Reviews

Once a big fan of this series, it seems to be grinding to a halt lately, with lazy and unrealistic writing. 3 cases in point:

1) Beth as the ballet coach: The scene at the showcase recital when the dancer falls down. How ridiculous that Beth comes running onstage and proceeds to have a slow dim-witted conversation with the girl about what she should do. The audience is still present! You would think they were out for coffee! Beth as a character was obviously a failed dancer, because as any performer knows, if you fall and you are not injured (the girl told Beth she wasn't), you immediately get up and continue where you left off. You don't have a summit about it onstage with your ballet instructor right in the middle of the recital! To top it off, Randall in the audience tells his girls to always remember how great their mother was!

2) As others have noted, it was very wrong of Madison to want to take the twins for Thanksgiving dinner to Elijah's. Kevin and Madison may no longer be "together," but they are united as a family by their twins. Elijah is nobody's father. He is not even engaged to Madison. Madison has always been my least favorite character. Her selfish and superficial nature was evident right when she was introduced in the series as befriending Kate, while being very mean to her. Even Kate was on Madison's side. Is this really the moral message that the writers are sending?

3) The former Miguel--Rebecca--Matt triangle is getting very "tired" already. As a writer, you never want your audience to get ahead of the characters' intelligence. It is so obvious to everyone that Miguel is in love with 'Becca, and the only character who seems not to notice is 'Becca!

I am trying to make it to the last episode, but I may not make it. Time for some new writers. The characters seem to be getting dumber and dumber each week.

This was an excellent episode. However, Jack's brother Nicky was not even mentioned. If in the time-frame of their mother's death, Jack and Nicky were estranged, then it still made no sense that in the flashback sequences when Jack was playing with his sled in the snow and was called in for lunch by the mother, it appeared that Jack was an only child. That was not true. Nicky left the family when they were teenagers, as I remember. They grew up together, yet Nicky was not there when they were children? Seems like a gaping plot hole to me in an otherwise well-written and acted episode.

Like many others, I was a fan of this particular series of AHS. Everything was building to this final episode, and by the and, you want to ask the writers, "What was that?" Probably the most egregious mistake was the mishandling of Lily Rabe's character. By the end of Episode 5, we realize that Doris is really the only sympathetic character in the series. She deserved a decent send-off. Give the "nasty" tone of the story, perhaps we would see her character enact some kind of revenge. Instead of the new pill that the writers came up with, how about a pill that would reverse the effects of the first pill. What do we get instead? Nothing--ZERO!! There is only a fleeting glance of Doris that her husband sees outside the window which we don't even get to see because it is off-screen. Doris deserved better--WE THE LOYAL AUDIENCE deserved better! What a huge disappointment to end the series. I felt betrayed for having spent so much time with these people, only to have this rushed episode. Even the major villains played by Evan Peters and Frances Conroy meet an appropriate grisly end, but their final goodbyes lasted 15 minutes! Again what were the writers thinking?

I never thought I would say this, but Mary Louise's character, and the way Meryl Streep is portraying her, continues to be totally hateful with no redeeming qualities at all. The character has no nuance as written, and I would have expected such a great actress like Streep to bring SOME quality of likability to Mary Louise. Instead, this monster who spawned the psychotic Perry remains totally unsympathetic. It throws the whole drama off track, as no one in his or her right mind would want Celeste's boys to be in her custody, no matter how troubled Celeste still appears to be. Streep's is a one-note performance. What a disappointment!