Summary
WhileAmerican Horror Storyseason 8 always had an uphill battle, the show’s worst outing could have been a lot better with one major change. Everyseason ofAmerican Horror Storyis connected, but the show is still unclear about exactly how its fictional universe works. Sometimes, real-life characters appear in the series, including fictionalized versions of living people like Mia Farrow. At other points, bizarre events make it clear thatAmerican Horror Storytakes place in a reality that barely resembles the real world. Meanwhile, the same actors appear as completely different characters, sometimes in the same season.
WhileAmerican Horror Story’s weird series faultsare plentiful, the confusing nature of the show’s fictional universe isn’t its biggest problem.American Horror Storyhas a zany tone that, despite how dark the series often gets, allows the show to get away with these silly self-referential twists. That said,American Horror Story’s bizarre inconsistency has been known to cause the series problems when it comes to continuity. The connections between seasons aren’t always clear and, on occasion, this can mean that a promising subplot is simply dropped and forgotten. This was the case with one particularly disappointing season.
American Horror Story Season 12 Brought Back A Terrible Recurring Trope That Always Unnerved Me
American Horror Story: Delicate indulged in a misguided trend that I’ve almost always found creepy and exploitative throughout the show’s history.
American Horror Story: Apocalypse Needed To Be A Coven Sequel
The Post-Apocalyptic Season 8 Revealed Its Story After 3 Episodes
American Horror Story: Apocalypseshould have been a straightforward sequel toCovenfrom the start, instead of spending way too long badly obscuring this fact.American Horror Storyhas reused the same twists, settings, and characters before, butApocalypseput a strange spin on this approach when the season began. The outing opens with the world ending and a handful of bickering, mismatched survivors eking out a bleak existence in an isolated outpost. Just as viewers were trying to establish a reason to care about these thinly written characters, they were all killed off en masse in the third episode’s ending.
From that point forward,Apocalypsebecame a sequel to season 3,Coven, as the heroines of that outing returned to rid the world of the Antichrist. However, the first three episodes were a complete waste of time and spent a full third of the season establishing characters who never mattered. This is hardly the first time the series has been critiqued for pointless twists. As recently as the season 12 finale,Kim Kardashian’sAmerican Horror Storydeathdeprived the series of a great potential recurring villain. However, it was notable mostly becauseApocalypsecould have been a great season.
Why Apocalypse Failed As A Sequel To American Horror Story: Coven
Season 8 Spent Too Long Establishing Unnecessary Characters
If it weren’t for the show’s weird insistence on misdirecting viewers,Apocalypsemight have been one of the strongestAmerican Horror Storyoutings ever. If the series began after the entire cast was killed off and replaced at the end of the third episode, viewers could have gotten more time withCoven’s heroines and been properly reacquainted with their story. Anyone familiar with the series could guess that the apocalyptic outpost was not going to be the season’s main story, so it wasn’t like the twist was worth the screen time. Thus,American Horror Storywasted one of its best stories on a cheap surprise.
