"Final Girl" – American Horror Story S09E10 Review

Okay, "Final Girl" was a little better. And made a decent finale. It didn't make up for a mediocre season, but at least it felt like an American Horror Story finale, mostly because it was mildly anti-climactic and wrapped everything up with a few time jumps.

The story focuses on Bobby Richter (Finn Wittrock). This Bobby being the son of Jingles we saw, not to be confused with Young Bobby (Filip Alexander), who was Jingles' younger brother and showed up "in the flesh" occasionally. Bobby arrives at Redwood in 2019, and finds it a shell of its former self. Montana (Billie Lourd) greets him, unaged from 1989, and oohs and ahhs over his phone.

They soon get down to business and Montana explains she's the same Montana who died in the 80s. She tells Bobby the basic conceit of "AHS: 1984": everyone who died there still exists as ghosts, and can't leave the camp boundaries. Anyone who dies inside the boundaries becomes a ghost, except ghosts who can live, die, and feel pain and pleasure. So just like real people, except with travel limitations and an ability to resurrect from death.

Trevor (Matthew Morrison) is still "alive", and the couple reveal in flashbacks Margaret's musical festival never went off as planned. Which saved on having to provide any musician cameos. Margaret (Leslie Grossman) went berserk, shot Courtney (Leslie Jordan) dead, and then found Trevor and killed him. She shot him outside of the camp and Trevor couldn't quite make it back inside. But Brooke showed up and helped him in, just to prove she's a nice person.

It turns out the ghosts killed Bruce/Alex (Dylan McDermott) and kicked his body outside of camp before he died so he wouldn’t come back as a ghost. Montana lured Richard (Zach Villa) into one of the camp's generic buildings and the ghosts killed him. They tied him up and kept killing every time he came back, so he couldn't come back under Satan's influence and leave the camp to travel to Alaska and kill Jingles' son. The ghosts also mention no one has seen Jingles since he was pulled into the lake, as we saw at the end of the last episode.

While Montana and Trevor are explaining all of this, Satan (i.e., a swirling cloud of black mist chanting "Vengeance") frees Richard, and he escapes from under the not-so-watchful eyes of Bertie and Chet. Richard manages to stab Bobby in back, but the ghosts (including Sean Liang, who despite his minimal exposure keeps getting upfront credit: he must have a good agent) all keep Richard at bay while Bobby escapes the camp. But not until Montana tells Bobby to go to the local asylum.

There's a brief bit where Bobby goes to the asylum and almost gets locked up as a nutter. However, Rita/Donna (Angelica Ross) overhears him say he's Jingles' son and takes him into her office to explain her side of the story. Which is she attacked Margaret, and Brooke intervened and was shot in the stomach. Brooke apparently died, and the ghosts captured Margaret, allowing Rita to escape. The ghosts then cut off Margaret's extremities, tossed them into a wood chipper, and shot the bloody parts over the camp boundary so she wouldn't die in the camp.

Bobby has been getting checks for years from an anonymous source. With Rita's help, he traces the checks to Oregon, where we find out Brooke (Emma Roberts) is still alive. She's been sending the checks in the hopes Bobby wouldn't be drawn to Redwood. And she tells her side of the story: Ray (DeRon Horton) found Brooke shot and dying, poured a lot of iodine on the gunshot wound, and helped her across the camp boundary. Since then, Brooke moved to Oregon, met a dermatologist, made a life for herself, somehow got enough money to send to Bobby, and has remained relatively unaged because either Emma Roberts didn't want to wear the aging prosthetics they stuck on Angelica Ross, or they didn't look believable on her, or something else.

Rita and Brooke realize they were both the "final girl", and they share a hearty handshake. Bobby decides to go back to Redwood because he feels someone was watching over him and he figures it was the unseen Jingles. When Bobby goes back, Margaret appears to him and reveals she died before they shot her head over the boundary, so technically she became a Redwood ghost like the others, and has hidden out for decades just so she could kill Bobby.

