American Horror Story Coven finale "Seven Wonders"
Adam Rifkin stashed this in American Horror Story
Stashed in:
It was not united in the slightest. Lemme list off some of the dispirate elements in this season- Witch Hunters. Voodoo Queens. A real-life historical serial killer. The Axeman. Voodoo Zombies. Papa Legba. Spaulding the murderous necrophiliac butler. Zombie Kyle.
And THEN there's the Whos-The-Next-Supreme plotline.
I seriously don't know how an observant person could say that this was a united season.
From the AV Club season Finale review:
In the end, American Horror Story: Coven just didn’t have any fucking clue what it wanted to be. It lurched drunkenly from idea to idea, never settling on one long enough to build anything of worth. “But, Todd!” you might say. “That was also true of Murder House and Asylum!” Which is sort of true. Both of those seasons kept adding weird bullshit right up until the very end. But in both cases, the show added items at the periphery, while keeping the core of the show more or less sound. Murder House was about a troubled family that moved into a haunted house, and while it was frequently ridiculous, it kept being about that, no matter how many pigmen hid in Eric Stonestreet’s shower. The even more successful Asylum was about a woman wrongly confined and the woman who confined her, tracing their twin arcs over decades of the country’s history and subjecting both of them to all sorts of traumas that revealed more and more of what they were truly made of, before bringing them to moments of unexpected release.
The problem with Coven, then, is that it kept adding stuff to the core, and it ended up destabilizing everything, so that even the crazy stuff stopped being fun and just got sort of boring. (About the only crazy thing I’ve legitimately enjoyed in the back half of the season has been the two appearances by Stevie Nicks, which were, not coincidentally, about as tangential as tangential can be.) The season started out as a story about a boarding school for witches, with young Zoe as our eyes and ears into a strange world we wouldn’t normally be privy to. At the edges of that world were a mother and daughter who had a relationship filled with emotional violence and a variety of historical figures who’d come along to make mischief and fuck shit up. The problem was that those people were played by all of the top-name stars that viewers ostensibly come to American Horror Story for, so they gradually dragged the show’s core over toward them.
With every week, the core got a little more diluted. Adding Fiona and Cordelia to it made a certain amount of sense, since they, too, were at the school. But the addition of LaLaurie was much more confusing, as she didn’t have pre-established ties to anyone and mostly seemed to be around to let Ryan Murphy give Kathy Bates some ridiculousness to play. And then the other stuff kept crowding into the middle of the merry-go-round, making everything wobbly. Marie Laveau was soon the biggest threat to the school, except also the season’s main villain. Except, no, the witch hunters were. Except they were easily dispatched, and maybe the whole season had really been about searching for the new Supreme among the teenagers at the school. But what if it were about this self-trained witch from the swamp, who possessed astounding powers over life and death? Though, no, for real this time, the story turned out to be about women seizing their inherent power and about a mother and daughter finally having a heart-to-heart after a lifetime of acrimony.
The ending was super weird. The whole coven thing reminded me of Xmen's Mutant Academy. Nothing was really wrapped up nicely leaving lots of loose ends, making everyone go "Huh?"
... The next Supreme is ... TACO BELL CRUNCHWRAP-SUPREME!
That is a great missed sponsorship opportunity!
Seriously though this season set up so many interesting situations and characters... but then couldn't figure out what to do with them. Like Fiona's plan to kill the Supreme in the end, and then she gets back from Paris and says, "Oh well I guess I won't." WTF?
The Witch Killers just let themselves get killed and so does the Axeman? Say what?
Queenie resurrected herself but can't resurrect Zoe?
Misty somehow doesn't get out of hell even though she can resurrect herself?
Madison lets herself be killed by a mortal?
It makes no sense. This will go down as a season with a lot of missed opportunity.
Coven probably should have had a second season just to explain everything.
I'd like that although almost everyone is dead or in hell.
And apparently once you're trapped in hell you don't get to come back...
1:08 AM Jan 30 2014