American Horror Story Recap: WHAT IS THIS, KNOTTY PINE???????

FINAL NOTES:

• Cordelia's the Supreme now because Madison can't do marble-speak. 
• Every single character has died and been brought back at this point, except Cordelia, whose eyes have come and gone enough to count her in, too.
• Fiona's hell is living in some cottage with the Axeman, yelling about Knotty Pine (what is knotty pine?).
• Misty's really gone, Nan's really gone, not sure what happened to Angela Bassett.
• Fleetwood Mac remains excellent.

To be fair, this is the most coherent finale of all 3 seasons of American Horror Story. The mystery of the next Supreme WAS ANSWERED, which is more than I can say for the Antichrist baby in season 1 (no offense, still loved it) or the alien bigamy in season 2. But why? Why? WHYYYY???? FOR ALL OF THIS??????????

My friend Garrett said it seems like this season's episodes were divvied up into 13 separate writing processes, and that each writer kind of went "eh, keep this, lose that" about the previous episode's contents. It's hard to figure out what to focus on when Marie Laveau's bull-headed lover can live forever for no reason and the Axeman is just hanging out because he was based on a real guy and Misty is at once the strongest self-taught witch and the victim of the least interesting death of all time (frog dissection hell? THAT'S DUMB). I can't presume to understand what goes into writing a successful television show (although I definitely am presuming that), but I know that there seem to be two camps of taking in this sort of thing:

1) the I-Don't-Care Camp, wherein the writers could introduce a swamp monster in the last 5 minutes and it wouldn't matter that it has nothing to do with anything BC IT'S COOOOOL!!!!!!

2) the I-Care-About-What-YOU'VE-Chosen-To-Present Camp, wherein the writers have control over their contributions to the show, and you have to assume that this hypothetical fucking swamp monster was either called forth from something earlier in the script or will become of service to something later in the script.

Maybe this is a bigger philosophical issue for Miss Beck. Maybe there can be meaningless, random events in life, and it's perfectly fine that they don't have anything to do with anything. BUT THIS IS A SHOW THAT IS WRITTEN, RE-WRITTEN, AND EDITED BY PROFESSIONAL WRITERS. Television isn't life. Every single word in a person's teleplay was chosen specifically. Chekhov didn't just throw a gun in there to hang out until it disappeared without a trace, just so you could go "cool, a gun, who cares that it's gone."

So what am I saying, that I don't like American Horror Story? Because it's pretty clear after three seasons that Amhorst's main deal is just throwing weird stuff around without working it into anything else at all. I just love the promise of it. It's my Lost problem. So many amazing, confusing characters and events are introduced, and some of them come together in a cool way, and it leaves me to believe that it will all be tied up in a very cool way. But it never does. And everyone's ok with that but me.

But let it be known to the universe that I would rather watch a 10-hour biopic of the Axeman than ten seconds of the last season of Lost and that's a PROMISE.

video courtesy fxnetworks