However, Jingles (John Carroll Lynch) steps in and stops her. When Margaret "kills" Jingles, Lavinia (Lily Rabe) steps in and tells Margaret to stop. And cuts Margaret's throat when Margaret doesn't stop. The other ghosts show up to presumably do something unpleasant to Margaret (who is watching Richard?), Montana tells Bobby to remember the 80s and tell the children ghost stories about Redwood, and Bobby runs out. Jingles, Lavinia, and the young Bobby wave to Bobby as he runs out of Redwood, presumably for good.

As I noted earlier, "Final Girl" was pretty anti-climactic. We didn't get any new information, or any big revelations. The reunion between Jingles and Bobby is good, because Lynch has always been a class act and Wittrock isn't bad, either, in a role that's different from his previous four roles on American Horror Story. Since they couldn't get Evan Peters or Sarah Paulson to come back, I suppose Wittrock is the best we could hope for as far as AHS vets.

The episode felt a bit on the cheap side: we never got the much-vaunted music festival, since Trevor turned away everyone before they could get there. Bruce/Alex gets killed so quickly and quietly you wonder why they ever had him on the show. Other than briefly putting Brooke and Rita in danger, he never did anything. Richard, although an imposing presence, doesn't get much to do. He's freed long enough to pose a danger to Bobby, but the other ghosts handle him pretty readily. The hints Satan is helping him are interesting, and mildly tie in with Satan as a "real" dark force on AHS but it never goes anywhere at the end of the day. Satan is a deus ex machina more than anything.

Margaret makes an effective totally evil presence, but she doesn't get a lot of screen time, either. Most of the episode is spent wrapping up the loose ends, and showing us what the life of a supposed serial killer's son is like dealing with the legacy. It's interesting, but it doesn't feel much like the season we've been watching for the last eight episodes

There are more jokes at the 80s expense. Montana oohs and ahhs over a smartphone, Bobby reveals jazzercise never became a thing. Since the creative team never treated the 80s as more than a source for punchlines and an excuse to involve Richard, Montana's plea at the end doesn't have much power. Ditto for her telling Bobby to tell the ghost stories of Redwood to the children. She mentions earlier no one has come to the camp for years, but she's given up her life of slaughter anyway and presumably persuaded the other ghosts to do likewise. Do the ghosts need stories told about them to continue existing? Why do they want to continue existing given how decrepit their "lives" are?

Given the "final girl" thing was something tossed out last episode, it doesn't have much emotional impact to see Brooke and Rita bonding over it. We see Rita escape, and the impact of Brooke apparently dying is tossed out and then erased in a matter of minutes. So it doesn't have much impact. And they never did explain how Bruce/Alex knew Rita's real name was Donna, two episodes back.

There were some nice directorial touches, mostly involving the ghosts and their acts of violence. They fall on Richard with edged implements and turn him into a pincushion. Later, the scene of the ghosts cutting off Margaret's extremities and feeding them into a wood chipper is American Horror Story-style over-the-top gory. With Leslie Jordan oohing and ahhing over the gore in typical Leslie Jordan-style.

Overall, "AHS: 1984" was... okay. It felt like a recycling of the "ghosts are 'live' people" conceit the show had already set up previously in "Murder House". There were a lot of questions raised, like what do ghosts do when there's nobody to haunt? And how is Satan involved in the whole thing? But there was never much to it. We've seen Richard's ghost in "Hotel", so... I guess he escaped Redwood at some point?

The season felt like a rehash of previous seasons at best, and feeble jabs at the 80s at worst. I suppose part of the intent was to take the mickey out of 80s homage shows like Stranger Things, by reminding us it wasn't all soft lights and childhood nostalgia. But Stranger Things has always done so to some degree, like in the season 3 finale with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So a whole season of AHS doing it felt like overkill.

I'm not sure where AHS goes from here. It feels like it's run its course at this point. I'm not saying there's something the creative team can find to take it further. They've surprised me before. But "AHS: 1984" felt like the creative team deciding to joke-homage the 80s (slasher horror movies, jazercize, "final girls", etc.) and toss in a few elements of previous seasons ("live" ghosts, Richard Ramirez, the presence of an unseen Satan). Last season's "Apocalypse" pretty much sealed the deal: once you've done the Apocalypse and the Son of Satan, anything else is downhill from there.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?