Well here it is, it seems like only yesterday viewers were anxiously awaiting the return of American Horror Story and its exciting new season focused on witches; now the show draws to a close tonight at 10pm and prepares to answer all of the burning questions we’ve had all season, namely who is going to be the new Supreme? While this season had its fill of witchy humor and suspense, it also had some flaws and plot holes that left viewers scratching their heads or ready to throw their TVs across the room.
1. Ding dong the witch is…oh nevermind. Usually when characters are brought back to life on a show, their reappearance is very dramatic and causes a major plot development. However, the power to bring someone back to life was used so much and unnecessarily that it brought no drama when someone died and even less surprise when they came back. Misty, Kyle, Madison, Myrtle, the Axeman, the man in the coffin, Joan, Spaulding (kind of), the random homeless man in the park, Misty again; all these characters were killed off and soon brought back to life. The first couple of times it was exciting and essential to the plot, like Misty revealing her powers or Kyle becoming Zoe’s Franken-kyle, and even Madison’s return from death put Fiona in her greatest moment of weakness. However, after literally the tenth person was killed and brought back, it had no effect on the plot and was just a cheap ploy to create drama. Most of the characters who were killed had no point in being killed anyways, like Joan who was shot and brought back to life five minutes later. And the characters who should have been brought to life, like Nan and Luke, were just left for dead.
2. Kyle and Zoe’s lack of a love story. The first episode where Zoe and Kyle met in a Romeo and Juliet-esque fashion through the fish tank set the stage for a romance reminiscent of the first season. However, this story ended up falling flat on its face. Zoe was ignorant enough to send Kyle back to his abusive mother and didn’t bother looking for him when he ran away, even though he was extremely violent and unstable at that point. I personally am a huge Evan Peters fan, so not seeing him on stage as much as I wanted was very disappointing. They did have their cute moments, like when he told her he loved her, and their three-way with Madison was kind of funny, but their story line became lost along with many other plots such as…
3. Remember that plot line? Neither did the writers. This season was notorious for setting up great plots, starting to develop them… and then just dropping them for no reason. The Minotaur was set up as this great potential villain but once his head got cut off he was gone… it’s not like Laveau isn’t a super powerful voodoo witch who loved him and must have had some sort of spell to fix him or something like that. Or Fiona’s cancer, which was a driving force behind her desperation to stay young, then three episodes later she was fine and healthy like nothing happened and her cancer was forgotten until the second-to-last episode. Didn’t she lose her hair one episode and wore some fashionable head wraps? Because it was back the very next episode. Even Madison’s traumatic experience with the frat boys was given one passing reference after it happened. She admitted to the audience in her well-delivered millennial speech that she kept herself from feeling anything from it, but it seems pointless for Madison to have gone through such an awful experience for it to never be brought up or resolved.
4. More bitchy than witchy in the Coven. Why do these girls even want to protect the Coven at this point? The witches had almost no unity or sense of companionship this whole season, half of them tried to or did kill the other half at some point, and they’re ready to destroy each other to become the Supreme, which is ironic because a Supreme is kind of pointless without a coven. Instead of trying to protect their dying breed as Zoe said, the witches are climbing over each other to take over. Hopefully they learn from Fiona’s disastrous rule about the dangers of letting all that power go to your head.
With all of that said, the show did have some bright points despite the numerous flaws. The acting, especially the dynamic between Delphine and Laveau, was phenomenal and a focal point of the show, and the strength the witches possessed was a great female empowerment message; these girls were not to be messed with and could take care of themselves without a man. Hopefully the finale can do its best to wrap up the remaining plot lines, focus on what makes the show great, and finally tell us who the Supreme is!