Wow! This show again. I've already quit this thing twice, first in 2012 (mid-Season 2) and then again, for what seemed like for good, in 2014 (mid-Season 4). But then this season - the eighth, holy shit! - was pitched as a combination of Seasons 1 and 3 - you know, the only two of this show I've ever finished. How perfect was that? So I bit the bullet and dove back in for the first time in four years a few months ago, buckling up and preparing for whatever the hell might happen in American Horror Story: Apocalypse. And holy shit., you know what happened? Within the first ten minutes of the first episode, the apocalypse happened! Nuclear goddamn war, wiping out the vast, vast majority of the human population.
What followed was an absolutely incoherent mess of flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks as characters from Seasons 1 and 3 (and others, apparently) just sort of made their way into this narrative - most of them having died, already, in their respective seasons - and oh man the whole thing was just stupid and pulpy satanic worship stuff, where the witches from Season 3 end up saving the human race thanks to time travel and other various tricks. Sarah Paulson played three, maybe four different characters in this. What a mess! What a dumb, silly mess.
All that said, I didn't hate this. The seasons of American Horror Story that I've bailed on - Asylum and Freak Show - tended to dwell on the disgusting and the demented; by contrast, the two seasons I've completed, Murder House and Coven, were full of campy horror tropes - the first season a delightful and surprising modern ghost house story, complete with plenty of jump scares, and the third one just a big old witch-on-witch-on-witch catfight between old-timey racist slaveowners, voodoo queens, and bratty teen celebrities. So yeah - Apocalypse was ridiculous, and it didn't really hit on any sort of thematic or character-based, I dunno, significance? But it was an easy enough epilogue of sorts to those two seasons I'd at least enjoyed, a somewhat enjoyable crossover of sorts.
Lastly, some rankings. I've seen three full seasons of this show and bailed on two more, without so much as knowing what happened in the other three. but but me in whatever camp goes 1-3-8-4-2. God, some people just loved Season 2. Guys - I just couldn't, with that one! It had the distinct tone and atmosphere of the Saw movies, but with psychotic abuse and mental breakdowns in lieu of the dumb gore-puzzles. No thank you!
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