also, if you were going to make a survival horror type game, wouldn’t the first half of Apocalypse or Roanoke be more logical settings for that game?). This is the worst episode in the franchise.