​"Apocalypse Then" – America Horror Story S08E10 Review

Well, isn't that special?

Season 8, "Apocalypse" ends with a bang and a whimper. And one wonders what all the hubbub was about. Or was there a hubbub? I've lost track. "Apocalypse" still felt like Season 3's Greatest Hits. Or Season 3B, as I've referred to it before. It basically does what everyone expected it to, and to some degree what it had to do. Hit a big ole reset button via time travel to make sure that Billie Dean could exist in 2022 to do a tour of the Hotel Cortez.

So last episode had to set up the whole tempus infinitum spell/time travel element. And this episode saw it through. One has to admire the tightrope act the creative team walked. They couldn't give away the time-travel plot device too soon, or people would have spent more time dissecting what a copout it was. But they had to foreshadow it rather than just drop it on the audience in the season finale. So I suppose bringing it up in episode 9 was the way to go. Not to mention little hints of it throughout, like the importance of Coco and Mallory to the proceedings.

Still, there seemed to be a few detours along the way. And the end result made most of the season seem like a waste. We got to see how Michael rose to power... only to have it all undone in the finale. So basically everything they spent six episodes on never happened. Whee.

That brings us to what did happen in "Apocalypse Then". We play more catch-up in the best part of the episode: Myrtle finding out about Outpost 3, meeting Wilhelmina and trying to out-snark each other, and killing Mutt and Jeff. Other than the fact they were nihilistic idiots, M&J never played much part in the apocalypse and the season as a whole. M&J basically existed as an excuse to have Evan Peters put on another funny wig and give Billy Eichner something to do.

The witches then decide to get Coco and Mallory close to Michael by wiping their identities and making sure they got tickets to Outpost 3. There is some tragedy and emotion here, as Coco talks about how her family deserves to live more than she does. And how she and Mallory were such close friends (huh?) but Cordelia modeled Coco's new personality on Madison's and had her demean Mallory so Mallory's powers wouldn't emerge too soon.

Why they had to do all this instead of just bury Coco and Mallory along with the other three witches in the Louisiana swamp, then pop out and go to Outpost 3, I don't know.

When the witches get there and remove the identity spells, we find out Cordelia brought Dinah back just so the former queen of voodoo, Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), could kill her successor. Cordelia cut a deal with Papa Legba to trade Marie in Hell for Dinah. Marie kills Dinah, Cordelia blows up the Miriam android, and Mallory grabs the android's gun arm to kill Michael.

But it doesn't take, since Michael is the all-powerful Antichrist. He blows off Mallory's head and goes after the other witches. Coco and Marie try to stop him, and end up dead. Brock (Billy Eichner yet again) shows up and kills Mallory. Myrtle kills Brock and then sits around and does nothing. Cordelia confronts Michael and kills herself, so her power will transfer to Mallory and let her cast the tempus infinitum spell.

Cut to the Murder House, where Constance has found now-adult Michael after he killed the priest. She kicks Michael out of the house after a very long Jessica Lange-style diatribe, and Mallory runs him over three times. Constance refuses to take Michael into the Murder House so his spirit will survive, and he dies in the street.

Mallory continues on with all of her memories of the original timeline. Which is all very timey-wimey. No one else remembers her, so Cordelia is surprised when Mallory hugs her. Mallory lets Madison stew in Hell for a while, and tells Queenie not to stay at the Hotel Cortez when she goes to LA. The demons of Hell figure they should get in good with Mallory since she killed Michael, and have Nan take Misty to Robichaux. And Mallory is left to wonder if Satan is giving up so easily.

Cut to Tim (Kyle Allen) and Emily (Ash Santos) meeting in the new timeline. They get married, have a son Devan, and he kills his nanny in 2024. The three Satanic followers arrive at the couple's doorstep and offer to help with Devan. And so the cycle continues.

There's nothing really wrong with "Apocalypse Then", and "Apocalypse" as a whole. Like I said at the beginning of the review, there's not much special about it, either. The whole time-travel thing burns my butt, since it's basically a big ole reset. I don't get the point of it. On the one hand, it feels like the creative team wrote themselves into a corner. There was no other way that they could resolve the season except to make it so that it never happened. To quote from The Twilight Zone, "Wish it into the cornfield, please." That's basically what the creative team on AHS did.

But then, like I said earlier... what's the point? Nobody remembers the sacrifices Cordelia and Madison (Madison? Yes, Madison) made: Mallory wasn't there to see them. She doesn't seem particularly upset Myrtle was never brought back from the dead.

There's also the timey-wimey stuff. Like how can Mallory be powerful enough to change time and remember the original timeline, if Cordelia never died to give her the power to do that? Cordelia isn't dead: we see her at the end. So a temporal fragment from a timeline that doesn't exist gave Mallory enough power by dying to erase the time line that gave her the power to erase the timeline, that gave her the power… see what I mean?

This might work in a sci-fi setting like Star Trek. Or get hand-waved away. And that's kind of what they do with "Apocalypse". They basically ignore it, and if you asked them, they'd put it down to "Oh, it's magic: it doesn't have to make sense".

There's also stuff that's just weird. Or unsatisfying. Or both. Like Brock showing up just to put a knife in Mallory's stomach. Perfect example of Chekhov's Gun. Or Knife, as the case may be. I don’t know why he bothered killing Mallory, anyway. Yes, she was Coco's assistant, but shouldn't he be busy hunting down Coco? Why kill her assistant? And Coco is still alive at the time: Michael kills her a few minutes later.

The whole thing also means that Mutt and Jeff survived. Setting aside the fact Myrtle couldn’t kill them because Cordelia didn't bring Myrtle back, Michael never survived to become the Antichrist so M&J never met him and never started the Apocalypse. We never find out anything about the Cooperative, either, other than learning Tim and Emily were... something. They couldn't have been Satan's backup plan, because if the Apocalypse had gone as planned, Michael had already won and a second spawn of Satan wasn't needed.

Tim and Emily meeting in the new timeline had nothing to do with the Cooperative, or their genetics, or much of anything. They just happened to breed the new spawn of Satan: no ghost rape necessary. So it made sense in a storytelling full-circle kind of way. But as a backup plan, it blew.

Instead we got the finale dwelling on the fates of Nan. And Misty. And Queenie. While Taissa Famiga stood around and didn't have any direct dialogue with anyone. Why did they bring her back again?

Overall, "Apocalypse Then" was a superficially complete wrap-up to Season 8. It resolved the end of the world, it kept the path clear for a season 9, it gave us lots and lots of the Coven witches, and it gave us a resolution to some hanging threads from Season 1. The performances of people like Cody Fern, Sarah Paulson, Frances Conroy, and Emma Roberts were good. But at the end of the day, it just didn't seem to amount to much. The Apocalypse came and then... it went. And all we got was the t-shirt.

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